Hey, amateurism romantics — you know, those of you who deny exploitation exists in college sports.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Your brand is so important, but the way the NCAA deals with it—and doesn’t allow you to use it—it takes a lot of potential earning away from players. There are so many great things student-athletes could do, but the process limits us. I’m not just talking money. It’s learning how to market yourself, your brand. Learning life skills.
Get The Picture 
Speaking of dimes. Anyone heard anything about Holyfield getting busted for weed?
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The Auburn boards have been trying to circulate that for a couple of weeks. I think they’re confusing it with the incident from a couple of years ago. I’m trusting Chip Towers to not let 5 minutes pass without being all over any official arrest report of a player.
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Sounds like he is learning a great deal about marketing. I’d say that’s a win for education.
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Is this Battle Sports Sciences Co owned by Bill Battle? Anyone? Bueller?
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Come on Senator! You and I and everybody else here KNOW that college football players are getting paid! The FBS bag men are funneling hundreds of millions of $ to recruits and scholarship players.
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You can justify by logic all sorts of things that won’t work in the real world. Marx and Rand both make a whole lot more sense in “theory” than in practice.
The problem with college player product endorsement is that it’s an easy way to cheat without the cheating. Every UGA, Bama, Auburn, gator booster would have products to peddle all up and down the roster. There would no doubt be a few legit arms length transactions but that would be dwarfed by the endorsement deals that would be peddled to players and every member of their extended families to get a LOI signed.
Figure out rules that only allow legit deals. Seems impractical to me.
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You are correct sir.
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Individual player product endorsement would, indeed, open Pandora’s box, but we may have to live with it. The mouthguard example may be a situation where the school is purchasing and endorsing the product, not the individual player, just like the uniform and shoe deals. To this end, the players should be able to share the wealth, but already do so in the form of tuition, facilities, healthcare, stipends, etc. More can certainly be done in this area. So the solution may be to have player LOI’s continue to be the temporary property of the institution, but they deserve a greater share of that value than they are currently receiving. Short of unionization, however, who could possibly negotiate and arbitrate this?
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It seems to me that one thing that has happened due to pointing out these inequities is that schools are starting to share the wealth a bit. It’s been a while since that UConn bb player talked about going hungry.
That opened up more meals and now you have stipends. I know they aren’t market value but it’s something. I would simply encourage any student athlete who has reasonable concerns to keep going to the media.
They’ve got plenty of money sloshing around and they don’t like bad press. Pressure the man.
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