I’m not sure it’s worth giving somebody who hosts a college football podcast (although he is a former ASU quarterback) too much credence on this subject, but I thought I’d pass it along on the odd chance that it’s an early canary in the coal mine kind of development.
Former Arizona State quarterback Rudy Carpenter recently revealed there’s growing unrest among a few dozen players in the Pac-12 about the upcoming college football season and that level of worry has now made it to the league office in an effort to increase health insurance past graduation and ensure enhanced player safety this fall during a global pandemic.
Carpenter, who hosts a college football podcast and frequently appears on sports radio, wrote Friday in a string of tweets about a player group from the University of California that initiated these demands, that have since garnered support from other Pac-12 teams.
“Pac 12 football players have created a list of “demands” 4 the Pac-12/Universities 2 take into consideration, if the demands aren’t addressed/complied w/ the players R threatening to sit out the season..There is significant support growing among ALL 12 teams with 50 or More players on many of teams in support of this action/demands list,” Carpenter tweeted. “The initial idea was 2 create a players union, they decided time didn’t allow 4 this & figure the best way to create the change they want is 2 “boycott” the season.
“Things they r asking 4 is 50/50 rev share, 6 yrs insurance upon graduation, better Covid-19 testing & protocols etc etc…The player led group is being spearheaded at Cal Football & they have been holding phone calls with other Pac12 teams..There is some kinda of players only meeting/vote that will be taking place shortly.”
The 50/50 revenue split is a pipe dream, of course, but the health stuff is a touchier subject, you would think. (Again, assuming this is all true.) I’ll be curious to see if there are any credible developments on this. I sure would love to hear Larry Scott’s take on somebody threatening his business model.
Get The Picture 
Extended health coverage is long overdue in my opinion. My annual donation pamphlet from Southern University (where we originally sent money for Devon Gales) showed up Saturday.
It’s a grim reminder of the chances those kids take every time they step on the field.
LikeLike
Lol.
If it’s not now, it’s eventually.
Lefties and media pundits have successfully pushed the narrative that college athletic departments and coaches are evil plotters twirling their pencil thin mustaches like Snidely Whiplash whilst the poor, beset played are tied to the railroad tracks.
They have successfully pushed the idea that a college degree is worthless and hardly compensation for anything.
They have successfully pushed the narrative that college football is awash in billions and billions of dollars, that rich, fat white men in country clubs use $100 bills to light their Cuban cigars while sipping Cognac.
But the reality is, for most college football players and programs, the kids are actually playing for their college scholarships, the coaches and and athletic departments provide the best living conditions, academic support and counseling many of the kids have ever had in their lives, the degrees they earn will pave a path to a better life and generational education, and their athletic department operate at a break even level to help the maximum amount of college athletes possible and are mortgaged to the hilt to do so.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Your comments are exactly why I’m a big believer in real NLI reform … not just another set of garbage of rules wrapped up in a nice little antitrust exemption. If the NCAA and its members can’t reform themselves, I hope it gets destroyed in court and by the states.
No right-thinking person believes the degree is worthless (although I would like to see more athletes in STEM or business disciplines). Also, no right-thinking person believes the athlete is being mistreated right now (those who compare intercollegiate athletics to plantation life hardly know what they are talking about … LeBron James who never stepped foot on a college campus as a student-athlete at the top of the list).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Still can’t comprehend how “lefties” are now for the free market and the “free market capitalists” are clutching their pearls because college players want to revenue share. The same people who justifies coaches salaries being high because that’s what “they’re worth”. UGA football’s revenues were $130 million in 2019.
Nobody is saying a college degree is worthless. But please continue with your breathless hyperbole and Grand generalizations.
LikeLike
I’m no lefty and I’m certainly not clutching my pearls over this. It’s about the romanticism of being an amateur vs. understanding the front of the jersey is what matters but the name on the back of the jersey deserves to have the right to earn on his NLI.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That wasn’t a reply to your comment.
LikeLike
I was responding to your premise this was a left vs. right issue. I think it’s more of a romantic vs. realist view.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The idea that the issue has any relation to political ideology can only be described in ways that disappoint and/or stress the host. So we agree on that foundational point.
However, my position is not a “romantic” one, but is tied to questions of what is right and what is wrong. Colleges should not be exploiting the players and the players should be taking the opportunity presented to themselves to get an education.
The vast majority will not make a living in sport. Moving forward in time the fantasy that athletic talent is a long term viable financial option, while it might feel good given the vast wealth college sports creates, will only lead to more exploitation and more personal tragedies in the future.
Trying to right a wrong with another wrong just creates more wrongs.
It isn’t semi-pro, or NFL-lite etc…
Applying more “realism” to this already bloated, obscene system is just going to destroy it completely in the long term.
We need to insist on going back to first principles: play college sports with college students.
More good will come of that you can imagine.
Kids with sports talent will study rather than being pampered and passed through. Communities that produce athletes who can’t get into the schools they watch on Saturday will reflect upon their local school systems and how they can be bettered. Kids who fall short academically can still go the JUCO route, show they can do the work and go through recruiting again.
Doing the right thing is always better in the long term than short cuts no matter how well intended.
LikeLike
Do you think Stanford is exploiting a kid who likely would not have been able to be admitted as a general student but because he/she has an athletic talent gets a slot? I’m ok with that kid who likely will never play a professional down, inning or period having the opportunity to get a degree from one of the finest institutions of higher learning on the planet.
Same applies at Georgia … I have no problem with a kid from a trailer park in northeastern North Carolina who probably didn’t meet the minimum requirements for admission as a general population student to be admitted because he had a special talent for running with a football. He used that as an opportunity to sign a contract that will take care of his mother for the rest of her life. Whether he ever gets a degree (which I hope he does) doesn’t matter to me. He got out of the college experience what he needed – a chance to develop and to make his life better.
The question is whether either of these individuals should be able to trade on his name, image & likeness while enrolled as a college student-athlete. It appears your answer is no. My answer is yes.
LikeLike
If Stanford has a reasonable expectation that the student has the capacity and desire to get a degree, I don’t have an issue with modest adjustments. I’m sure they do it for all sorts of situations. Traditionally, it’s been “Daddy bought a building!” “Ok, you’re in!”
What I have an issue with is schools letting kids come to school where:
1) the kid knows he doesn’t want a degree
2) the school knows the kid can’t earn a degree
3) they each know 1 & 2.
When a kid says “I’m one and done” and UK signs him my question is “why?” He’s just said that he has no interest in what you’re offering.
If you can’t have a basic mutual understanding that the kid is there to go to school and earn a degree, then what do you have?
Would that require some rigid standards at or near average admission criteria? Of course.
We’re agreeing to change the very foundation of college sports because there are a very few excluded from pro sports for a very short period of time due to the fine print of NFL and NBA CBA’s.
If you think you have open market value, then don’t go to college! Easy.
I just think its bs.
If you can craft an “unsullied” NIL system I’d consider it. I just think it will lead to further exploitation but with a greater excuse to do so.
Why can’t they tell the kid he can’t take chemistry? He’s making 100k! They should be able to force the kid into Easy, Useless Degree if he’s making 150k!
Its bs.
LikeLike
“If you think you have open market value, then don’t go to college! Easy.”
We don’t know if they have open market value because they’ve been locked out of the closed shops due to age/years out of high school. I do know that kid out of North Carolina might have had a shot at a contract if he had been allowed an opportunity. It’s ironic that LeBron James does a documentary on the exploitation of college athletes when he voted to shut the door behind him on allowing a kid to declare for the draft right out of high school.
If these athletes had a professional option like baseball players, women’s gymnasts. or golfers, I wouldn’t likely be so sympathetic to their desire to earn money while on scholarship. I personally think each one of them should have the ability to do what every other person on the campus can do … earn outside money.
LikeLike
The problem with NIL is how easy it is to corrupt it. You show me an incorruptible NIL plan and I’ll consider it. I don’t think it exists.
Why don’t we just let each of them open up “go fund me” accounts and the schools can recruit new players on the basis of how much money runs through them?
After all a history major could have a go fund me with a balance of $1 so why can’t Pickens have 50k?
It just all seems very short sighted and only based upon hostility towards admittedly terrible, awful, greedy administrators.
LikeLike
The system today is corrupt, but the problems with the system today are that every bit of the money is under the table and the organization established to oversee the process is corrupt. I lost my romantic’s view of college sports when I watched the NCAA hang AJ Green (and any hope for the 2010 season) out to dry for suspending him only on an accusation made in a TMZ report and his specific denial that he had any involvement in AgentGate. He (and UGA) cooperated beyond the original request and the $1,000 payment for his bowl game jersey (his personal property) became known. Of course, later that year, the NCAA turned a blind eye to clear evidence of the Auburn bagmen’s payment to Cecil Newton for his son’s services. 3 seasons later, the NCAA once again turns a blind eye to clear evidence of selling autographs by Johnny Football while dropping the hammer on Todd Gurley a year later.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The guy above made it a clear left vs right issue. I disagree. I would say it’s pragmatists vs people with an idealized vision of what college football is (in contrast to what it used to be).
Then halcyon days are gone with the broadcast contracts.
LikeLiked by 1 person
LOL, indeed.
LikeLike
That’s a matter of personal choice. Each athlete has to want a meaningful degree. If an athlete chooses to not graduate or a meaningless degree, then that’s on them, not the school.
The time requirements aren’t that onerous, it can be done. Again, it’s a matter of their choices & how much they want the degree.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Uh hunh.
Right.
Sure.
Even when I was an amateurism romantic, I never bought what you’re trying to sell here.
LikeLike
I lived it, saw it first-hand & have the BBA. And plenty of guys came from less that ideal backgrounds to get real degrees. It can be done.
LikeLike
I’m not saying it can’t be done. But the system isn’t structured to encourage it. Never has been.
LikeLike
There’s not much more “lefty” than earning marketing dollars. I think it was Che Guevara who said “Drink Coke.”
Do you sniff glue or huff gas to eliminate the brain cells required for this sort of “analysis?”
LikeLike
Shit, man, it’s 9AM on a Monday morning, and you’re already laying on the personal insults?
Don’t make this a long week for me.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Monday morning?! I thought it was Sunday. My vacation has apparently started out on the wild side. I’m going for a hike now. I think I should avoid the wife for a while.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Should take your partner. Exercise is good bonding!
LikeLike
Probably gonna be a very long week Bluto. The playpen on Wed promises to be epic!!
LikeLike
I already have something lined up for your commenting pleasure. 😉
LikeLike
The PAC 12 was not a “well” conference before the pandemic. Don’t be surprised if covid causes it to unravel more—and in long lasting ways.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I keep coming back to this. A month ago I wasn’t thinking the pac 12 would play a football game at all. They’re all a mess. Cali on lockdown again.
LikeLike
You are 3 to 4 times more likely to attend college if your parents attended college.
Just one kid breaking the cycle and becoming a degreed professional is all that is necessary to end the string of poverty.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Have you seen the shit for brains colleges are turning out lately? Especially the female Coeds. A bunch of busy body do-gooders that know nothing. As one national writer named them “Caitlyn’s from Georgetown”. You see gaggles of them on TV rioting and protesting and generally making everyone’s life miserable daily. Universities are good for playing sport and watching sports nowadays
LikeLike
Some do prefer the undereducated. Can’t possibly imagine why.
LikeLike
I think Anon is trying out for the next Ron Burgundy movie.
LikeLike
Like most people you confuse education with intelligence.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t confuse them. I do think that there are people who are interested in having a dumb population and others, like you, who enable them. I would remind them that it was not uneducated peasants who led us to break free of the bonds of tyranny, but I’d bet King George would have been happier if the only people with an education, means and a musket had been beholden to, or better yet part of, royalty.
A free people require such things as an education, money, a weapon and a willingness to use them as necessary.
Uneducated folks while no doubt occasionally motivated to act will be quickly defeated by the entrenched powers. There was a reason it was illegal in the South to teach slaves how to read. An uneducated population is an annoyance but never a true threat. If your intent is autocracy criticize and demean the value of an education. It helps…. the autocratic.
If you had an education, you should know how important one is. If you had one and that lesson of history passed you by, well you should have let someone else take your place as it was clearly wasted.
LikeLike
You must be loaded up with useless degrees to take that many words to express that sophomoric diatribe.
LikeLike
Emil Faber would appreciate your pith, but not your message.
When you get a chance send us a list of the wealthy, free societies that succeeded in spite of diminishing the value of higher education.
I mean if you’re right, there will be at least one.
LikeLike
Anyone who would argue that education is overrated obviously does have one.
LikeLike
What are you—Derek’s pet parakeet? If you can’t see the difference between marxists takeover of faculty lounges of today and college 30 years ago when I was there then that means you are probably a few years out yourself and loaded up with useless degrees and unplayable student loan debt. Maybe Derek can reply to this and you can give him another “attaboy Derek”
LikeLike
Someone sounds triggered.
LikeLike
Ha—“triggered”. Fucking juvenile. Go play someplace else.
LikeLike
No.
LikeLike
Literally no one was complaining about Marxism on college campuses back then, da.
The red scare ain’t new.
LikeLike
Please meet Derek. All degreed up and has it hanging above his mantle like the trophies we all got as kids. Loves coming on here spewing his brilliance on all of us. He could have saved the $100k in student debt and drove for UPS and doubled his salary. But he got that degree man. Anytime this dude post on here I laugh my ass off at him. Watched it for years. We all know posers like him
LikeLike
Please refrain from personal insults.
LikeLike
My UGA degree is mostly worthless. College education is overrated if not technical/specific. So, there you go. You’re wrong.
LikeLike
https://smartasset.com/retirement/the-average-salary-by-education-level
LikeLike
My grandfather, greatest generation, battle of the bulge, country boy education, no college, self made carpenter, wisest man I’ve known. Plus, a very good person, which is undervalued today.
LikeLike
I bet he wanted his kids to go to college.
LikeLike
Fair point.
Perhaps a college degree really is worthless.
LikeLike
Depends on the degree. Some will set you on the road to a comfortable life. Others are not worth the paper they are printed on other than to say you made it through 4 years of something.
LikeLike
and you’re eligible for post-graduate degrees like MBA’s, JD’s, MD’s, etc…
You can get a degree in anything and get into law school. But you have to have a degree.
And you also have to deal with facts:
https://smartasset.com/retirement/the-average-salary-by-education-level
On average the more education you have, the money you make.
LikeLike
Colleges have created too many degrees just to increase enrollment therefore income. Too many of those degrees have little hope of returning the investment and leaving you in debt. A skilled trade will return over a lifetime many times over what some worthless degrees will. You really have to look at it as White Collar College or Blue Collar College.
LikeLike
No reason you can’t have both. It wasn’t easy and took a while but turned out to be well worth it in he long run.
LikeLike
I am probably further right than most anyone on fiscal issues, and a realist on social issues. This to me is a humanitarian one. Kids who can suffer lifelong injuries or impacts from illnesses for creating revenue for an organization, at least deserve some form of protection from the organization that accrues the benefits for their services. It is in humane to say I will allow you to make me tens of millions of dollars and then turn around and say oh you’re sick you’re on your own.
LikeLiked by 1 person