So, Notre Dame’s president and AD pen an editorial in the New York Times entitled “College Sports Are a Treasure. Don’t Turn Them Into the Minor Leagues.” and it’s every bit the joke you’d expect.
The perception has grown in recent years that student-athletes, whose talent and hard work create so much revenue for schools and even coaches, get nothing in return.
Gee, I wonder how that happened. Let’s trot out that old, familiar straw man in rebuttal.
The claim that student-athletes otherwise get nothing from a multibillion-dollar college sports industry is false — and the misperception behind it goes to the heart of what is at stake.
If a talented high school player heads straight to the minor leagues, he earns a paycheck. If he goes instead to college, he can earn something far more valuable: a degree. Economists estimate a college degree is typically worth about $1 million in enhanced earning power in a lifetime. At our institution, 99 percent of student-athletes who stay for at least four years get a diploma. Because less than 2 percent of all our student-athletes will play in their sport professionally, such a benefit is useful indeed.
The claim isn’t that college athletes are getting nothing. It’s that they’re not receiving fair market value for their participation. And if there’s anything that demonstrates the difference, it’s what the NIL era has ushered in and what these two gentlemen complain about in their piece.
Again, expressing concern about what the money flow was doing to change college athletics would have been relevant and even considered a couple of decades ago. Now, with the horse out of the barn, it’s little more than insipid nostalgia. But, good luck with it, dudes.
Get The Picture 
So we make $100 million per year to do, well…not much, and we’ll give you an education worth maybe $1M over the course of your lifetime. Mind you, we’re not giving you $1M, just a piece of paper you need to spin into that amount. Seems fair, no?
Their disingenuous exhausts me.
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This is especially rich coming from an independent that has their own lucrative deal with NBC.
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It’s certainly a hell of a lot easier to describe and quantify the value that college athletes produce than whatever the hell it is Swarbrick and the NCAA do.
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Good grief. Is there a more tone deaf response? Typical gaslighting by the members of a cartel who are invested in the status quo. This is coming from someone who isn’t in favor of employee status and pure pay for play for athletes at the college level.
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I would expect nothing less from him. Pretending it’s 1965 is not a good way to operate an incredibly large business whose product is entertainment to the masses.
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Sink everything you have into US Steel
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I wonder if Notre Dame’s athletics director or president would be willing to take part of their compensation or even all of their compensation in free tuition for post-graduate classes. After all, think of the value of a Notre Dame masters degree or a doctorate!
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If there is any institution/business in the United States that is more useless than Universities and their Administration, it would be hard to find, other than Congress.
These University Presidents’ are pampered, showered with money and other benefits. They essentially live in glass houses insulated from the real world.
They are as about as useless as tips on a boar hog.
Same OLD Bullshit.
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Hmmmm…I always looked at education as a good thing. I don’t think everybody needs or should get a college degree, but are universities really “useless”?
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I present Michael Adams. The defense rests. jk 🍻As a group they are a lot like congress. We certainly need the institutions however the room for improvement continues to grow faster than their ever inflated costs.
Good day for this as I just finished the annual look at my grandkids 529’s. At this rate I may be giving birth control for Christmas and birthdays to my kids. 😉 jk
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Tell me you are a Walmart UGA alumnus without telling me you are a Walmart UGA alumnus.
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For craps and giggles, I wonder how many of the 1 percent of athletes who stay at Notre Dame four years and don’t receive a diploma are on the football team.
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It’s a brazenly disingenuous argument.
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They are fully aware of the stupidity of their argument. They’re also aware of the news echo chamber in which their target reader resides. “Even the New York Times says…” is the reaction they’re going for, and they’ll get it from the people they’re aiming this at.
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Agree. Printing crap like this is exactly why the MSM has lost cred with the right and the left. All the NYT does is amplify the voice of the monied and privileged elite.
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NBC & its last loyal viewers from the 50s & 60s would rather its poster child school rebuild its roster every 4 years only to get destroyed in the title game? Shutup and pass the plate.
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Cracks me up how bad Swarbrick & Jenkins are at gaslighting.
“Welcome to Notre Dame football, son. Now, remember that college is about the life of the mind. When you aren’t on the gridiron, stick your head in a book!”
“I read in this book that our football team generates almost a hundred million a year. Don’t we players deserve meaningful shares of that revenue?”
“Get your head outta that book, son! You’re a football player!”
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Shut up and pass the plate? That’s exactly what I’ve been hearing the Classic City Collective say.
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I thought for sure universities had to abandon the $1M schtick for legal reasons or something. I’m a fan of higher education, but that ploy is essentially taking advantage of kids. Plus, that’s the same number quoted to me in 2007. I guess the value of college degrees can’t keep up with inflation.
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“Don’t turn them into the minor leagues.” As if that ship hadn’t sailed long ago. And I’m sure the university isn’t in any hurry to turn down the millions of dollars of revenue they get from ticket sales, TV deals, licensing, etc.
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If they weren’t the minor leagues already, every player on every team would meet the admissions requirements at every school. When people throw out that Stanford admits you before an athletic scholarship is offered, that may be true, but I can tell you that players on their team would not be admitted as students at Stanford without their athletic ability. Tiger Woods probably would not have been admitted to Stanford except for his ability to play golf. He even admits he was out of his element academically at Stanford (he talks about a guy who lived on his hall that literally had a photographic memory even for highly technical or scientific material).
College athletics serves as the minor leagues for most of the professional sports. The colleges should embrace that.
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By the way, Tiger is a smart guy.
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Obviously most of y’all disagree..but I think the guys point is valid. Our “College Sports” are changing for sure…
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I don’t have a subscription to the New York Times so I can’t read the article.
I don’t think anyone would argue that the sport isn’t changing, but what are the changes that you disagree with the most? I have more problems with potentially losing a traditional rivalry game due to conference expansion than I do with student-athletes getting some cash in their pocket. It doesn’t bother me that these guys don’t have to sit out a year anymore after transferring, but I’m still salty about having to play at Auburn two years in a row.
The guys running this sport will strip away everything that makes CFB unique and if/when it all comes crumbling down around them, they’ll look at the rubble and lament how letting players make money off NIL ruined the sport.
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I disagree with most all changes. Paid players, Free Agency…a league with that already exist.
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“Economists estimate a college degree is typically worth about $1 million in enhanced earning power in a lifetime.” People that can’t, get degrees in econ.
Yeah, I’m sure that gender studies degree will greatly raise your income. If anyone wants to see the $ value of a given major, the university system has done the work (history and religion ain’t pretty) https://www.usg.edu/your-future-earnings/app/state/compare-between-majors
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“Economists estimate a college degree is typically worth about $1 million in enhanced earning power in a lifetime.”
Way to deal in useless generalities, dudes. B/c a degree in interior design from SCAD is so similar to a degree in mechanical engineering from MIT that you can meaningfully compare the earning power of the SCAD and MIT degree holders. I’m glad y’all are administrators, b/c this piece of…I guess it’s technically writing tells me y’all can’t teach shit.
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Just want to make clear, dawgxian, that my response to your post is addressed to Swarbrick and Jenkins, not to you.
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“Horse out of the barn”
I don’t care for Auburn. FTMF.
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So, to play devil’s advocate for a sec, just who sets market value for these guys???
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