… and pretty soon you’re talking about a real problem for the NCAA.
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Category Archives: The NCAA
A pay for play buffet
A few morsels rounded up for your reading pleasure:
- A reminder about the value of that free education the NCAA touts: “According to 2018 report from USC’s Race and Equity Center, just 55% of black athletes from the Power Five conferences, which include college sports’ most profitable programs, graduate in six years as compared to 69.3% of all student-athletes.”
- This is a detailed breakdown of how we got to California’s Fair Pay to Play Act, as well as what we might expect to see if there’s a court challenge (assuming it passes, of course).
- Scratch Mike Leach on the subject of paying players and he sounds a lot more like Dabo than Mike Leach.
- For those of you who don’t get how antitrust law and cartels work, remember that you don’t have to buy tuna fish.
Monday morning buffet
Grab yourself a plate and go.
- Georgia is favored by 13 points over a top 10 team. Think about that for a minute.
- Next season, every SEC West team faces
AuburnAlabama and LSU in back-to-back games. Weird. - There sure seem to be lots of folks telling the NCAA “no” lately.
- Through three weeks, Georgia is the fourth best team in the county in yardage differential.
- Pac-12 officiating: still inept, but with full disclosure.
- Son, you’re gonna need a bigger lemonade stand.
- The main reason I hope this gains legs is that I would love to see Dabo in front of a legislative committee bitching about player compensation in a moment made to be captured for the recruiting trail.
- The state of college football marketing, in less than 280 characters.
The passion of the GPOOE™
Judging from the emails I received, a number of you have seen this clip of Tebow going off on the state of California for trying to ruin college football.
“I know we live in a selfish culture where it’s all about us, but we’re just adding and piling it on to that where it changes what’s special about college football and we turn it into the NFL where who has the most money that’s where you go,” said Tebow. “That’s why people are more passionate about college sports than they are about the NFL. That’s why the stadiums are bigger in college than the NFL because it’s about your team, about your university, about where my family wanted to go, about where my grandfather had a dream of seeing Florida win an SEC championship and you’re taking that away so young kids can earn a dollar. And that’s not where I feel like college football needs to go.”
First off, I don’t question Tebow’s sincerity on the matter. I don’t even doubt that, had been given the choice at the time, he would have turned down the opportunity to take money.
But that’s just it. No college athlete is given that choice, by NCAA diktat.
Beyond that, I also doubt Tebow realizes how incredibly tone deaf his comments are. His grandfather had a dream about Florida; most of Tebow’s teammates’ grandfathers wouldn’t have been allowed to attend Florida. As he talks about young kids earning a dollar, all I can consider it where that got Green and Gurley, both of whom grew up in considerably less comfortable circumstances than did Tebow, and wound up on the wrong side of the NCAA for relative pennies.
Had the COA stipend come a few years earlier, I wonder if Tebow would have had the willingness to stand up in a team meeting and fervently urge his teammates to reject it. What I don’t wonder is whether his teammates would have gone along with it. My bet is that most of them would have found this thinking more compelling.
Filed under The NCAA, Tim Tebow: Rock Star
More, from the annals of the fairly compensated
This is what chomping at the bit sounds like.
The idea that college stars won’t see a significant change in fortune if allowed to receive money for their names is a fantasy. A romantic one.
Filed under It's Just Bidness, The NCAA
Amateurism, defined downward
We had an interesting discussion on California’s Fair Pay to Play Act yesterday. Some of you are convinced that the state doesn’t have a proverbial leg to stand on and that the NCAA will stand firm and eventually prevail. Others are convinced that the NCAA is the lesser of two evils.
Me? I think it’ll take a little time, but the NCAA and California will wind up meeting somewhere in the middle. If you doubt that, consider these words of wisdom from NCAA board of governors chair Michael Drake:
When asked if the NCAA’s current rules are fair, Drake said the rules need to evolve.
“Well, fair is an interesting word,” Drake said to ESPN. “We need to look at [NIL rules] carefully. My understanding broadly of name, image and likeness and the implications of those restrictions has changed really over the last several years and continues to evolve. We need to make sure our rules and guidelines evolve forward. We’re not the association of the 20th century. We need to make sure we have 21st-century rules.”
Folks, “fair is an interesting word” isn’t a signal that you’re standing on your hill to die on.
Amateurism is whatever the NCAA says it is. The only question here is whether the state gains additional leverage from other state legislatures and Congress passing similar bills. In any event ($$),
… if the Ackerman working group recommends what is expected – a modest liberalization of its “no NIL” rules, with a cap – and the full NCAA endorses that recommendation, then whatever happens vis-à-vis California, the needle will have moved further away from “amateurism” in college athletes.
Will that turn out to be a crisis for amateurism romantics? My bet is nah.
Filed under Political Wankery, The NCAA
This is why I’m a lapsed libertarian.
Shorter director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom: True freedom is allowing an illegal cartel to rig a labor market.
Filed under Political Wankery, The NCAA
