Yeah the big news today is per that tweet up there. WSJ summarized as follows:
The NCAA cleared the way for college athletes to begin profiting from their name, image and likeness on Tuesday, a landmark decision that will dramatically alter the economics of college sports.
The NCAA’s governing board directed its three competition divisions to immediately consider changing the rules governing such benefits for athletes, and to make all such changes no later than January 2021. “We must embrace change,” said Michael Drake, chair of the board and president of Ohio State University.
Looks like all that whining was revealed to be such in record time. NCAA is getting dragged kicking and screaming into something resembling fairness.
This morning, Golic and Wingo were talking about this and they said that what the NCAA
really doesn't want is full pay-for-play, but by resisting this half-measure they're making it likely that that eventuality - which is inevitable, they think - will come faster than it would have otherwise.
You've made some very good and interesting points in this thread - especially in your excellent summary at
#53 of the relative financial role athletics play in a school's overall budget , and obviously are much more knowledgeable than I about the subject. So I'd like to lean on you and pose a question to garner your thoughts. Could you see a possibility of eliminating athletic scholarships altogether and transitioning to or substituting a pay-for-play model? Would such a move necessarily "cost" more than the current expenditure on athletic scholarships? Would you see a need for some type of wage control system to be put in place, or let free market forces play out?
I start from the position that when it comes to athletics, universities are effectively operating as a for-profit business. Scholarships are just price discrimination for customers of the education product, and using them for when the customer IS the product (revenue sports) makes sense. Why charge your employees money for the privilege of working for you? I personally think the long-run future is that there will be boundaries established of who can play for colleges' revenue-sports teams, and those players will eventually be entitled to a free education after their playing days are over, but continuing to insist that the two be done in parallel or are somehow connected is a big part of the farce. But anyway, if the university stops expending educational resources, such as they are, on pretending to educate revenue athletes, there won't be any need for the scholarship system. It doesn't reduce available funds for non-athletes.
Go
read this article, if you haven't already, on how financial-aid decisions at private colleges are really made, and how the game is being leveraged against admissions officers by the privileged (But not so wealthy as to be Development cases) to actually beat back diversity efforts. Anyone concerned with scholarship availability for regular ol' students needs to be concerned with this first and foremost, and athletic scholarships for non-revenue sports secondarily. Impact from revenue-sport athletic scholarships is a sideshow by comparison.
Sooner than any disassociation between revenue athletes and scholarships will be explicit payment of the difference-makers on college teams, yeah. That's already being done today, in the shadows, by various boosters. As long as you can get tax deductions for putting them (or their families) on the payroll of your local auto dealership surreptitiously, or giving them free shit like the use of a vehicle, the difference between doing that via a direct (deductible) donation to the university is pretty minimal.
Let's imagine a world where colleges are free, or nearly free, to pay athletes whatever they want. Boosters contribute whatever they want, there's haggling over tax deductibility, but athletes are free to focus on their jobs winning on-field glory for their university rather than pretending to get an education (unless they want to take some classes in their scant spare time). There are considerable cost savings:
- Compliance officers in athletic departments can be reduced to almost nil
- The NCAA itself can probably staff way down, or at least the universities should insist that it does (Taylor Branch's article strongly suggests they are looking to preserve their expanded power and budget, so that's a longshot - but the point is they
could)
- Money is managed centrally and can be spent the best way they know how rather than having to upgrade facilities to a farcical degree in order to maintain plausibility as necessary CapEx (Golic pointed out that the LSU locker room has airplane first-class-seating pods as the lockers, that it's downright stupid and all involved would prefer the money just go to the athletes directly)
- The amount of time being spent by coaches on either managing compliance-related stuff, answering questions, or dodging around plausible deniability, would also go down.
(probably other efficiencies I'm not considering, too - this is a tremendously inefficient process today, the baseline costs required to run a D1 football team are absurd, and made profitable only via unpaid labor)
As for wage controls, that's likely down to collective bargaining for the athletes involved. There is something called the
College Athletics Players Association, and I bet it or some successor will become much more analogous to top-level pro leagues' players unions. I could see it going either way depending on the extent to which the universities want to ensure a level playing field vs a lower barrier-to-entry.