"College" Football and Basketball as Minor Leagues

Saints Rest

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Using OCST's post here from the unionization thread . . .
OilCanShotTupac said:
Spin the teams off as for-profit entities.
License the school name, logo, colors to the for-profit entities (for a very hefty sum that makes a lot of money for the schools).
Charge the teams rent for use of school facilities.
Pay the players.  Let them elect to take classes if they want, but end the fucking charade.
Let the gravy train roll on.
 
I'm sure I'm overlooking some troublesome detail, but I don't see why something like this wouldn't be workable.
 
Here's my thought expanding on OCST's concept:
  • Take football and basketball (being the two big revenue sports and also the two sports whose professional leagues rely on collegiate athletics rather than a minor league system) out of the NCAA and make them the actual (rather than de facto) minor league systems of the pro leagues in their respective sports.  
  • Traditional conferences could be maintained, if desired, as the minor league names (e.g. instead of the International League or the Carolina League, you might have the SEC or the ACC).
  • The Major conferences could become the equivalent of the AAA/AHL level minors, while mid-majors could be like AA or A, and smaller schools could be like the Florida Coast League or similar.
  • I would take OilCan's ideas for licensing of logos and mascots, as well as use of college facilities.
  • Finally, I would make each of the former "college" teams into affiliates of a major league team.  So the Celtics might have Michigan State, Notre Dame, UMass, Holy Cross and BU (randomly picking by school color or geography to gain a broad spectrum of major, mid-major and small) as their "Minor League System," while the Pats might have FSU, BC, UConn, Harvard, Colorado, Boise St and Vanderbilt.
  • There are about 250 1A and 1AA schools playing football.  So basically each NFL team would have roughly 8 teams in their system (probably less as some schools might opt out (If this just applied to Division 1A, you're looking at about 125 teams, thus about 4 "minor league" affiliates.
  • As in minor league baseball, the draft would now cover high school kids and be a ton of rounds.  But once a high-school student was drafted AND signed, he would be a pro and would be in the minors.  The pro system would then slot him according to his skill level.  Perhaps in year 1 (as an 18 or 19 year old), he might play for the "UConn Huskies/Patriots" and in year 2 he might play for the BC Eagle/Patriots, before moving to the FSU Seminole/Patriots as a 3rd year.
  • This would eliminate the age-eligibility rules.  A pro team could determine who is an Xander Bogaerts ready to play NFL at 20 and who is a Daniel Nava who should wait until he is 25 or so. 
  • Money would flow to the right levels and the right people as determined by the market, a la baseball.
  • Players could have the opportunity to take a course or 2 if they wanted to, but they could do so free from any eligibility requirements, the same way a 19 year old working at a factory and taking night courses might do.
  • Players not good enough to be drafted could then opt to enroll in college in the more traditional fashion, non-scholarship.  Perhaps they play Div 2 or Div 3, perhaps they catch the eye of a scout and get drafted later in life (the better Daniel Nava comp).
  • Colleges and universities could still receive some money from the system to help fund other offerings, be that academic, athletic, or extracurricular, without any need to keep the money in the big-sport program, as the costs of maintaining the facilities and paying coaches, etc would now be borne by the Major League team (or its affiliate).
Thoughts?
 
M

MentalDisabldLst

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So, before anything else, I like the concept and I bet some combination of tactics could make it workable.
 
The affiliation with pro teams doesn't make sense to me.  I envision it more like junior hockey in canada.  Players become essentially free agents, working their way through lesser teams and towns, with their contracts bought and sold, until and unless (A) they quit/retire or (B) they get drafted by a top-level pro team in their sport.
 
Frankly, the farm-league system that MLB has has always seemed a bit exploitative to me - not of the players, but of the fans, who pay to see two teams competing their hardest to win, when the actual goals of the teams and players in question have only a slight correlation with trying to win.  Joe Posnanski explained it better than I could.  But if we're creating new minor leagues from scratch, I'd much rather they be "free" than "affiliated".
 
The other thing I'll say is that, by maintaining the affiliation and licensing agreement with the schools, it's important (for business reasons) for the team to maintain the allegiance those schools' fans have to the team, which ultimately derives from their allegiance to the school itself.  Should the President have some control over the Head of Football (as distinct from the AD who manages non-bigtime sports)?  What if alums don't like the direction that the team is going, to whom does the team or its coaching staff answer?  In my view, one affiliation they should maintain is that any 4-year employee of the team gets a tuition-free education at the (legacy, affiliated) university, as a sort of pension benefit, anytime they want, the rest of their lives.
 
There are other unanswered questions:
- If a basketball player like Kobe or Garnett are ready before age 18, can they join such a team?  Or would we maintain the 18-year-old age limit?  I assume you'd want people to be adults before they took on the health risks of football, but there's no corresponding risk to life and limb from playing basketball, unless you're Rip Hamilton.
- Who owns the teams, do they have a trustee?  Do the profits go back to the previously-affiliated school?  If so, the schools take on all sorts of other legal obligations.  Maybe there's a way to separate out the liability of directing the team from the university, as with an irrevocable grantor trust or something - so all the school gets is the profits
- Does this put an end to no-show or no-skill jobs with the athletic department that seemingly many athletes at football/basketball get if they can't make the pros or get a real job?  I wonder how efficiently these teams would be managed when given a profit motive (especially if that profit accrues to individual or consortium owners rather than the university).
- Can these teams sell corporate sponsorship on the open market?
 

DJnVa

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  • Finally, I would make each of the former "college" teams into affiliates of a major league team. So the Celtics might have Michigan State, Notre Dame, UMass, Holy Cross and BU (randomly picking by school color or geography to gain a broad spectrum of major, mid-major and small) as their "Minor League System," while the Pats might have FSU, BC, UConn, Harvard, Colorado, Boise St and Vanderbilt.
    [*]There are about 250 1A and 1AA schools playing football. So basically each NFL team would have roughly 8 teams in their system (probably less as some schools might opt out (If this just applied to Division 1A, you're looking at about 125 teams, thus about 4 "minor league" affiliates.
 

 
 
This would be fun as hell to "draft" out fantasy style.
 

berniecarbo1

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The NHL used to have a regional so that Montreal got first dibs on the Francophones... My only issue with it is the "competition". In other words suppose the Patriots have FSU as one of their teams. The pats lose a center and the backup is on the PUP. They move things around but ar now in need of a solid pulling guard. The best of the bunch is the kid in Tallahassee. FSU is running the table again and the drop off to the second stringer is huge....how do you deal with those logistics?? Wouldn't the college game be diminished in that like the D League, AHL and the Paw Sox, their records are meaningless. They are there to develop guys for the big leagues.  Not sure how you reconcile that with the the boosters in Tuscaloosa.
 

Saints Rest

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berniecarbo1 said:
The NHL used to have a regional so that Montreal got first dibs on the Francophones... My only issue with it is the "competition". In other words suppose the Patriots have FSU as one of their teams. The pats lose a center and the backup is on the PUP. They move things around but ar now in need of a solid pulling guard. The best of the bunch is the kid in Tallahassee. FSU is running the table again and the drop off to the second stringer is huge....how do you deal with those logistics?? Wouldn't the college game be diminished in that like the D League, AHL and the Paw Sox, their records are meaningless. They are there to develop guys for the big leagues.  Not sure how you reconcile that with the the boosters in Tuscaloosa.
You are assuming in-season call-ups.  I'm not sure that would be part of this, at least not in football.  (Maybe in basketball, it would be OK to send a guy up and back a la the Pawtucket shuttle.)  In my vision these minor league teams supply the upper level teams on an annual basis.  
 
Right now, college boosters are pretty much rooting for the laundry in any case -- how much would it matter if you only see the star players (let alone those faceless guys in the trenches) for a year or two instead of 2 or 3?  Between huge rosters, red-shirting and early entry into the NFL draft, how many college football players (let alone one-and-done basketball players) are starters for more than 2 years anyway?  As long as you don't disrupt a team mid-season, the boosters should be happy.  
 
Perhaps there would be some variation of the Rule V draft each year to prevent too much red-shirting.  Maybe players could sign shorter-term deals to get them to minor-league free agency?  
 

Infield Infidel

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NBDL already accepts 18 year olds. Eventually, kids will start going there more. While they are kind of pushing to have more one-to-one affiliates, they could easily carve out one or two teams that would be stocked purely with kids straight out of high school. So take 15-30 kids would choose the NBDL instead of college. 
 
NFL could easily have a spring league with 6-10 teams (300-500 players). It's insane that the biggest sport in the country doesn't have a developmental league.
 

OCST

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Something like the transfer system in soccer might work.  I'm a soccer n00b compared to many here, so someone who understands this better can correct me, but as I understand it, Club A transfers Player X to Club B when Club B pays an agreed upon "transfer fee" to Club A.  When that happens, Player X and Club B negotiate an entirely new contract - Player X's contract with Club A does not survive the transfer.  Club A and Club B need not be in the same league - one can be in the top flight, one can be a small-town team in a lower league, or even a team in another country. 
 
So when a small team in a lower-level league has a player that richer teams covet, they can essentially sell the player to the richer team and pocket a nice fee.
 
So, instead of affiliating 7-8 colleges with each NFL team, you could keep the existing college leagues intact, so that big schools play big schools and small schools play small schools, with the understanding that, when a player is ready to "move up," a bigger school could pay a transfer fee to the smaller school for that player.
 
For example, you could have an 18-year-old* at Delaware (ie a freshman, but the idea of "class" designations becomes less useful)  who has a great year, so Northern Illinois pays Delaware the transfer fee and he spends his year-19 year with them.  He has another great year, so Auburn pays NIU the transfer fee and negotiates a two-year deal with the guy.  At each step the player's contract gets more lucrative, reflecting the fact that he's playing in bigger stadiums and to bigger TV audiences.  Ultimately he ends up in the NFL (leaving aside for a moment whether the NFL draft survives intact, or changes somehow - that's another whole discussion).
 
Etc. etc. etc.  The rich teams get to spend their money on better players; the smaller teams have an incentive to scout their locales for promising talents who can be developed and sold (maybe generating enough revenue to move up a weight class themselves). 
 
This gives players a hierarchy to climb as they mature/progress, without tying specific colleges to specific pro teams - that whole mechanism seems cumbersome and not really necessary.
 
Obviously there are a ton of moving parts and there may be problems that I'm not seeing.
 
M

MentalDisabldLst

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OilCanShotTupac said:
Something like the transfer system in soccer might work.  I'm a soccer n00b compared to many here, so someone who understands this better can correct me, but as I understand it, Club A transfers Player X to Club B when Club B pays an agreed upon "transfer fee" to Club A.  When that happens, Player X and Club B negotiate an entirely new contract - Player X's contract with Club A does not survive the transfer.  Club A and Club B need not be in the same league - one can be in the top flight, one can be a small-town team in a lower league, or even a team in another country. 
 
If this is as you say, why wouldn't a team that is currently paying a king's ransom to an underperforming player just trade them for a bag of balls in order to get out from under the contract?  Or are soccer contracts non-guaranteed, the way most NFL salaries are?
 

OCST

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MentalDisabldLst said:
 
If this is as you say, why wouldn't a team that is currently paying a king's ransom to an underperforming player just trade them for a bag of balls in order to get out from under the contract?  Or are soccer contracts non-guaranteed, the way most NFL salaries are?
 
That's a good question.  I don't know.  This is where my knowledge of the whole thing gets fuzzy. 
 

Saints Rest

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OilCanShotTupac said:
Something like the transfer system in soccer might work.  I'm a soccer n00b compared to many here, so someone who understands this better can correct me, but as I understand it, Club A transfers Player X to Club B when Club B pays an agreed upon "transfer fee" to Club A.  When that happens, Player X and Club B negotiate an entirely new contract - Player X's contract with Club A does not survive the transfer.  Club A and Club B need not be in the same league - one can be in the top flight, one can be a small-town team in a lower league, or even a team in another country. 
 
So when a small team in a lower-level league has a player that richer teams covet, they can essentially sell the player to the richer team and pocket a nice fee.
 
So, instead of affiliating 7-8 colleges with each NFL team, you could keep the existing college leagues intact, so that big schools play big schools and small schools play small schools, with the understanding that, when a player is ready to "move up," a bigger school could pay a transfer fee to the smaller school for that player.
 
For example, you could have an 18-year-old* at Delaware (ie a freshman, but the idea of "class" designations becomes less useful)  who has a great year, so Northern Illinois pays Delaware the transfer fee and he spends his year-19 year with them.  He has another great year, so Auburn pays NIU the transfer fee and negotiates a two-year deal with the guy.  At each step the player's contract gets more lucrative, reflecting the fact that he's playing in bigger stadiums and to bigger TV audiences.  Ultimately he ends up in the NFL (leaving aside for a moment whether the NFL draft survives intact, or changes somehow - that's another whole discussion).
 
Etc. etc. etc.  The rich teams get to spend their money on better players; the smaller teams have an incentive to scout their locales for promising talents who can be developed and sold (maybe generating enough revenue to move up a weight class themselves). 
 
This gives players a hierarchy to climb as they mature/progress, without tying specific colleges to specific pro teams - that whole mechanism seems cumbersome and not really necessary.
 
Obviously there are a ton of moving parts and there may be problems that I'm not seeing.
The reason behind my affiliation methodology (and I'm just spitballing here) is that right now the athletic departments of Big State U is managing the enterprise -- finding the players, running the facilities, hiring the coaches, negotiating the contracts with TV, etc, all of which are continually being shown to be pursuits that are not in alignment with the University of Higher Learning that shares the same name.  
 
I say let's call a spade a spade: make these Big State U programs be actual professional sports teams, but not in competition with the NFL/NBA, but rather in concert with them.  
 
The baseball minor league system seems to be the most obvious parallel.  There are 30 AAA MiLB teams in the two AAA leagues (for now I'm not including the Mexican League which Wiki does).  There are 30 more AA teams over three leagues.  Then 30 more "High-A", 22 Short Season Low A teams and 18 Rookie League teams (not counting Arizona leagues as yet.  So that's 110 teams over 5 levels or basically 4 affiliates per MLB team.  
 
In my world, that would align pretty closely with Division 1A football (aka FBS) which currently has 120 teams which would match up pretty well with the NFL's 32 teams at 4 per team.  
 
For simplicity sake you could have those 4 divisions be AAAA, AAA, AA, and A with 30 teams in each.  Maybe make three 10 team leagues which would be like the old NCAA Conferences.  Or just start fresh.  Maybe make the teams regional to cut down on travel and to engender rivalries.   
 
The bottom line is to make these teams be pro teams the way that the PawSox or Durham Bulls are.  And then let colleges and universities get back to being academic institutions where the term student-athlete would be a compliment and not a term of sarcasm.