Interesting piece from David Roth, at SB Nation:
March is a tough one. There is the NCAA Tournament, which is — despite the dense, ambient stink coming off those first four letters — one of the most blissfully overwhelming and blessedly human sports experiences to be had on earth.
And then, sucking around the edges of every transcendent moment, is the NCAA itself: unconvincingly advertising its own puffed-up merit during commercial breaks, congratulating itself on another year of success in soft-palmed handshakes in executive suites, and generally getting paid…
And now there’s the National Labor Relations Board ruling that football players at Northwestern University can be designated as employees, and as such are entitled to unionize and bargain collectively with the university. Northwestern is not happy abut this. The NCAA isn’t, either, but naturally elected to express its unhappiness in the smarmed-out language of “disappointment.”…
The crux of it, which very few are eager to dispute beyond legalisms and Herculean feats of blinkered sentimentality, is that student-athletes are held to a significantly different standard than student non-athletes, to the point where they become something less like students and something more like employees who are compensated for their work with (highly contingent and incomplete) tuition reimbursement.
The nascent union at Northwestern wants to be able to bargain as employees, and its goals are almost poignantly modest. Not annual salaries or performance bonuses or training table room service, but enhanced concussion protocols, a dedicated fund to help players earn their degrees and financial assistance for ex-players who suffered injuries while playing/working with the team. (As employees, they would also have rights under Illinois’ worker’s comp laws, although that would require a separate ruling.) This is all patently and intentionally not extreme…
So many coats of avarice and craven justification and desperate self-importance have been applied to the idea of amateurism that it’s difficult, at this point, to recognize it, let alone engage with it. It’s by no means clear that the NCAA is serious or honest enough to do that. Either way, it will spend millions of dollars on numerous court appeals to avoid doing that, because it does not want to change a single thing.
The NCAA will do that because it’s the NCAA, because it only really remembers how to say “no” and because it has come to understand its purpose: being the perpetuation of the NCAA. The present system works well for the NCAA and a small caste of administrators and coaches, and it does not work well for the student-athletes under its control, which is the same thing as saying that the present system doesn’t work…
What say those of you with a dog in this fight?
raven
West Liberty falls to the Central Missouri Mules in the DII natty.
raven
So now SC will be able to pay it’s players above the table.
MikeJ
Are the dogs unionized?
raven
@MikeJ: these Dawgs ain’t!
max
I have no dog in this fight. (?) Fuck the NCAA.
max
[‘If you’re going to risk ruining a kid’s life to encourage alumni to donate, pay the kids.’]
dp
I absolutely love college football, but I am out of the business of trying to justify it. I don’t know what the answer is, but this seems like a step toward an answer.
Omnes Omnibus
I am a Division III guy. Sports really are amateur at that level.
raven
The Prez on the NCCA is on the pre-game on TBS now.
raven
@efgoldman: I know you know I know all this.
Elmo
I have extensive work before the NLRB in this region – does that count? I don’t give a shit about unionizing college football.
But I do know that the administration has directed the NLRB Regions to be “activist” and to push the envelope of current labor law as far as can be done. As a Corporate drone, that makes my life very difficult. As a progressive, I applaud.
How do I resolve the conflict? I drink.
Baud
@Elmo:
Worst corporate sellout ever.
raven
@efgoldman: You include me in the response and you’ll get the same from me.
WaterGirl
Dave Zirin seems to think this is a pretty big deal: The Northwestern University Football Union and the NCAA’s Death Spiral
negative 1
As a guy who works for a union trust me, we need as much help as we can get.
As a guy with a six figure student loan debt the idea of paying students for non-academics while I had to borrow the cost of a house for an education (remember when colleges did that) makes me so angry I could spit.
MikeJ
@Elmo: As a corporate drone it gives you job security.
RobertDSC-Power Mac G5 Dual
More earthquakes here in LA. Bleh.
notorious JRT
I love to go to University of Washington football games. But, I am fully aware that I do so in denial of what I refer to as the seamy underside of the game.
I have long felt that it is patently unfair that players and their families receive such limited benefits from the millions of dollars generated from those who are SO invested in watching their college teams play and win. The system seems corrupt and unfair, but I do not know the best way to make it more fair and still preserve the character of the game for fans. But, the playing field is far from level in multiple ways. At every turn things are rigged against the players.
raven
@efgoldman: Let me state that in another way. Anyone who doesn’t know what you said doesn’t know enough about it to have an intelligent opinion.
MikeJ
@RobertDSC-Power Mac G5 Dual: 9 minutes ago 4.5 Greater Los Angeles area, California
https://www.google.com/maps/place/33%C2%B057%2743.9%22N+117%C2%B053%2706.0%22W/@33.9622,-117.885,3040m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x0?hl=en
Mnemosyne
@RobertDSC-Power Mac G5 Dual:
Yep. Earthquake.gov seems to indicate that they’re clustering together — that one was a little bit north of yesterday’s, in Rowland Heights. (Though, not being a geologist, I have no idea if that little bit north is geologically meaningful or not.)
madmommy
Good points were made in the discussion afterward with Kellog and Barkley. Changing scholarships from year-to-year to a 4 year package is a start. A lot of these kids might get a scholarship but they don’t come from a situation where mom and dad can send an allowance every month for extras like other students have, and they don’t have the option of getting a part-time job to earn spending money because of NCAA rules. The current model doesn’t seem sustainable to me so something is going to have to change at some point.
Baud
@raven:
Wait. Knowledge is now a prerequisite for having an opinion?
I guess I’ll need to take up backgammon.
raven
@MikeJ: My mom is buried in Rose Hills.
raven
@Baud: Or teabaggery!
raven
@madmommy: I like Kenny but his idea was whack!
MikeJ
@raven: And you’ve been doing spells to bring her back! You’re the reason for the quakes. He’s a witch!
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Wouldn’t you need to have knowledge of the backgammon rules?
Baud
@raven:
Heh. True.
madmommy
@raven:
Which one?
raven
@MikeJ: She’s better off wherever she is than she was in Torrance.
Ruckus
@negative 1:
This is the part I can’t stand. Colleges getting rich off football and yet charging more and more money for others to go to school.
I worked in a professional sport that a few don’t even survive and in which many have life long injuries, including me. I even participated in it as an amateur. We did, as far as I can tell, everything we could to lessen injuries and no one involved from my side was making anything like huge money. And I still had a hard time working in the sport because it was dangerous to the participants. It will always have that danger, even if it becomes less likely. But the people engaged in the sport do so because of the love of it, and yes at the top some of the participants do OK, monetarily, but no one is getting rich off of others participation in the sport.
schrodinger's cat
Caturday open thread needs Freddie Meowrcury
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
There are rules?! That always seemed like the most random game in the world. Never actually played it.
raven
@madmommy: Paying kids a some kind of bonus based on championships after they graduate.
p.a.
Don’t just blame the NCAA. Universities aren’t covering themselves with glory regarding the labor of their TA’s, and the NCAA isn’t involved with that.
Good read.
madmommy
@raven:
Yeah that was a bit out there. It seems to me that a part of the problem with agents/improper contact etc. is that so many of these kids are coming from economically disadvantaged homes and get plopped into a situation where they’re playing a game, making the university a shit ton of money and they can’t buy a damn pizza. There are no easy solutions, something that will help some will hurt others, but something’s got to give.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Rules and strategies.
madmommy
@efgoldman:
That seems reasonable. The reality today is that getting a degree in 4 years is getting to be the exception, not the rule. As a parent with kids still in middle/elementary school I am already having nightmares thinking about what college is going to cost when they get there. I still have trouble getting my head around the idea that somehow getting an education has gone from something that was considered by most people to be an admirable goal and something that benefited all of us to being either outright suspect or an avenue from which a very few make a profit.
raven
@madmommy: If the current ruling holds Northwestern will no longer be in the B1G.
raven
@madmommy: As much as I hate Bob Knight I liked his idea of tying scholarships directly to graduation.
raven
I suspect the Gators will club Dayton but one never knows.
madmommy
@raven:
I like the idea-if you’re going to call them student-athletes then get them to graduation. Even if they do end up with a pro career, the odds against them are slim and the chances they’ll be broke inside a decade are large.
raven
@madmommy: Like boy gorge said, very few will ever make a dime playing ball.
FlipYrWhig
@efgoldman: How about getting universities out of the sports business entirely? If your goal is to pursue being an athlete, you should be able to get paid to be an athlete. The NCAA proves that there’s money in it at a level below the absolute elite. Make it more like other lines of work. No one demands that bands attend colleges before they can sign a record deal.
My view is basically this: if you want to be a professional athlete, great. Good luck and work hard. There’s no need for educational institutions ever to have been involved. Is there college soccer in Europe? Let the players who are good enough get paid as soon as they’re done with high school. And let colleges find some other way to market themselves.
raven
@FlipYrWhig:
And all the blog posts in the world won’t change that fact.
FlipYrWhig
@raven: That seems like a way to add even more corruption, as colleges come up with sneaky ways to get their athletes to graduation (simple or fake classes, paper-writing tutors, etc.) while continuing to demand that they train for their sport as though they’re already pros. Just cut the link entirely and let athletes be athletes without the charade of getting an education that a lot of them don’t want and that even more of them are actively discouraged from seeking because of the insane demands on their time.
raven
FlipYrWhig
@raven: I think it’s kind of odd, myself. I watch college sports and it seems like a subpar version of pro sports — too slow, too error-prone, etc. I’d rather watch pros.
raven
@FlipYrWhig: Life’s a bitch isn’t it?
Omnes Omnibus
@FlipYrWhig: I don’t have a problem with universities being involved in sports. It seems to work reasonably well at the D-II and D-III levels. As far as other countries go, it seems to be a feature of the Anglo-American university system.
notorious JRT
Some uneducated thoughts:
Offer of scholarship is for full tuition on credits needed for degree. Good while on team or if leave team due to injury. Injury scholarships do not count against team, but proceeds in place to verify injury as reason for leaving team
Maybe some sort of injury insurance for players.
While with team, room and board stipend based upon some national scale of cost of living in area where school is located. Paid while school in session / or during practice / game schedule if not the same.
Trust fund for players based upon jersey & ticket sales and post season play. Annual funding and available when eligibility ends.
Player / coach equality: if coach bails, then players can go, too. No one year wait, but forfeit trust $$.
raven
@FlipYrWhig: Well there you go. You might feel otherwise if you could walk to Sanford Stadium from your house.
FlipYrWhig
@Omnes Omnibus: In an ideal world, people who were chiefly concerned with making their way to the bigtime (Johnny Manziel, Andrew Wiggins, et al) could sign with pro teams instead of going to college if they had little interest in going to college. (And there would be more pro teams operating concurrently–more like the long-ago minor leagues for baseball, or the tiers of English soccer.) Once something like that happened, then intercollegiate athletic competition would be less corrupt, more “amateur.” It would also be much worse to watch, but, them’s the breaks.
FlipYrWhig
@raven: The stadium wouldn’t go away, just the team’s affiliation with a college. Go Dawgs FC! That’s how most of the world does it. Pay the players, sell tickets, get crazy.
notorious JRT
@FlipYrWhig:
I feel exactly the opposite except on error front. Pros slow and devoid of passion too much showboating.
Elmo
@MikeJ:
12 hour days, traveling every week lately, and incredible stress – but yeah, I’m irreplaceable. I love my job, swear to FSM. But dayum.
raven
@FlipYrWhig: The Georgia RFC, The Blind Pigs!!!
eta I have to tell you that I am fully aware of the problems associated with college athletics and I still love it. Maybe it’s because I have lived in Urbana and Athens since I was 19 years old but I can shake it.
FlipYrWhig
@raven: and for that matter, of all the things for a public university to spend money on, sports facilities and coaches are pretty crazy priorities. I would keep something like the SEC, break the ties to the member schools, and pay everyone what the market will bear. I don’t know why people would like it any less. But, you’re right, I didn’t grow up in a college sports-happy area, so it’s all a bit lost on me in the first place.
raven
@Elmo: “I’m irreplaceable”
really?
? Martin
The flip side of the problem is that many public institutions bring in more revenue off of their sports than they do in state subsidies for the students being educated. That leads to a bad set of incentives, not least of which is an inconsistent quality of education, high at one end to allow the institution to be competitive attracting students, and low at the other end to allow the institution to be competitive attracting athletes.
The problem isn’t necessarily that the athletes are academically uncompetitive, it’s that athletics takes priority, so students are put into programs where key courses can never interfere with practice and games, where exams and projects can’t put too heavy a burden on students that effectively live in the locker room. So the most rigorous programs, even if the student is academically strong enough to do well in them, are off-limits simply due to workload or logistics. And once you have this, almost second class of academic programs, you not only shove all manner of other students through them as well, but you now have an excuse to admit athletes that aren’t academically competitive and run them through there as well. The stronger academic athletes get robbed of the education they deserved, the weaker ones do as well, and then a pile of other students go along for the same ride.
These programs bring in enough money that rather than dumping the funds back into the athletic program or campus marketing, they could be used to expand course offerings in the more rigorous programs to an extent that the athletes would have enough options to make academics and athletics work together, which would help everyone. Now, I’m glad to see a request for funds to help students complete degrees. That’s better than what most schools do, but it hardly addresses the real problem.
@FlipYrWhig:
Most of these sports wouldn’t exist in any form without college athletics. You watch a lot of professional swimming, water polo, field hockey, rowing? Even pro football and basketball wouldn’t ever have started without the colleges providing the first layer of organization. I agree that the huge money in the pro sports has corrupted the NCAA and college sports, but that’s not an indictment of the merits of college athletics, rather of the corrupting influence of too much money.
Heliopause
I just throw up my hands because nobody ever, ever, ever bothers to identify the actual problem.
The NCAA are bastards but they are merely taking advantage of a situation that was created for them, not by them. The actual root of the problem is two cartels of billionaires who act in a flagrantly anticompetitive manner and nobody seems to want to hold them accountable.
The NCAA and Texas A&M had no capability of forcing Johnny Manziel to play football “for free”. None. Johnny Manziel was playing “for free” because a cartel of billionaires refused to hire him, refused to pay his development costs, and squashes all attempts to allow him an alternative workplace where he might play for money.
While the end of the NCAA exploitation machine would be a great thing the root problem, as I said, is being steadfastly ignored, and it’s possible to imagine unintended consequences of the various payment schemes. Whereas if the cartel were compelled to act in accord with the market principles its members espouse in the abstract, problem solved.
But I despair of this point ever sinking in.
FlipYrWhig
@notorious JRT: the pace of the pro game is often slow, agreed, but the raw speed of individual pro players is dramatically higher.
FlipYrWhig
@? Martin: I dunno, they play plenty of soccer and basketball everywhere else in the world without getting it all mixed up with higher education. Local sports club plays against neighboring sports club. Nothing conceptually difficult about that. I know it’s pretty much impossible to unwind the tangles now, but it didn’t have to be this way, and the fact that it is now this way obscures what should be a simple issue, which is this: if people’s work makes other people money, they should share in it. If it weren’t for the fig leaf of college, academics, scholarships, and all that, it would be obvious what is the right thing to do.
MikeJ
@FlipYrWhig:
Premier League teams bring kids into their academies starting at 9 or 10 years old.
Elmo
@raven: ha! No.
PhoenixRising
@Heliopause: Ding ding ding! We have a winner.
My kid is an elite athlete. She competes in a sport that has about 240 NCAA Div 1 positions available, of which about 80 come open each year.
Her mentor has encouraged her to compete in the pros for a year before college, then attend a college that has a flexible winter term so she can continue as a pro during school, rather than attempting to get one of those 80 seats and getting an inferior quality education because she has to make sacrifices to keep the scholarship.
If she were a pro prospect for the NFL, instead, she’d be locked into the college as AAA league model. It’s crazy that we allow a cartel of very rich men to dictate what the largest universities in this country are allowed to do, and not do, in the course of providing a free development league.
ETA: The NFL is the tail wagging the dog of college athletics in this country. Most NCAA athletes are non-scholarship, and the vast majority are in sports that don’t have a paid professional path at all–why in the hell can’t we at least break off football from the rest of the enterprise?
My hope is that enough parents of young boys will be affected by the alarming data about CTE to throttle footbal. as we know it.
FlipYrWhig
@MikeJ: that seems a bit early, but I would certainly want to allow people to be paid athletes earlier than they are now. Johnny Manziel has no interest in going to college. He wants to work on his sport. It’s a dopey and exploitative system that makes him go through the motions of Going To College so that he can pursue a pro career later–as long as he doesn’t get hurt. I think there’s a lot of merit in what Heliopause says above.
Mudge
@Elmo: May you drink only the best and may you drink it neat.
Elmo
@Mudge: too kind, thank you.
Villago Delenda Est
@Heliopause: The very rich hate market mechanisms with all their shrunken, withered souls.
Adam Smith had their number over two centuries ago. That’s why they ignore his book.
catclub
@FlipYrWhig: This. Get colleges out of professional sports.
College football is an amateur event the day the coach is doing it on his own dime.
catclub
@? Martin: “Most of these sports wouldn’t exist in any form without college athletics. You watch a lot of professional swimming, water polo, field hockey, rowing?”
I do not see the need for college professional athletics – where professional is: The coach is paid primarily for winning.
Except for rowing, do European colleges do any of these?
catclub
@Villago Delenda Est: Both MLB and NFL have antitrust exemptions.
What about NBA? NHL?
Schlemizel
Are you guys kidding? There are billions being made on ‘amateur’ athletics, no way they are going to give up that kind of cash without one hell of a fight. Probably have to create a new division for the ‘professional level’ sports. The football, baseball, basketball and hockey factories will set up their own divisions & can be funded by the major leagues they feed. With any luck that would allow the others to relax a bit & go back to just being a game that is played and viewed for pleasure.
MikeJ
@catclub: UK Sport will fund athletes, but it isn’t tied to school.
Laen
NHL players can be drafted at 18. There is no requirement for college or certain amount of time out of high school. MLB has a couple weird rules to protect 4 year colleges, but a player can enter the draft after high school directly.
Only the NFL and NBA, oh wait the two biggest college sports, have rules to prohibit adults from working.
Omnes Omnibus
@catclub: Does Oxford count?
Schlemizel
@efgoldman:
I’m OK with the NHL leaving the kids alone. If they don’t they can pay for each kid that gets a contract. Every NHL team has several minor league teams, they could afford to finance one at the collegiate level, it that means they shut down one in Iowas City or Flin Flon I’m OK with that.
EDIT: I should admit I HATE the NHL. What they do to what could be a beautiful game is a crime. As a result I am even less sympathetic to them than to the giants in shorts or the CTE league
gian
Not a ton of thoughts. But MLB pays for it’s own minor league and drafts out of high school as well as college. Why should the NFL and NBA be different? I know the NBA has a d -12 ague but the whole one and done thing makes “student athlete” a transparent sham.
And
One of the guests on msnbc this morning indicated “student athlete” was coined in the 1950s to avoid paying benefits to the survivors of a player who died in a game.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
This. When I was in Div III athletics, it was made clear to us that homework took priority over practice. Of course, this was a school with teams so bad they made a documentary about it, so it’s possible other Div III teams aren’t quite as far out there.
Roger Moore
@FlipYrWhig:
The problem is that a lot of that money is probably coming because of things specifically associated with college athletics. Look at minor league sports. The top minor leagues probably have a higher level of competition than top level college sports, but they don’t make anywhere close to the same kind of money and don’t get national TV contracts. There’s clearly something about college sports that makes it enough different from the pros that people are willing to treat it differently from any old minor league. I suspect you’d have to completely change the structure of the professional leagues to make it work.
Roger Moore
@Laen:
The rules aren’t there so much to protect 4 year colleges as they are to deprive players of negotiating leverage. The teams don’t want to spend a moderately high round draft pick on a player and then have him threaten to go to college because he doesn’t like the signing bonus he’s been offered. That strategy works better if he has the option of going back into the draft after every season in college, so MLB basically says that players who choose to go to college have to wait before they can change their mind and re-enter the draft. Helping college baseball is a minor consideration.
FridayNext
@negative 1:
I have never understood this particular whine. You know why you have so much debt and they might get paid to go school? They have skills that make other people millionaires. You don’t. Me neither. I also have student debt. Maybe it’s fair, maybe it’s not, but that’s how life works. It’s why Lane Kiffin gets 5.2 million for getting fired, and the coaches at my small college had to teach gym class for extra money. It’s also why George Clooney gets kajillions a film and the actors at the local dinner theater get paid in food. Clooney’s name makes even a crappy movie more successful. A championship and/or a star player helps bring in millions to a schools coffers in myriad ways and bonuses to coaches and AD’s. I suspect you and I were financial drags on our colleges, just learning and using stuff like libraries. They get free tuition and maybe, soon, paid. You and I get debt.
That’s how the world works. Sure, you could get angry about it. But given the net worth of such lumps as the Kardashians and Snooky, I suspect you can look forward to a long life of anger.
Cacti
My opinion on how to split the baby with this issue is for the NCAA to shitcan its rule preventing players from using their own name and likeness to make money outside of school. If people are willing to pay Johnny Manziel for his autograph, why should the NCAA or the University be able to interfere with that?
I think the O’Bannon case is going to kill the model of “for four years of eligibility, we hold rights to profit from your likeness in perpetuity” in college sports.
James Parente
One of the biggest heartbreaks of my life was when I found out that my alma mater (a S.U.N.Y School) went NCAA Division 1. Sorry. I’m a weirdo in that I believe a University should be producing scientists, engineers, artists, musicians, teachers, doctors, nurses, writers and others who will enrich and advance our nation.
Donalbain
@Omnes Omnibus:
Not the Anglo-American system, just the American system. In the UK, university sports clubs are a student run matter with no outside interest in them at all (with a very very very few exceptions such as the Boat Race).
Omnes Omnibus
@Donalbain: The question was whether there was college soccer in Europe. I took it to mean whether there were university associated sports. In that context, I believe my answer to be correct. I was not suggesting that universities in the UK have anything resembling US Division I university athletics.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@efgoldman: I’ll do you one better. Here’s my proposal: the University athletic program has to take out disability insurance on every athlete who plays a revenue generating sport. You can get seriously maimed for life in college football, and even in basketball in rare circumstances, and the least the university can do is make sure you’re financially protected.
Second, you get a modest stipend while playing (say $10,000 of walking around money) and a payout on graduation of an amount to be determined by the NCAA. This should be X percent of the total revenue generated by college sports.
Third, if you fail to graduate, you still get the stipend – prorated based on the number of credits you earned toward graduation – but it comes from your coach’s salary. That gives both the coach and the player a financial interest in making sure players graduate. There are too many coaches who use these players to get outlandish salaries but then don’t make sure the player comes out of it with a pro career or a degree. Your “scholarship” isn’t worth anything if you don’t get a degree.
If the player leaves early to pursue a professional career in an American pro sports league, the NCAA would pay out the same prorated stipend. I think that set of proposals would be fair to everyone and provide the right incentives to all involved. Sure, it would cut into the NCAA’s outlandish revenues and coaching salaries, but those are too high anyway.
jake the snake
I don’t care for professional athletics. I loathe the owners, the agents, and am not particularly fond of most of the players.
I am sympathetic to the fans, because, as obnoxious as most are, they get the worst side of any development.
As for as the actual games, there is way too much uniformity in the way teams play.
I understand the issues with amateurism so far as the NCAA goes. As far as I am concerned, the NCAA should be prosecuted under the RICO statutes.
The thing that bothers me most that the scenario that seems most likely with 60 or so programs forming a semi-pro league only
exacerbates the de facto class system in Division I sports.
FridayNext
@James Parente:
One of the reasons I chose my undergraduate school was that they were NOT a Div1 school and didn’t even have football team. (It also didn’t have a real Greek system. Another plus) Football had distorted the values of my high school so badly, I was sick of it. Now my alma mater is regularly ranked in the top 20 for undergraduate education, especially for state schools. No regrets.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Roger Moore:
The difference between Div I and Div II/III? TV money. Lots and lots and lots and lots of TV money. That’s what’s happened to college sports, but especially football. My alma mater’s football team were Div III national champs one year, but nobody at the school was making a dime off of them because there was no TV interest.