[HN Gopher] National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston ...
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National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston [pdf]
Author : thestoicattack
Score : 79 points
Date : 2021-06-21 16:08 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.supremecourt.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.supremecourt.gov)
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Kavanaugh hits the nail in the head in his concurring opinion.
|
| > In my view, that argument is circular and unpersuasive. The
| NCAA couches its arguments for not paying student athletes in
| innocuous labels. But the labels cannot disguise the reality: The
| NCAA's business model would be flatly il- legal in almost any
| other industry in America. All of the restaurants in a region
| cannot come together to cut cooks' wages on the theory that
| "customers prefer" to eat food from low-paid cooks. Law firms
| cannot conspire to cabin lawyers' salaries in the name of
| providing legal services out of a "love of the law." Hospitals
| cannot agree to cap nurses' income in order to create a "purer"
| form of helping the sick. News organizations cannot join forces
| to curtail pay to reporters to preserve a "tradition" of public-
| minded journalism. Movie studios cannot collude to slash benefits
| to camera crews to kindle a "spirit of amateurism" in Hollywood.
| Price-fixing labor is price-fixing labor. And price-fixing labor
| is ordinarily a textbook antitrust problem because it
| extinguishes the free market in which individuals can oth- erwise
| obtain fair compensation for their work.
| bretpiatt wrote:
| What's even worse with NCAA compensation is that it is limited
| to a scholarship and the value of that scholarship is tied to
| the cost of a given college or university. If an athlete is
| given a scholarship to an in-state public university their
| compensation might be $25,000 per year versus another student
| attending a higher cost private school who could be getting
| paid $75,000 per year effectively.
|
| You then have the value of the different degrees to the market
| (which is separate from the cost) so it is very possible that
| certain student athletes are obtaining a degree worth hundreds
| of thousands of future dollars in the market versus some who
| get 4 years of room and board to play sports, make the
| university money, and then maybe they do not even end up with a
| degree by the time their eligibility expires (see data on
| student athlete graduation rates).
| smithza wrote:
| And this is sidetracking the point that college-athletes
| being recruited with aspirations for professional sports view
| the college as a means to the pro-level job; college courses
| and the degree are not viewed as benefits but necessary side-
| effects. Is this true for all sports and all athletes? No,
| not for fencing or handball, but for football, basketball,
| and other potential high-earners.
| creyes wrote:
| tl;dr in 2 quotes from the decision. Wild shit that the NCAA got
| this far
|
| > The NCAA does not contest that its re-straints affect
| interstate trade and commerce and are thus subject to the Sherman
| Act.
|
| > With this much agreed it is unclear exactly what the NCAA
| seeks. To the extent it means to propose a sort of judicially
| ordained immunity from the terms of the Sherman Act for its
| restraints of trade--that we should overlook its restrictions
| because they happen to fall at the intersection of higher
| education, sports, and money--we cannot agree.
| sib wrote:
| For more about the egregious ways in which the NCAA treats
| student-athletes, this is a great book:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LFZ8SF8/
| wyldfire wrote:
| From "Law & Crime" [1]:
|
| > Essentially, this is a classic violation of antitrust law. What
| the NCAA is arguing, however, is that it should be allowed an
| exemption to that law. The Court wasn't willing to play ball on
| that one.
|
| > Justice Gorsuch made short work of the argument that the NCAA
| is entitled to an exemption on the grounds that it is a "joint
| venture." Reasoning that "student-athletes have nowhere else to
| sell their labor," the justice wrote, "[e]ven if the NCAA is a
| joint venture, then, it is hardly of the sort that would warrant
| quick-look approval for all its myriad rules and restrictions."
|
| [1] https://lawandcrime.com/supreme-court/unanimous-supreme-
| cour...
| jalgos_eminator wrote:
| I think sports is a big blind spot for most HN users, so I would
| like to offer an informal Q&A with me here in this thread. I am a
| former top-level division 1 football player that got a technical
| degree and now work in the IT/software space.
|
| I like to do these every once in a while because there is so much
| incorrect information and bad assumptions about high level
| college athletes that I feel the need to combat this when the
| opportunity presents itself. I haven't read the posted SC opinion
| yet because I'm at work and currently eating a burrito. Don't be
| afraid to ask probing questions, the worst that will happen is I
| will choose not to answer.
| Zanta wrote:
| An argument presented in this case is that increased pay to
| college athletes will incentivize them to spend more time on
| their athletics and less on their academics. How convincing do
| you find that argument, applied to athletes in a) Top Tier D1
| Football programs, b) D1 programs but for less hyper-
| commercialized sports (say track, or volleyball), and c) D2 or
| D3 athletes with little-to-no aspirations of a future in
| professional athletics
| elpakal wrote:
| former D2 athlete here, never had aspirations to go pro. I
| don't think it's possible to spend "more time on their
| athletics" even at D2 level (can't speak for D3, though from
| my friends playing D1 it seems to be more time consuming).
|
| my experience was waking up before the crack of dawn to pre-
| train, going to school in the morning, and then spending the
| rest of any free time I had after training (be it weights,
| cardio, practice etc). and then you watch film. all for the
| love (scholarships were nice) - so anyone that suggests there
| is more time to spend on athletics at these levels, and that
| paying athletes will somehow encourage them to do so vs
| academia, deserves a flan in the face.
| tw04 wrote:
| You have to maintain a certain GPA regardless to continue
| competing. Unless they're cheating in school, the incentive
| to study will be the same either way. If they are cheating in
| school, then they were never serious about the education in
| the first place.
|
| Honestly the focus (or lack thereof) on education starts at
| home.
|
| source: also played college sports.
| jalgos_eminator wrote:
| I think that argument is dubious and the money would only
| affect a very small subset of athletes. It would even be a
| small subset of football/basketball players. You would want
| to set up professional feeder leagues and give kids the
| option of going pro or going to school. Honestly a proper
| developmental league would go a long way to fix/alleviate
| many of the problems with college athletics.
|
| This is how baseball works, and all the baseball players I
| met actively wanted to be in college. Some of them even
| turned down $100k-$500k draft signing bonuses to play college
| ball.
| dan_quixote wrote:
| How did you manage the technical degree and full-time athlete
| duties? Did they occur at the same time?
| jalgos_eminator wrote:
| Yes, I got my degree in 5 years and was on the team for all 5
| of those years. It was tough. Lots of scheduling conflicts,
| because practice/meeting/lifting times are set in stone and
| you have to schedule your academics around them. I didn't
| find the workload too bad, but I basically didn't have time
| to do anything else other than football and school. In-season
| you scale back classes to the minimum number of credit-hours
| because football takes about 50 hours per week (minimum, 60
| hours when you are travelling that week). I took 5 years
| though, so was able to spread the credit-hours out over an
| extra year so I wasn't taking too many classes each term.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| There was a starter on the football team in my graduating
| class at umich cs. The only explanation of how he found the
| time I can think of is he had tutors do most of the work for
| him.
| jalgos_eminator wrote:
| I think its unfair to assume that about him. There were a
| decent number of athletes in engineering degrees when I was
| in school and they absolutely worked their asses off,
| myself included.
|
| Although there were special athletic academic tutors, there
| weren't any available that could tutor for engineering
| subjects so I doubt any athletes were getting assignments
| done for them. Regular tutors wouldn't have played along
| with that game. Also, the professors (at least most of
| mine) were pretty skeptical of athletics, so I was on a
| short leash for what I could get away with (missing
| classes, moving exam dates, asking for extra time on
| projects, etc). If they sniffed that I was cheating, they
| would have brought the hammer down without thinking twice.
| That's just my experience at my school though.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Just a second hand anecdote, but a professor of mine at my
| small liberal arts college with a D3 football team -
| mentioned over a few glasses of wine that he had moved on
| from teaching at Virginia Tech because he was pressured by
| the administration to give passing grades to Michael Vick,
| who never attended a single class or completed any
| coursework of his.
| jalgos_eminator wrote:
| Yeah, I would only be mildly surprised if this happened a
| time or two while I was in school. There are some guys
| that just don't want to go to school, but college
| football is their only pathway to make it to the NFL. The
| academic counselors have their hands full just trying to
| keep all their athletes eligible, let alone enabling them
| to thrive in an academic environment.
| moate wrote:
| How, and how much, do you personally feel student athletes
| should be compensated?
|
| Should anyone actually care that West Nowhere State can't
| afford to compete against Alabama in football or KSU in
| basketball, since they never could have in the first place?
|
| How much under the table money will these just be getting above
| board/visible to laymen (and isn't this a good thing when it
| comes to large state schools being accountable to taxpayers?)
| jalgos_eminator wrote:
| I think the point of all this is that my opinion of how much
| college athletes should be compensated isn't relevant. My
| opinion on how much a software developer should be paid isn't
| relevant either, because the market sets the rate of
| compensation for software developers.
|
| The problem right now with college athletics (at least
| football and basketball) is that the schools found a cash cow
| and the pro leagues found a free farm league that produces
| top talent. Its a symbiotic relationship and neither one
| wants to rock the boat. There's a reason the NFL players have
| their own union after all.
|
| Regarding your second question, West Nowhere State is an ant
| in an elephants world. There are plenty of D3 programs (that
| give no aid or preferred admission) that have football
| programs that lose hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
| They'll keep doing it even if Alabama is able to pay their
| players above the table.
|
| As far as under the table money, I'm not sure. I never saw
| nor heard about those things, and with the way athletes like
| to boast it would surprise me if they were all able to keep
| their mouths shut. I think its less money going to less
| athletes than people would like to think.
| moate wrote:
| My first point was less of a "200K/year" and more of a
| "whatever the market dictates the value of their skills
| would be" vs "a tiered set scale". Basically, do you think
| that Bama should be able to drop 2 million a year in player
| salaries while West Nowhere can only offer partial coverage
| scholarships.
|
| And the under the table money is real, but less secret bags
| of cash left in their dorm and more "the AD bought a new
| car but realized he doesn't like the interior, do you want
| it?" IDK where you went to college, but several high
| profile programs lost championships and got sanctions for
| creative ways they "recruited" players. The ruling opens up
| more levers for schools to use to funnel goods and services
| towards players, even if they can't give them actually
| currency.
| jalgos_eminator wrote:
| Yes, I think that players should be offered what they are
| worth. At this point the cat is out of the bag. College
| head coaches are getting paid millions per year (look it
| up, its all public), the assistants are getting paid
| 200k-800k. The athletic directors get paid $400k-$800k.
| Strength and conditioning coaches are getting $150k.
| Every year coaches leverage the public nature of their
| salaries to get better offers. Apparently the free market
| works great for everyone except the athletes. Strange how
| that works.
|
| For some reason, the schools don't complain about how
| much money they are paying the coaches. They don't
| complain about how much money they are spending on
| facilities. They don't complain about how much money they
| spend on marketing. But for some reason, when the public
| starts talking about paying players, they start
| complaining and making excuses. If you want them to play
| for the love of the game, then get rid of scholarships.
| If you want them to be professionals, then pay them.
|
| And yes, that will create inequity among players. That's
| fine. I wasn't worth the same to my team as our star
| quarterback (who now is a backup in the NFL). Its the way
| the world works, especially the world of sports.
|
| edit: grammar
| topspin wrote:
| "I deleted n pages of someone's rules today"
|
| Does this mean players can just do the straightforward thing and
| negotiate lucrative contracts with schools and we can forego all
| the backdoor, indirect compensation and self-inflicted corruption
| that goes on now? If so then these institutions can just be what
| they are in a straightforward way; football teams that also
| happen to fund a legacy educational branch.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| The ruling today was quite narrow, so players cannot do the
| straightforward thing at the moment.
|
| There were very strong hints that the NCAA needs to change its
| rules around compensation completely, so it seems likely that
| they eventually will be able to do that. But it isn't the case
| now.
| Scaevolus wrote:
| Alternate headline: "Supreme Court unanimously sides with former
| college players in dispute with NCAA about compensation" (from
| ESPN).
|
| Note that this is a narrow ruling about the NCAA limiting
| educational compensation and what scholarships can encompass--
| but some justices gave indications that they disagree with the
| NCAA compensation restrictions at large.
| crooked-v wrote:
| The oral arguments stage made it pretty clear that none of the
| justices were buying the NCAA lawyers' arguments in general. It
| really makes me feel that the only reason this judgment didn't
| explicitly open the field for giving student athletes a salary
| was that the justices wanted to give schools some time to adapt
| instead of completely blowing up the current system all at
| once.
| jfb wrote:
| Kavanaugh's concurrence is 100% an invitation for a broader
| restraint-of-trade suit, and honestly, it is _long_ overdue.
| The NCAA is dead, they 've got to settle, but there isn't going
| to be any real interest in half measures.
|
| As someone who _detests_ the Plantation League, this is long,
| long, long overdue.
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| The solution in my opinion is to do away with college athletic
| scholarships and preferred admission for athletes. Let school's
| field their sports teams from their normal student bodies and
| ensure that those teams are truly amateur and the participants
| really are "student-athletes". Let the NBA and the NFL field
| their own semi-professional minor leagues like baseball does. If
| these schools have to start paying their football and basketball
| players (and lets be perfectly clear, that's what this is about),
| it will be the absolute death of virtually every other men's
| sport at the college level, and will likely only leave enough
| women's sports to offset the football team due to Title IX. I
| won't even get into the ridiculous hypocrisy of our institutions
| of higher learning pouring billions of dollars into a sport that
| is proven to cause brain damage, while cutting other sports that
| don't. That is not at all what college athletics should be about,
| it should be about extracurricular opportunities for real
| students. I think the Division 3 model (no sports scholarships/no
| backdoor admissions) has been much more successful and has
| provided many more opportunities for students (men and women) to
| compete in a wider variety of sports. I say this as someone who
| was a college athlete on scholarship years ago and still coaches
| high school.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > it will be the absolute death of virtually every other men's
| sport at the college level
|
| Why's that?
| chadash wrote:
| In the current system, schools need to have an equivalent
| number of sports teams (and slots) for men and women, with
| the same number of scholarships (the law governing this is
| called Title IX). Generally speaking, women's sports don't
| bring in money for schools, whereas football at a competitive
| school will bring in money in the form of TV deals and even
| donations from alumni. So essentially, the football and
| basketball teams subsidize the rest of the athletic
| department. If you had to pay the athletes in these sports,
| then there'd be less money to go around for other teams that
| don't generate revenue. But at a minimum, you'd still need a
| few women's teams because of Title IX.
|
| EDIT: to clarify, I personally think it's ridiculous that
| star college athletes don't get paid given how much time
| those athletes put in and how much money they bring in for
| schools, but I also think that at least at the schools with
| huge athletic programs it'll have some effect on other
| sports.
| triceratops wrote:
| Alternatively, universities would spin off their money-
| making teams into professional organizations in return for
| licensing fees.
| slg wrote:
| >If you had to pay the athletes in these sports, then
| there'd be less money to go around for other teams that
| don't generate revenue.
|
| This relies on the assumption that sports are somehow
| separate from a school's educational mission and therefore
| must be funded by the profit from other sports. There are a
| maximum of only 2 or 3 dozen athletic departments that are
| self sufficient in the manner you suggest. The rest fund
| sports the same way they fund any other extracurricular
| activity.
|
| I'm not sure we should require sports to fund themselves
| when we don't have that requirement on something like a
| drama or music departments. The understudy in a school play
| is probably no more likely to make a career out of acting
| than the backup QB is to make a career out of football, so
| why do we pretend one is a worthwhile academic pursuit and
| one isn't?
| Loughla wrote:
| Your math doesn't work out here. I can't major in
| football, I absolutely can major in drama and/or music.
| From my experience, club sports and clubs such as the
| theater club are funded via student fees, whereas
| departmental projects such as drama and music are funded
| via tuition.
|
| In theory, the major areas are self-funding because of
| the tuition costs.
| slg wrote:
| >Your math doesn't work out here. I can't major in
| football
|
| Literally, no you can't major in football. From a
| practical standpoint many of the athletes who go to a
| school like Alabama to play football do end up majoring
| in it. Maybe their actual degree will say something
| sports specific like kinesiology or sports management,
| maybe their academic advisers will point them to general
| education classes specifically targeted for athletes and
| they will end up with a super generic business or
| communications degree, but either way football is the
| primary focus for many of them.
|
| >From my experience, club sports and clubs such as the
| theater club are funded via student fees, whereas
| departmental projects such as drama and music are funded
| via tuition.
|
| The point is who funds a play or a concert at
| universities? Do they all need to be financially self-
| sufficient or do we accept that these pursuits have value
| outside of the number of people who will pay to watch
| them?
|
| >In theory, the major areas are self-funding because of
| the tuition costs.
|
| This isn't true. The costs to teach different subjects
| varies wildly and departmental budgets are therefore not
| always inline with the number of students in each
| specific program. For example, tuition from an English
| department would likely go to help subsidize a more
| expensive Physics department.
| danvasquez29 wrote:
| you kinda can in a lot of universities with big programs.
| There's a lot of "sports marketing" and "sports science"
| majors now that get a little loose with requirements and
| rigor. when done right, they can be good tools to prep
| athletes for life after playing (agents, marketing, phys
| ed instructors and coaches, etc.) but they also run the
| risk of being places for the football team to sleep
| through class and get an A for working out and attending
| video.
| chadash wrote:
| > There are a maximum of only 2 or 3 dozen athletic
| departments that are self sufficient in the manner you
| suggest
|
| By the same token, there's only a few dozen athletic
| programs with athletes who would probably be paid if not
| for NCAA rules banning pay.
| slg wrote:
| No, that is a poor conclusion. Athletes are not
| distributed in the nature you are suggesting. There are
| profitable players who exist on unprofitable teams and
| there are profitable teams that exist in unprofitable
| athletic departments. The reverse is also true.
|
| Honestly the biggest stumbling block for me to be in
| support of paying college athletes are all these details
| on deciding who gets paid and how much since they don't
| all provide uniform value. There are situations in which
| one person might be worth millions and their teammate
| might be worth absolutely nothing. That is one of the
| reasons why I think allowing players to profit of their
| name, image and likeness (NIL) rights seems like the
| first step. That allows the free market to better assess
| their value and reward them for it. Roughly half the
| states have already passed, are currently debating, or
| have recently debated laws allowing college players to
| profit of their NIL rights.
| chadash wrote:
| > No, that is a poor conclusion. Athletes are not
| distributed in the nature you are suggesting. There are
| profitable players who exist on unprofitable teams and
| there are profitable teams that exist in unprofitable
| athletic departments. The reverse is also true.
|
| Fair, but a few schools would be disproportionately
| affected by paid athletes. Ohio State and Alabama would
| probably pony up a lot, just as they spend tons on their
| athletic departments right now. Northwestern probably
| wouldn't, except maybe in rare cases.
|
| > That is one of the reasons why I think allowing players
| to profit of their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights
| seems like the first step.
|
| Agree this sounds like a good first step. It's utterly
| ridiculous that they can't.
|
| > That allows the free market to better assess their
| value and reward them for it.
|
| Why is this better than schools bidding on player
| contracts? Would you argue that when Patrick Mahomes got
| a $150 million contract, that wasn't the free market
| making an assessment of his value?
| slg wrote:
| >Why is this better than schools bidding on player
| contracts? Would you argue that when Patrick Mahomes got
| a $150 million contract, that wasn't the free market
| making an assessment of his value?
|
| I think completely open bidding on players will cause
| more problems. Like I said, you can have teammates in
| which one is worth millions and the other is worth
| nothing. They would both be putting in the same amount of
| work and ostensibly be doing the same job, but one is
| just drastically better than the other. That might be
| worse for public perception than them all getting
| nothing.
|
| I imagine any system of paying players would probably
| come with both a floor and ceiling for how much a school
| can compensate a player.
|
| Also this isn't really the point of your comment, but
| like many athletes Mahomes has never and potentially will
| never sign a true free market contract with a team. He
| was drafted by the Chiefs so they had exclusive rights to
| negotiate with him. His huge extension was negotiated
| with the Chiefs during his initial contract which means
| he couldn't field offers from other teams. If he was a
| true free agent, he would have received even more money.
| He was willing to take a discount on that value for the
| added security of signing the contract now and
| guaranteeing some portion of that money. It is
| endorsements where someone like Mahomes can see his true
| free market rate because he can have the Nikes, Adidas,
| Gatorades, etc of the world competing against each other.
| Giving college players NIL rights gives them the
| opportunity to cash in on those free market endorsement
| deals.
| Zimahl wrote:
| Just to add, the NFL is even more closed-market in that
| each team has a salary cap. So giving Mahomes more means
| someone else on the team gets less.
| slg wrote:
| True and superstars like him are often guilted into
| taking less than their true value so the team still has
| enough to pay other high quality players.
| handrous wrote:
| The 2-3 huge money-maker sports tend to fund all the rest.
| Paying athletes real money will cut into those profits
| (especially if a strong labor market for student athletes
| develops) with a plausible result being that other sports
| will be cut as budgets tighten. The only ones that would be
| _for sure_ safe would be whatever women 's sports are needed
| to achieve Title IX parity with the income-generating men's
| sports.
|
| Of course, it's also possible that colleges will find other
| ways to pay for the "lesser" sports, and there would be no
| cuts.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > tend to fund all the rest
|
| How much 'funding' does an amateur university sport need? I
| don't think my fencing club at university had any 'funding'
| we just met and fenced. Occasionally we borrowed a van to
| go to a competition. We had a coach we paid from a few
| pounds of membership fees we collected from ourselves.
| csa wrote:
| In the US, in no particular order:
|
| - equipment
|
| - coaches
|
| - travel/hotel/per diems, sometimes long distance
| depending on league
|
| - trainers
|
| - workout facilities (typically shared)
|
| - practice facilities (might be shared)
|
| - game facilities
|
| - additional dining options to accommodate training
|
| - nutritionists
|
| - doctors
|
| - scholarship money for tuition
|
| - scholarship money for room and board
|
| - video review areas and equipment (shared)
|
| - video recording equipment and videographers
|
| - insurance
|
| - announcers for events
|
| - recruiting
|
| - tutoring
|
| - event management
|
| - publicity/advertising
|
| - title ix compliance official
|
| Note that at some universities (even some high schools),
| there are self-funding booster clubs that will pay for a
| lot of this stuff for some sports. That said, there is
| still some stuff that the university has to pay for
| directly.
|
| As a simple example, Alabama football (big program that
| makes tons of money) also funds Alabama's championship
| teams in golf, softball, and gymnastics (and many other
| sports that have not led to national championships).
| jessaustin wrote:
| If money is unlimited, you could come up with reasons to
| fund all of the junk you've listed. For GP's example of a
| college fencing team, they need 1) occasional use of a
| well-ventilated room with a hard floor [and one or two
| electrical outlets if they're using that fancy electronic
| scoring] and 2) storage for their equipment when they're
| not using the room. Literally nothing else is needed. Few
| fans would ever pay to see fencing, so these actual
| student-athletes don't need any more compensation than
| the room and the storage. Equipment can be funded by
| donations and dues. Coaches should mostly be volunteers,
| but if someone needs payment that can also be from dues
| or donated.
|
| (Source: I played on my college club kendo team. If
| anything the needs of fencing are less than those of
| kendo.)
| csa wrote:
| At most schools, what you are describing are called "club
| sports". These sports have much less funding from the
| university, and they are ubiquitous.
|
| The next logical question is probably "why aren't all
| sports club sports?" The short answer is that varsity
| football and basketball are often direct or indirect
| money makers for the school that warrant funding for
| competitiveness, and title ix that says that there has to
| be access to sports at equal levels (typically this means
| a university needs a few women's sports that have
| equivalent quality equipment, facilities, etc. as
| football and basketball).
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I just don't get why a university amateur golf team needs
| anything but a few people and their golf gear. Why take
| it so seriously?
| chrisBob wrote:
| That is an easy argument for an outsider to make in
| virtually any situation. The answer is probably similar
| to the reason you aren't doing your programming job on an
| 11" chrome book.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Other countries don't even remotely approach social
| university sports teams like this and still have fun and
| generate elite athletes.
| csa wrote:
| Outside of the US, elite athletes are often members of
| non-university clubs. These clubs are supported well and
| often have very good funding.
| yupper32 wrote:
| Because everyone else you're competing against is taking
| it seriously.
|
| Please try to step back and understand why people take it
| seriously and truly care about sports. You don't seem to
| understand and don't seem to be actually trying to
| understand. It's exhausting trying to have conversations
| like the OP topic when people come in and degrade high
| level sports at its core.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| People take sports seriously in other countries as well.
| I took sports seriously. I just didn't have an
| expectation of professional facilities for a social
| sports team in spare time at uni.
| yupper32 wrote:
| I don't know what more to tell you.
|
| If you want to compete at a high level in the US you
| often need to fulfill that long list of requirements a
| few posts above, unless it's a very niche sport.
|
| You can also play pickup basketball down the street with
| nothing more than the court and a ball. There's nothing
| wrong with that, but don't expect that to convert to any
| kind of high level play.
| csa wrote:
| It's a business decision and it's law.
|
| 1. If a certain sports outcome (e.g., beating a rival,
| league championship, etc.) will lead to an increase in
| alumni donations, then it might be considered prudent to
| invest some money into that program.
|
| 2. Title ix creates weird incentive structures for
| athletic programs, with a default assumption being that
| the university is guilty of discrimination if there isn't
| a lot of equal treatment for all sports (both men and
| women). Note that this has helped funding for women's
| sports _a lot_ (the disparity was almost comical in the
| 80s and prior), but it has also led to the elimination of
| some fringe men's varsity sports (some of which became
| clubs).
| camgunz wrote:
| I think OP is referring to the spectacle that is
| collegiate football/basketball/baseball; not that there
| won't be these teams, they just won't be multi-billion
| dollar enterprises.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Since the ostensible point of colleges and universities
| is education in various academic subjects, the absence of
| high-dollar athletic teams wouldn't be an actual problem.
| labcomputer wrote:
| From a US perspective:
|
| Most "rec sports" are self-funded university-affiliated
| student clubs. I was the treasurer of one such club for
| three years.
|
| My school's cycling team ran about a $20k-$25k/year
| budget to cover race transportation, motels, entry fees,
| coaching and an annual 2-night training camp. That was
| for a full collegiate road season with an average of 6-8
| riders and about 75% of a MTB season with 2-3 riders.
|
| Funding came from sponsors (mostly selling space on the
| team jersey), selling jerseys and bibs to alumni and
| donations. Most of the sponsors were alums with local
| businesses, but we also had a couple bigger brands
| (energy bars and cycling clothing) who gave "in-kind"
| donations of steep discounts on merch (>50%).
|
| Team members paid for their own equipment. We did discuss
| buying a couple team bikes to bring in people who could
| not afford them, but budget constraints and concerns
| about damage/jealousy/competitiveness nixed the idea.
|
| I'd guess that you could run a competitive "varsity"
| cycling team, including everything I mentioned above plus
| mechanics and equipment but excluding scholarships, for
| around $40k-$50k/year (assuming mechanics are paid a day
| rate at races and piecewise for maintenance and the
| coaching staff is not full-time university employees).
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| Yes! This is exactly what I was alluding too in my original
| comment. I will also add that there are a number of
| demographic factors that are going to come to a head over
| the next 10 years or so that are going to put a serious
| squeeze on non-revenue men's sports:
|
| First college enrollment is likely going to drop
| significantly starting around 2025 due to severely
| declining birthrates in the US that started during the
| 2007-2008 financial crisis. It is expected that 2025 will
| be the smallest graduating high school class in the US in
| the last 30-40 years. Every college and university is going
| to be fighting over a smaller pool of applicants. Fewer
| people are going to attend games and fewer people will be
| watching college sports on TV which means smaller TV
| contracts.
|
| The percentage of men attending college has been declining,
| in 2017 57% of college students in the US were women:
| https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98
|
| And it looks like the declining rate of men in higher
| education is only speeding up:
| https://hechingerreport.org/the-pandemic-is-speeding-up-
| the-...
|
| College men and male alumni disproportionately support
| college athletics, they attend games and donate to the
| athletic department more than their female counterparts.
| Fewer men on campus in the long term likely means less
| money for the athletic department as a whole:
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/nvsm.34
|
| Lastly, Title IX only requires that sports opportunities
| for both men and women be proportional to the percentage of
| men and women in the student body. With only 43% of college
| students nationwide being men now, and football being the
| juggernaut of college athletics that it is (with typically
| over 100 players on a college football team), there will be
| little room left for any other men's sports in college
| athletics, and no incentive for the athletic department to
| keep them around.
|
| Over the next decades many men's sports will likely become
| nearly extinct at the D1 level: tennis, golf, rowing,
| wrestling, hockey, volleyball, swimming and diving, cross
| country, even track and field and baseball look to be in
| big trouble as athletic departments try to keep the revenue
| from college football flowing in while dealing with these
| challenging demographic factors.
| hervature wrote:
| Why do you assume that paying the athletes will have any
| meaningful impact on expenses? I will be using my numbers from
| [1]. Coming in at 65 on expenditure, University of Kansas
| spends $14 million on football. At the time of the article,
| they hadn't been to a bowl game in a decade and the drought has
| since continued. I'm sorry Jayhawks, but the program isn't good
| at all. First, no school is going to remove scholarships
| because that's an easy way for the university to pay their
| athletes. Paying the football players $10k per year would only
| cost an additional $1.05M for a 105 man roster. That's less
| than 10%. That is easily covered by increasing price of tickets
| by $2 in their 50,000 capacity stadium over the course of the
| season. But students watch for free? Well, not really, they
| already paid in their student fees. So fees have a one time
| increase of $2. But more realistically, these are football
| players that will never go to the NFL. They are happy for a
| free education and the Jayhawks would never pay them in
| additional to what they give them already. These rules apply
| solely to the top 10 teams that wish they could pay the top
| recruit of the nation $100k. I say that all of this is easily
| fixed by giving the players 10% of their jersey sales. It is
| completely insane that the NCAA can make money off of a
| person's likeness and not pay them which is illegal in most
| states.
|
| [1] -
| https://www.syracuse.com/orangefootball/2017/08/which_school...
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| We saw during Covid that as soon as there was a tiny bit of
| financial stress on athletic departments they immediately
| started cutting non-revenue sports, here's a fairly complete
| list from the last year:
|
| https://businessofcollegesports.com/tracker-college-
| sports-p...
|
| You can see from that list that the vast majority of sports
| that were cut were non-revenue, men's sports. $1.05M lost to
| paying the football team could just as likely be covered by
| cutting one or two non-revenue sports as it is by raising
| ticket prices. The reality is attendance of college football
| games was already down before Covid, even for powerhouse
| schools like the University of Georgia:
|
| https://ugawire.usatoday.com/2019/03/27/college-football-
| gam...
|
| It is extremely unlikely that even the biggest football
| schools will be able to cover the cost of paying their
| players through increase ticket prices when they are already
| concerned about filling seats.
| hervature wrote:
| I wouldn't constitute COVID "a tiny bit of financial
| stress". That list is clearly temporary cuts. Stanford
| "cut" all sports programs and now they are all back. Your
| second article states that fans just prefer to watch on TV.
| Thus, the schools will make it back in more lucrative TV
| contracts.
|
| But your entire argument lacks the essential point that
| salaries will be market driven. That, already, most
| programs cannot pay for their athletes. That scholarships
| and world class facilities and coaching are more than
| sufficient compensation. Scholarships again being pennies
| on the dollar for the university. We're talking on the
| order of a dozen schools that are willing to pay and 100
| players that will realistically get any type of meaningful
| compensation.
| yupper32 wrote:
| This would end up killing a bunch of smaller sports, and
| hurting the larger ones.
|
| NCAA covers a massive number of sports. The vast majority of
| those who go pro in any US sport, first go through an NCAA
| team.
|
| Think about a scenario in the current world: You're a pretty
| good golf player in high school. You commit to Stanford for
| golf and a degree in some STEM field. The school already has a
| system in place to make sure both are possible. You give high
| level competitive college golf a shot and realize you can
| actually go pro. After college, you do. And even if it doesn't
| work out, you've got a degree from Stanford.
|
| And then there's your world: You're a pretty good golf player
| in high school. You go to college instead of the separate LPGA
| feeder leagues because it's the safer bet and your school
| doesn't have a system in place to make sure you can compete in
| both. Why would they? You never get to experience and thrive in
| the high level competitions and end up not going pro.
|
| So many professional sports would get maimed with your model.
| After a decade the US would heavily drop on the world stage
| when it comes to sports.
| ecshafer wrote:
| So maybe we don't need so many professional sports players.
| yupper32 wrote:
| Who needs those sports balls on the television, right?
| jackschultz wrote:
| This comment is getting downvotes and given my experience
| playing D1 college, getting a STEM degree, this scenario is
| in no way possible.
|
| Stanford on its own is one of the top golf programs in the
| country. Its practice facility is absurdly good (my team was
| able to use it once when we were out there. The reason we
| were in the bay area? Because we took our spring breaks to go
| play fancy courses with rich alumni to get them to donate to
| the athletic department, which is another part of money you
| don't see but athletics gets.) You need to be really, really
| good to play at Stanford.
|
| Second, college golf is a case where, because of the niceties
| like practice facilities, tournaments, where you don't pay
| for any of that, it's a feeder to the main tour. In fact, PGA
| Tour University[0] came out to help get guys who were good in
| college to the Tour quicker. The quality of guys in lower
| level tours is crazy, and this is a deserved bumper for the
| good guys. Guys play in college first because that's where
| you grow.
|
| I'm very anti-NCAA. Each sport is different in terms of
| growing to the professional level though, and how engrained
| the NCAA is in most cases though makes it tough to have an
| overall solution.
|
| [0] https://www.pgatour.com/university/what-you-need-to-know-
| faq...
| yupper32 wrote:
| You're getting bogged down in the details of my example. I
| know a good amount of people who played D1 sports. One went
| pro and is competing in the Olympics this year. The others
| used their degrees to get "normal" jobs when they weren't
| able to go pro (or had no intention to in the first place).
| All of them would not have had the opportunity to compete
| at a high level in their sports without forgoing their
| higher education.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I was friends with quite a few D1 athletes when I was at
| college. Their sports took up so much of their time that
| they were only able to put minimum effort into academics.
| In fact, the coaches and staff would help guid them into
| known easy classes, so they would be able to maintain
| their grades while working 40+ hours a week in their
| sport.
|
| It would make so much more sense for them to just hold
| off on school, go try to make it as a professional
| athlete, and then go back to school if it didn't work.
|
| No other country ties sports and athletics like the US
| does. Good soccer players in other countries sign
| contract at 10 years old, and play for the academy while
| getting paid.
| [deleted]
| triceratops wrote:
| Sounds like that's a problem for the pro sports leagues to
| solve. They have the money to do it, so they'll be fine.
|
| Baseball does an adequate job with its system of minor league
| teams. Pretty much every other country in the world manages
| to have professional sports leagues without having
| universities be their feeder teams.
|
| Even in your scenario, there's nothing stopping the aspiring
| golfer from attending Stanford part-time while they try to
| make it in pro-golf. Or applying and deferring admission for
| a couple of years. Frankly, they'd do better academically if
| they didn't have golf distracting them.
| yupper32 wrote:
| NBA? Sure. NFL? Yeah. They can probably fund and figure out
| the logistics for an operation like this.
|
| What about all the other sports? At the moment, we've
| figured out a way to elevate less lucrative sports like
| track & field or swimming into a potential profession
| without making young people take massive risks by skipping
| higher education.
| jldugger wrote:
| _NBA? Sure. NFL? Yeah. They can probably fund and figure
| out the logistics for an operation like this. What about
| all the other sports?_
|
| I'm really struggling to come up with a reason this is
| the academy's problem to solve.
| yupper32 wrote:
| Its society's problem to solve. We shouldn't do away with
| college sports without a replacement avenue for people to
| get into high level sports.
|
| Most people who want to do away with college sports seem
| okay with killing their professional leagues. We
| shouldn't be okay with that.
| eastWestMath wrote:
| Just because someone doesn't go to college at 18 doesn't
| mean they're "skipping" higher education. Spending a few
| years making 30k a year to play basketball would be
| awesome - my father had teammates in college who put off
| grad/med school to go play in a shitty European leagues
| or random minor leagues around North America, it never
| sounded like they regretted it.
|
| If they followed Hockey's example, where playing a year
| in the MJ gives you a year of tuition, it could work out
| great for young players.
| Ekaros wrote:
| If they can't make money to pay athletes, maybe they do
| not deserve to survive. We don't subsidise aspiring
| people in most other fields, why should sports be any
| different.
| yupper32 wrote:
| > We don't subsidise aspiring people in most other fields
|
| Yes we do. It's called merit based scholarships.
| triceratops wrote:
| How do countries that are "not the US" produce swimmers
| or track and field athletes?
| twiddling wrote:
| often through direct state sponsorship
| cortesoft wrote:
| Why is skipping higher education to try to play
| professionally a massive risk? If it doesn't work out,
| you can go to college after. Lots of people get jobs
| right after high school, then go back to school later.
| Not only that, but those people are usually going to jobs
| with a lot less upside than being a professional athlete.
| danvasquez29 wrote:
| baseball arguably does a terrible job at solving this.
|
| the minor league system pays significantly less than
| poverty wages. incentivizing kids to go that route instead
| of getting an education is terrible.
|
| which is why so many dont, and go to college on
| scholarships anyway, which leads us right back where we
| started.
|
| the right analogy to make IMO is ice hockey, especially the
| canadian model. There, you have well funded and
| professional-like "minor leagues" (called juniors close to
| same thing). you can't get paid but in the tier 1 leagues
| you have very little if not zero personal living expenses,
| it's like being on a full-ride at a big college program
| with room and board included. In canada, it's seen as the
| route potential NHLers take instead of continuing with
| school. you're not allowed to be paid, but there's a rule
| in place that for every year you play in that league you're
| owed one full year of college paid for. If you age out of
| the league and dont make it as a pro, you at least get 2-4
| years of free college to go get the rest of your life
| together as compensation.
|
| The US Junior system has some of those attributes but is
| more geared towards getting kids into NCAA scholarships.
| The thing there though, IMO, is that the money involve in
| that sport is right about at that sweet spot where i'd
| argue a full ride to school like notre dame or penn state
| is about right for the level of compensation owed.
|
| all opinions above are my own, in the context of a former
| D1 ice hockey athlete who thinks the football players
| should probably be paid.
| Ekaros wrote:
| In capitalist system, if the sport league doesn't make
| money should the workers be paid anything more than
| minimum wage?
| twiddling wrote:
| The Canadian Major Juniors are a great model. Of course,
| there also players who try out at MJ camps with their
| names obscured as not to jeopardize their NCAA
| eligibility.
|
| Baseball's history of labor abuse ( read up on the
| history of free agency ) is why the Minors are a terrible
| mechanism.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Given that college sports mostly loose money for schools[1],
| why do we think its OK to ask students and (for public
| colleges) taxpayers to subsidize professional sports' feeder
| system?
|
| I went to a large state school (SUNY Buffalo) where the
| administration wanted to go division 1 when I was there in
| the early 90s. Transitioning to division 1 came along with a
| large (to us) mandatory athletic fee. The student body voted
| against this multiple times, and then the administration
| simply stopped asking and went division 1 anyway (and imposed
| the fee).
|
| [1]:https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/do-college-sports-make-
| mon...
| yupper32 wrote:
| So in-state tuition at UB would be around $4850 instead of
| $5200 without sports. Out-of-state would be around $13,750
| vs $14,100.
|
| Would life be significantly better without sports at UB, if
| students were given back a few hundred dollars? Would
| alumni donations go down without the occasional March
| Madness appearance? Or Bulls games?
|
| When people make this argument, they make it seem like
| schools would all of a sudden be able to afford a massively
| better educational experience. That's just not the case.
| ecshafer wrote:
| It sounds like life would be significantly better without
| sports. 5200 vs 4850 is $350. That is the difference of a
| month of rent in Buffalo for your room, snow tires on
| your car that year or not, text books or not.
| Ekaros wrote:
| So around 24 hours of 15$/h minimum wage labour so that
| someone else can do something they could be doing on
| their own dime... That sounds very excessive burden to be
| placed on students. For something they gain very little
| from...
| drewg123 wrote:
| Speaking from experience, the administration's disregard
| for the wishes of the student body pissed me off enough
| that I didn't donate anything to them for 15 years or so
| after graduation (until William Greiner, the president
| who presided over this had retired). Others in my peer
| group felt the same way, and I imagine did the same
| thing.
|
| In terms of the impact of the fee: When I went to school,
| the tuition was $675/semester, and the fee was over $100
| (I don't recall if that was per semester or per year). So
| that was at least a 7% increase in cost. Its sad the
| tuition has gone up so much.
| RNCTech wrote:
| I think the NCAA should create an investment pool backed by
| individual students' contributions to revenue. So, you're a star
| at Alabama. Based on your play time, jersey sales, you get a
| share of Alabama's share of total revenue into the pool. It grows
| and after 5 years you are eligible to withdraw that share. It
| could be used as a buffer in case of career ending injuries or
| liquidated for profit with incentives to perhaps see out your
| college career.
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