@arthur-dent I don’t get it. Why are we supposed to inherently believe the Dean and Professor are good at what they do and should be paid as much? If they are so good, they have the option to apply their skills in the private sector and make bank.
Sports is great because if a coach like DeVries comes along and they suck at their job, in a few years you can fire them. AD’s and coaches are constantly cycled through, not the same in academia.
Using your logic, why can't we pay players that way? If they suck, they don't get renewed. So it is one year, to my knowledge, no college athlete is getting $10 million buyouts because they suck.
One would assume the highest-paid professor doesn't suck. And that notwithstanding, since it is double the highest-paid, it accounts for suckage.
If colleges cannot afford players, why can they afford to pay the most expensive people on any university, state, or federal payroll? Why can they afford these high buyouts? How much has IU spent in buyouts the last 10 years or so?
Why do we ONLY want to limit athletes? If universities are losing money, can't overpaying coaches be part of it. Louisville is mentioned in the article. They are paying Brohm $6million/year plus the $1 million buyout from Purdue. They paid $4.8 to fire Chris Mack, then whatever they paid to hire Kelsey.
Colleges are limited to $23 million for all athletes. Yes, they are getting more from collectives. But that isn't coming out of the university. If Louisville is losing so much money I doubt it is because of that $23 million. Other bad decisions and overpayments matter too.
I actually don't want this, but if we are going to completely blame the athlete and slam the brakes on them, why don't we look at the real fat cats? $15.5 million to fire Tom Allen would be 2/3rds of a year in direct athlete payments.
@arthur-dent I don’t completely blame the athlete, I don’t know where you got that. I think we should drop the veil and make them sign time bound contracts.
I don’t even love this argument as I make it, because money is fungible, but the truth is coach contracts and NIL is not funded through tuition fees. Professors are.
You could get rid of college athletics entirely and it’s not like there would be more money to spread around to professors.
@carramrod I am in favor of making athletes employees and signing a collective bargaining agreement. A lot of this can be gained through that. The courts are already treating them as employees. Look at the Chambliss case, one of his main arguments is the NCAA would deprive him of his income.
Failing that, contracts with players. If pretty much everyone had 2 year contracts with harsh buyouts, from both sides, then we would see a lot less movement.
I don't like the collectives being around still, the courts really opened a can of worms with that. Why can't a group in Cincy raise money to give to recruit Bengal players in free agency? Not honest endorsement deals, simply come here, we add your name to our list and we will pay you $5 million. That would destroy the salary cap.
The purpose of higher education is to make the person even more able. The individual is correctly free to choose their own path at any given point.
Why are there any controls on which football team a football player chooses to play on at the collegiate level? If the team is willing to let him play, so be it. If he refuses to sign a contract, that shouldn’t preclude him and the team from agreeing to let him play. If Mark Cuban is willing to pay him $1 billion to play at IU, why shouldn’t he?
The purpose of higher education is to make the person even more able. The individual is correctly free to choose their own path at any given point.
Why are there any controls on which football team a football player chooses to play on at the collegiate level? If the team is willing to let him play, so be it. If he refuses to sign a contract, that shouldn’t preclude him and the team from agreeing to let him play. If Mark Cuban is willing to pay him $1 billion to play at IU, why shouldn’t he?
I am in favor of that with one proviso. Students apply to college and are accepted without any consideration of athletic ability. They then hold open tryouts. Yes, very much like a club sport. If they are there as STUDENT athlete, enforce the student.
Why connect student with athlete? Isn’t that also arbitrary? We had a frisbee team and actually played against other college teams. No funding. Players came and went. But when playing a game, we played by the rules. in other words, the only actual rules, governing the entire sport were ingame rules.
OK I think I see your point. The basic idea is to be on a college team one has to be affiliated with the college as a student. And you’re saying to be so affiliated one has to not just qualify as a student but also behave as a student in some fashion.
That’s an interesting topic really. Should one be required to be affiliated with the college as a student to be on the college team? Traditionally that has been the case.
Speaking of clubs, I don’t know for certain, but I believe some clubs formed by students include in some fashion participants from outside the university unaffiliated with the university. So if a sports team is considered a club, could student members of that team invite unaffiliated people from the community to join the team?
Couldn't it be argued that current college athletes are barely, if at all, affiliated with the university they represent, anyway?OK I think I see your point. The basic idea is to be on a college team one has to be affiliated with the college as a student. And you’re saying to be so affiliated one has to not just qualify as a student but also behave as a student in some fashion.
That’s an interesting topic really. Should one be required to be affiliated with the college as a student to be on the college team? Traditionally that has been the case.
Speaking of clubs, I don’t know for certain, but I believe some clubs formed by students include in some fashion participants from outside the university unaffiliated with the university. So if a sports team is considered a club, could student members of that team invite unaffiliated people from the community to join the team?
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@hhlurker you mentioned the purpose of universities, hasn't the purpose of universities always been to teach students?
Now if we drop University from the equation and go to European club sports, that is fine. Maybe better. But we could forget anything associated with IU as the European model typically is city or region based. So the main club team for Indiana would be Indianapolis and Bloomington would be a feeder program is how I think it would happen.
So converting it to a university club sport is fine. If you play on the IU ultimate or bowling teams, are you not required to be a student? Or go to European and eliminate school involvement, which would also zap high schools as I think in Europe one plays club and not school at any level.
I do not know if universities have ever said, "hey, come take part in our programs but you don't ever need to take a class."
It does look like IU requires one to be a "part of IU" to play club sports.
https://recsports.indiana.edu/activites/club-sports.html
Couldn't it be argued that current college athletes are barely, if at all, affiliated with the university they represent, anyway?
A few weeks back, Wilkerson told Don Fischer he'd never been "on campus." No, I am not kidding.
I have long recommended to this board (and the last WC) the book, The Last Amateurs, by John Feinstein. It followed the Patriot League men's conference basketball teams for a season in 1999-2000. The purpose was to contrast those players to the major college basketball players.Couldn't it be argued that current college athletes are barely, if at all, affiliated with the university they represent, anyway?
A few weeks back, Wilkerson told Don Fischer he'd never been "on campus." No, I am not kidding.
Of course, it was not worthy of the book club.
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I do not get the problem. University NIL is capped. IU isn't paying directly all this money, just $23 million over all dports. If private entities pay, which is happening, why would IU care? If that is too much, make athletes employees and sign a collective bargaining agreement.
I think the SEC and B10 would like to pay more. I could easily see SEC leaving the NCAA in football, creating a far larger cap, and have their own season and championship. I don't know the B10 could pull it off.
I think it's becoming quite clear that the SEC doesn't have as much money as people think when everyone is on a even play field.
Exactly, the uni is there to educate students. Well-rounded education traditionally includes some phys ed. This clearly evolved to big-time sports programs with big bucks.
The problem is, somehow the NCAA came along and turned high-achieving student athletes into indentured cash cows.
The NCAA was never needed by any university to fulfill its mandate toward students. There was never any logic to preventing students from monetizing their academic or athletic skills, an essential life tool one should learn before venturing out into the world. Where did the bogus trap of “amateur athlete” even come from?!
NIL was an outgrowth of student athletes legally ending their arbitrary indentured servitude and freeing themselves to monetize.
Here’s my thought. NIL was also a concession by the NCAA granted in order to retain their (unnecessary and arbitrary) power. Universities still don’t need the NCAA to fulfill their mandate.
Universities could unilaterally step away from the NCAA. The SEC, B1G and so on could continue on in their current fashion, eliminating any constraints from the NCAA they don’t like and simply compete. NCAA gone without a thought. Gone without even abolishing it. Just not-ised.
Meanwhile students and student athletes have the same or more freedom to control their own educational choices and destiny.
In a sense I think you’re asking, Should football players not be allowed to be students because they’re not interested in physics, for example? Maybe a more appropriate re-orientation would be to consider football a trade, along the lines of all the various trades taught in trade schools. In that sense the football team would be an applied trade in which the university is doing a far better job of turning out graduates from that trade than students from the English department and other departments which have virtually no application built into the program.
I don’t really know from personal experience, but it seems like universities need to rethink their curriculum for students who are more focused on their athletic future. Trade schools have traditionally had specialized curriculum. A lot of people just aren’t built to learn from books. They learn better from practice. I don’t see why universities can’t relax their arbitrary curriculum ideas, forcing students who simply aren’t book types to learn subjects that really have no application to their futures.
Still trying to answer your question, I think most student athletes very much consider themselves university students. The vast amounts of NIL money, after all, are fed into the universities because people love their alma mater.
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