[OutsiderFan]

I am against pretty much all of that.  However, one thing I didn’t get is why you necessarily have to have a draft.  Leagues implement drafts to try to get competitive balance, but there is nothing intrinsic about professional sports that requires a draft. European soccer leagues, for example, don’t draft players.

BC

Yes, but they also implement drafts as a way to control salaries. If you don't have a draft, players can be paid, and NIL is still a thing, then the programs competing for talent will have no constraints on what can be spent and you'll have financial Armageddon.

The players will think they want to get paid, and that's fine, but there are always trade-offs. No way are schools going to pay players without a labor contract that allows them to cut underperforming ones, and without some controls over compensation. And competitive balance will be needed to keep people tuned in to the NIL League, which a draft does (at least in theory). You can't just have a handful of teams dominating and expect to have a lot of national interest when uncertainly of outcome is the primary driver of sports consumption for the avg. fan. Just figuring out how much the programs get and how much they have to pay their licensing school, and then the percentage to the players is very difficult. Even when that is figured out, will there be salary caps? How will programs decide how much to pay individual players? Just figuring out these things is a nightmare unto itself. It will take a long and arduous negotiation process to hammer out all those issues, then there are things like practice time, medical benefits for injured players, etc. Do some kids take scholarships to their NIL school? Is this factored into compensation amounts? Say goodbye to the transfer portal. That certainly won't exist anymore. Can players be traded from one team to another?  

None of this is going to be easy as the money Big Media is now paying makes it seem like it is going to be. There are dozens of agents and lawyers looking at that $7B Big Ten contract like vultures, and are scheming ways to get at it, I have no doubt. I don't honestly know if the whole thing won't collapse on the weight of its own hubris to be honest. I've always been an advocate of paying players, but within an NCAA model that didn't factor in NIL collectives and forming a College Football NIL pro league apart from NCAA. It's all a pretty big turn off to me.

[OutsiderFan]

I am against pretty much all of that.  However, one thing I didn’t get is why you necessarily have to have a draft.  Leagues implement drafts to try to get competitive balance, but there is nothing intrinsic about professional sports that requires a draft. European soccer leagues, for example, don’t draft players.

BC

Yes, but they also implement drafts as a way to control salaries. If you don't have a draft, players can be paid, and NIL is still a thing, then the programs competing for talent will have no constraints on what can be spent and you'll have financial Armageddon.

The players will think they want to get paid, and that's fine, but there are always trade-offs. No way are schools going to pay players without a labor contract that allows them to cut underperforming ones, and without some controls over compensation. And competitive balance will be needed to keep people tuned in to the NIL League, which a draft does (at least in theory). You can't just have a handful of teams dominating and expect to have a lot of national interest when uncertainly of outcome is the primary driver of sports consumption for the avg. fan. Just figuring out how much the programs get and how much they have to pay their licensing school, and then the percentage to the players is very difficult. Even when that is figured out, will there be salary caps? How will programs decide how much to pay individual players? Just figuring out these things is a nightmare unto itself. It will take a long and arduous negotiation process to hammer out all those issues, then there are things like practice time, medical benefits for injured players, etc. Do some kids take scholarships to their NIL school? Is this factored into compensation amounts? Say goodbye to the transfer portal. That certainly won't exist anymore. Can players be traded from one team to another?  

None of this is going to be easy as the money Big Media is now paying makes it seem like it is going to be. There are dozens of agents and lawyers looking at that $7B Big Ten contract like vultures, and are scheming ways to get at it, I have no doubt. I don't honestly know if the whole thing won't collapse on the weight of its own hubris to be honest. I've always been an advocate of paying players, but within an NCAA model that didn't factor in NIL collectives and forming a College Football NIL pro league apart from NCAA. It's all a pretty big turn off to me.