(05-03-2022, 07:39 AM)lex24 Wrote: (05-02-2022, 08:59 PM)Goose Wrote: I think the Supreme Court is relying in the idea that if the NCAA needs some regulatory powers that it does not now have, Congress is perfectly free to give them such powers. Unless and until that happens, the NCAA and/or the conferences cannot restrain trade. Period. Any regulation that prevents an athlete from being paid to do something cannot come from the NCAA. It can come from an individual school, because they can control their own admission standards. The schools cannot collude together and agree on such regulations however.
The issue is characterization. If there is a case that determine they are employees, then College sports is doomed. Unless Congress steps in. And even then , their would be lawsuits challenging the Constitutionality of their legislation.
It's been interesting to read in some of the later posts how human nature is going to be changed utterly by NIL. Kids who do not throw games when they're being paid nothing will somehow be motivated to throw them if they receive NIL money. Huh??
Boosters will take over the game. Never mind that boosters were far more a factor in the 50's and 60's before big pro money showed up, and the likes of Bud Wilkinson, Darryl Royal, Frank Broyles and the like seemed to have no trouble keeping control of their programs.
Back in the day, when the money college sports generated was relatively small and professional careers in the schoolboy sports (football and basketball) a gleam in the eye, it might have made some sense to worry about payment to players. But now the money at the college level has become a torrent, every quality athlete dreams of playing professionally, and the landscape has changed entirely. The only way to approach college sports is with the icy logic of academics and extracurricular activities.
1. If a student is enrolled in school and meets academic requirements, he or she is eligible to play varsity sports. Period. The NCAA should restrict itself almost entirely to academic integrity. The travesty that happened at North Carolina is indicative of how totally values have been turned around by the obsession with amateurism. The academic failure should be central to the NCAA mission and North Carolina should have been sanctioned accordingly.
2. Schools cannot play players. They are schools and these are students.
3. Schools own the revenues from bowl games, the NCAA tournament, and so on. These were developed by the academies, and fans follow them out of loyalty to the institution, not particular players.
4. Schools do NOT own the celebrity that comes with athletic success, and they should not be in the business of regulating how students exploit it. They also do not own the professional potential of an athlete and should have no right to prohibit or forbid his or her contracting with anyone who is interested in it - and I particularly mean to include professional franchises, the NFL, NBA, MLB, and so on. A set-up where the student athlete develops maturity and athletic skills simultaneously over his college years seems ideal to me. No one would have any problem if we were discussing a musician, actress, another type of performing artist, or even a budding entrepreneur. Why is an athlete any different?
There's an obsession with boosters here. i'm not so sure. The intensity of Kentucky's BBN has to be experienced to be believed. Oscar Tshiebwe does not need cynical booster money to do well. Every kid in Kentucky is going to want a jersey with his name on it, and it is going to go on for some years after he's used up eligibility (they still sell Issel jerseys). The Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, Clemson and other football fan bases are even larger. You don't have to conjure up cynical boosters to note the income potential.
More than that, if you've been following enforcement for the last few years, the big NCAA issue has not been boosters, but illicit agents, particularly in AAU basketball. Those big booster payments, to the extent they exist, are usually investments in the athletic future. You think anyone is going to pay serious money for an unproven kid who may be gone in a year? Not likely.
You can't prohibit an athlete from marketing his celebrity and . . . you shouldn't. It belongs to him or her, and they have every right to profit from it. What is unprincipled and unsettling is that the notion that the school has any right or interest in this. Why? On what possible basis? Some phantom notion of athletic purity? Gimme a break.
The only solution is to go the other way and drop all the artificial nonsense. Back to the numbers.
5. Schools have no interest in a student athlete's personal finances, other than the prohibition against payment by the schools themselves. If an Elway enrolls with a contract in hand from the Broncos or Rams, so be it. It's no different than a family trust. I've read all sorts of parade-of-horribles arguments about interference by the pros, but that's nonsense. The world being like it is, and the coaching fraternity being pretty large, everyone is going to be interested in the kid ending up in an academic and athletic situation that makes the best sense for him. (There is also the reality that at the moment athletes do get input from other sources than their coaches. But they get it from the worst possible sources - friends, admirers, overly ambitions dads, etc. The professional evaluators, coaches and scouts, who might give them cold-blooded objective advice, are barred from the process.)
In short, you take the schools completely out of the business of supervising the student's economic life. It doesn't do it with any other enrollees, and it shouldn't do it with athletes.
The cat's out of the bag with the student owning the rights to his celebrity, which is actually the way the system always should have been. Limitations are outrageous. That being the case, the only way forward is to discard all the monstrous, cumbersome apparatus altogether. Stick to transcripts and academic performance. Let the water seek its own level.