(08-29-2023 08:23 PM)bryanw1995 Wrote: [ -> ] (08-29-2023 06:46 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote: [ -> ]It’s no longer a debate. Either the colleges will figure out how to compensate players in an acceptable manner to all parties or the court system will impose a system for them just like what happened with NIL.
Still a very different situation. NIL was an illegal restraint of trade, and the money involved became very large relatively recently. O'bannon v NCAA wasn't decided until 2015. Offering kids football scholarships instead of actual Cash money, a practice that's been accepted for 100 years? That MIGHT change, but it's far more likely to change b/c Sankey or Petitti wants it to change, if they decide that's the way they want to go.
The most logical solution would be for the NFL to establish a farm system, with some kids going straight to NFL AAA and some going to College, similar to how baseball handles things. However, the NFL doesn't need to deal with all the hassles associated with that when FBS schools are happy to do the heavy lifting for them, and their boosters are happy to pay the kids while they're at it, too.
If anything, I think that NIL makes it LESS likely that kids become actual paid employees at schools.
I think NIL has placated a portion of the issue.
To your point, the NFL isn’t interested in a AAA league (as it has already gone through the expensive demise of the World League of American Football/NFL Europe, which even initially had a franchise in Columbus playing in Ohio Stadium and another in Birmingham). College football has a unique synergy of having these semi-pro players attached to a school brand that people are passionate about as about to random minor league franchise where there’s no attachment, so the current system completely works for the NFL.
At the end of the day, though, the definition of an employee is about whether a party *treats* a person like an employee. It’s not about revenue. You can have someone that brings in $20 million in a one-shot deal being deemed a non-employee and the straight expense custodial crew are all deemed employees. To me, the way Division I athletes pretty much all have the attributes of an employee: their time is controlled by a coach, they have negative repercussions if they don’t play on the team (e.g. lose their scholarship, which is distinct from other extracurricular activities on campus), it’s in excess of 20 hours per week during the season in a way that would even mandate certain benefits as full-time employees, etc. If/when there’s a court ruling, it’s really hard for me to see how the athletes would be deemed to be anything other than employees.
What I’d propose: all Division I athletes (whether revenue or non-revenue) get paid a base amount of at least minimum wage. It doesn’t have to be a huge amount, but the fact that the direct compensation is currently ZERO is what’s causing the legal issue. If schools want to pay more than that, then that’s their prerogative, but the equal base pay for all athletes is important for Title VII and/or Title IX purposes.
If you want to pay football and basketball players more, then that’s where a revenue sharing model is applied on top of that base pay. For example, a percentage of all revenue generated from football goes into a pool to be split among all of the football players and a similar pool would be for basketball players. Frankly, you could do this for every sport in order to keep it contractually equal and to account for how some other sports can generate revenue (such as hockey in the Big Ten or a lot of baseball teams in the SEC), but the practical effect would be that football and basketball players would receive more total compensation compared to other athletes in the vast majority of cases.
Frankly, that’s how a normal functional workplace works. Everyone needs to get paid as an employee whether they’re a revenue generator or a pure cost center. (We all are revenue or non-revenue employees, too. I was a revenue employee at a law firm and now a non-revenue employee as in-house counsel.) That’s the law. However, there are generally incentives provided to revenue generators that can increase their total compensation.
NIL then serves as the differentiator between individual athletes and their respective market values. I don’t think any college wants to get into whether they want to directly pay the starting QB more than a backup offensive lineman. That’s just a mess even beyond the binary question of whether players should be paid. To the extent that they need to pay players directly, they’d rather pay them all in a straightforward fashion in the way that I described. NIL, though, is what lets the starting QB make more money off of endorsements, jersey sales, etc.
When you put all of that together, you get a system that starts to resemble what looks like normal free market compensation for the top revenue generators while also dealing with the higher legal risks that colleges and specifically athletic departments face (such as much higher risks for Title VII and Title IX claims since there are inherently specific teams and roster spots dedicated to each sex).
