(01-17-2021 09:33 AM)ken d Wrote: (01-16-2021 09:13 PM)JRsec Wrote: (01-16-2021 08:48 PM)ken d Wrote: (01-16-2021 03:23 PM)JRsec Wrote: It's not the SEC. It's the league that wants to pay NIL and play in an upper tier. There is no conference name on this which is why I tagged the divisions like I did.
That makes it sound as if paying NIL or not would be a choice. It seems to me that if NIL is legislated, or decreed by the Supreme Court, it's going to apply to everybody. I don't see the PTB creating a safe haven where schools could opt out of paying NIL. I suppose individual schools could choose not to recruit athletes who might at some point in their career become good enough to attract the attention of advertisers. But if they guess wrong and a kid blossoms and attracts someone who wants to pay them for their NIL, they're probably stuck with him.
I don't see NIL driving any realignment.
You don't delve too deeply do you? Pure amateurism avoids all of it. However that means no scholarships either. Students walk on and play voluntarily. There are some who are talking about returning to such and therein lies the chasm of crossed purposes between schools looking to reinforce academics at the expense of athletics and those by-stepping academics for the sake of athletics. NIL is going to widen that chasm significantly. There may be some fine academic state schools who choose a more Ivy like approach to athletics. But if you are going to give scholarships then you would be correct in that there will be no way to avoid it.
And Ken there will be those who simply choose not to offer expensive athletics because of it, and football will be such a sport. It is the largest team roster of any college sport, requires a heavy investment in equipment and a significant investment in venue. Space is premium at some small city locked campuses. Money is tight for some privates, not so much for others. There will be attrition and with attrition there will be realignment.
There are a lot of programs right now trying to figure out how much overhead NIL will create for their programs and then trying to determine if they can afford it.
Look at the G5. Virtually every G5 subsidizes athletics to the tune of 25% or higher. How many state run G5's can afford to go to their citizens for more taxes to support athletic program overhead at schools where the athletics can't support themselves. Now really you are going to tell me NIL won't bring about more realignment?
It's going to be far more revolutionary than most here realize and it is coming precisely at the worst time, when so many programs are running millions in the red from COVID 19 impacts on their budgets.
So there will be essentially 3 things that happen out of this. There will be some schools who commit wholly to academics and return to pure amateurism and will do so at the expense of having their name out there in athletics and will rely upon their academic reputation to fill their enrollment.
There will be the vast majority of the P5 who keep football and make the necessary staff changes to get ready for helping athletes with their NIL rights and will adjust budgets accordingly because athletics is too much a part of their profile to abandon or significantly reshape or reduce.
There will be many programs at the G5 and smaller level who will abandon football and concentrate resources on basketball and baseball and their counterparts for Title IX. After all many of these schools are already facing state shortfalls for funding and tax payers will be quite irate if their taxes are raised to pay for directional U's football shortcomings.
It's a big deal Ken.
Actually, JR, I do delve pretty deeply into issues like this. And I've certainly considered all the alternatives you bring up.
What I can't find in my research is any proposed legislation that would require schools to pay athletes cash for the use of their NIL. The only legislative proposals I've seen just prohibit the schools or the NCAA from prohibiting others to make such payments. That would appear to mean that NIL itself would have no impact on schools' budgets.
That's not to say that NIL won't impact competitiveness. Apparel companies and other advertisers may very well pay an athlete more if he plays for a high profile school like Alabama than if he plays for Mississippi State. And some local advertisers (that is to say, boosters) might be more willing to shell out for athletes who play for their favorite team. These are issues still being debated.
What would likely have a major impact on schools' budgets would be legislation declaring athletes to be employees of their school with scholarships being a part of their compensation. Such legislation would likely address questions such as minimum wage laws and other benefits like health care costs. I'm not sure if any such legislation is in the pipeline yet.
That would be a big deal.
NIL will cost schools. There will need to be personnel that help the athletes understand and manage their NIL and to keep their NIL stipulations separate from those of the schools especially with regard to how they sponsor competing lines from what the school sponsors and this added staffing by its nature will likely be legal. So it will add overhead.
But logically Ken the issues is what it always is with such changes, the proverbial Camel's nose under the tent. The next logical deduction will be some kind of pay for play. This too has already been raised as a legal topic concerning student athletes. Once the right to NIL is granted and the legal status of the student athlete changes then what logically follows is compensation. This has been raised many times as the right of the athletes to earn a % of the Gross Total Revenue of the schools, particularly by the players who sought to form a union in the PAC 12.
Considering that current political climate change in Washington it is inevitable that this matter is going to be addressed, and likely favorably.
So I look at NIL as a step that reclassifies the rights of the student athlete and compensation under whatever label is chosen will follow logically behind it. From my vantage point this isn't an either or, but rather an if "a" then "b"
The next decade will leave the sport scene on college campuses entirely altered and I believe fragmented according to what the institutions value as their priorities, or simply can afford.
What we are really facing with the alteration of amateurism is this dichotomy. Institutions are fighting like mad to protect the intellectual property of their instructors and graduate students work from corporate grant entanglements. So intellectual fruits are important to the individuals within the institution as patents are valuable to both the institution and those generating them. Legally speaking why is the intellectual fruit of a say a gifted graduated student his/hers to benefit from professionally in the form of not only acknowledgements but sometimes profitably with patents, but the physical gifts of an athlete are not his/hers to benefit from beyond recognition? It is clearly a double standard that will not stand legal scrutiny other than the fact that heretofore one party had the legal team to resist and the other party usually had no means individually to challenge and that the legal team worked for the intellectual property rights but not the athletic ones. It certainly could be argued that athletes had a beneficial arrangement, at least when schools earned 2 to 3 million a year in sports broadcasting revenue and that the reward of the education was a legitimate benefit. By large degree, though the premise has not changed, it can easily be argued that the risk reward of athletics has become massively disproportional to that of the schools. In the past the school offered the reward of a degree opportunity and room and board while the school earned enough to pay the required staff and offer the space and instruction and food. That equation today is massively disproportional to the one that existed 70 years ago, or for that matter even 40 years ago. The athlete risks no more today than they did 70 years ago physically but the reward for the institution is staggering by comparison to what it was 70 years ago or even 40. This inequity has led to the NIL ruling. Amateurism individually speaking is dead. It is only a matter now of when as to the collective nature of the whole business. And as a fiscal conservative and a Christian I find no reason that the arrangement we have at present should remain. Does scripture not say that one should not muzzle an ox which treading out the grain? The meaning in antiquity was quite clear. You cannot decline to allow the one working to benefit from the work. And as I am opposed to slavery in any form, exchanging what is frequently an education which carries little merit in the workplace in exchange for Athletic Departments that earn in excess of 150 million in Gross Revenue is not anywhere near an equitable exchange. 4 years of indentured servitude for a diploma in a field that is not in demand and where the pinnacle for the vast majority of the minority earning an actual degree is a coaching position at a high school acquired at the risk of injuries that last a lifetime, is not going to be found to be equitable or even a reasonable exchange. Therefore change is coming in this area as well.
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Thamel: Seismic change is coming
