My thought is that while the issues in college sports are real, this Roundtable is theater, and bad theater at that. When was the last time a roundtable this size, with this many talking heads, with this many interests, some of which are not being represented, e.g., student athletes, and some members with questionable credentials, e.g., why is Boris Epsthyen there???, made any substantive changes?
As far as Tillman Fertitta’s participation, why waste Fertitta’s time? He may not be able to get a word in edge-wise, with these talk-a-aholics. Tillman is better getting his point across, one-on-one, with the Chairman.
There was a story in the paper about this meeting. The president is unhappy so many schools are having to spend so much there is danger of bankrupting some athletic depts. He says he intends to write an executive order making congress address the issue of helping pay the players…the SCORE act would provide NCAA with anti trust exemption, and now there is enough support in congress for it to have a chance to pass…talk of pooling TV rights too, and Cody Campbell of Texas Tech is at these meetings and says doing so could raise another 6 billion, which could keep FB and BB solvent for decades. He asked the president to be part of a smaller working group to help the president draft the executive order…
Not technically correct. The ruling does not prohibit the prevention of pay for play. Everyone just ran with pay for play until someone stops them.
The justices even said that could be challenged by the NCAA (or more likely specific schools) to keep in the future. One of the secondary justices specifically commented that their ruling was not to allow pay for play.
A lot of lawsuits can still be applied to control external spending. Just a lot of lawsuits and money. I think the NCAA just want the govt to step in a create rules so they can avoid the lawsuits.
Students just cannot be prevented from a legit outside job or earning legit money for their likeness and name.
Don’t know what the committee is planning, but if they are looking at how to give players more money, that will not help the situation, just make it worse and more costly overall for the sport.
Need to block the unrestricted transfers.
Why? one may ask. For the sake of education. While all students can transfer, those that do transfer more have a lower rate of graduation thus hurting their academic success. A school needs to help student athletes succeed and limiting transfers for academic reasons does just that.
Limiting the transfer rule would be limiting a student athlete’s access and movement, which would only be acceptable through collective bargaining, which college sports does not have and the NCAA is against.
It was pretty clear throughout the case, including from the NCAA’s own arguments, that a win for Alston (the eventual result) would functionally enable everything short of schools signing checks to players from their bank account, and in Kavanaugh’s concurrence, he hinted that if that was at issue, he’d probably have allowed direct pay, too. The NCAA has basically gotten laughed out of court in almost every case regarding restrictions on compensation since.
Maybe the Supreme Court will buck that trend and determine that an executive order is enough to override their interpretation of antitrust law, but there’s not a lot of reason to believe that’ll be the case.
I think most fans would find this hard to disagree with, but it’s also extremely difficult to enforce. I don’t know how you stop schools and boosters and agents and coaches from negotiating new contracts behind closed doors. That’s true in other leagues, too, but it matters a lot more in NCAA sports because they’re the only ones who, through recruiting, have to work on roster management for next season before the current season is over. You’d basically have to entirely reinvent the recruiting process. Which kind of brings us back to the first part of your post:
The NCAA needs to be able to enforce player movement rules. As things currently stand, every player is a recruit every year. That makes losing or gaining a coach way more impactful to a school’s trajectory. Cignetti probably doesn’t win a National Title at Indiana without a bunch of guys that he recruited to JMU first. Since coaches don’t usually get hired at lateral-move jobs, that means that even if you make the argument that the coach you hire to replace the one you just lost can do the same thing, at best, you’re replacing a team that was good enough to get a coach hired at a better job with players from a team that was ostensibly worse than yours.
To the extent that the NCAA’s job is to provide a compelling sports product, they need a structure that, all else equal, rewards high-performing schools that overperform their budget. Instead, the current structure punishes that, and ensures that high-budget teams won’t underperform for too long and low-budget teams won’t continue to overperform. It enforces a tier system. It’s almost exactly the same thing MLB is going through with the Dodgers, but dramatically worse.
In a sentence, I don’t think a version of the sport where Texas is always one good offseason from a National Title and Houston is always one bad offseason from extended irrelevance is good.
“A federal district court in California agreed in part: It ruled that the NCAA could restrict benefits that are unrelated to education (such as cash salaries),”
Saying that it allows pay for play from outside the education system is false. That said, that does not mean future cases may not allow it. I don’t remember which, but one of the justices actually wrote that it was not intended to allow pay for play. Also one said that there are many more issues that were not covered by this case that would require separate filings.
Maybe the Supreme Court didn’t intend to allow the most thinly-veiled pay-for-play imaginable and they’ll backtrack, but the NCAA, the schools, the players, and the lower courts have all pretty consistently treated it like it does.
This would be a huge win for everyone, but especially the Big 12 and ACC. The biggest brands in the SEC and Big Ten would still make more money than they do now, but some Big 12 and ACC schools could close the gap entirely on a large chunk of those programs.
Here’s how the money distribution tiers were described by Smash Sports in a 2024 Yahoo article:
- Tier 1: the top 16 schools earn per-school revenue projections from $130 million in Year 4, escalating to $250 million in Year 12 (double the SEC and Big Ten’s current distribution rate). Tier 2: the next 22 schools earn revenue of $60-$110 million (similar to the SEC and Big Ten current rates).
I don’t see how this could be a net negative for Houston.
The SCS proposal would be great for the Big 12, if it held up in court. But it won’t.
My argument in the post that you’re replying to is that the status quo is disastrous.
(I’m also, in the abstract, a fan of players receiving money for play. But I think there needs to be a middle ground between “a scholarship that doesn’t even lead to a degree most of the time is enough compensation” and “players should just play for the team that’s willing to pay them the most that particular second and if it means changing sidelines between plays so be it because anything less than that is slavery.”)
Like I said at the beginning “Not technically correct.”
How people are interpreting it is a different statement. Still room for change in the next few years. There is no backtracking, they reviewed what specifically was put before them and left the other areas open for future claims in court. NCAA has treated it as pay for play simply because they have not set rules yet about it - notice the agreement for the overview of NIL by Deloitte - that will likely end up with court cases that will go up the chain to set something more permanent. I think most are waiting to see if the govt does anything.
As you day status quo is disastrous so I would expect some challenge or change still to come.
92010Coogs
(I took a lie detector test...No I did not)
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What is truly unreal in all of this is that we are talking mostly about public schools.
Any proposed system going forward is now bordering a franchise system.
By doing so other questions come up:
Should tax payers keep footing the bill for public universities?
How much of public tax money has funded these universities sports programs and continue to do so? By all account 80 to 90 % public universities sports programs operate in the red. Very few make a profit.
Shouldn’t there be a salary cap and operation cap cost?
Again, we are talking about public universities not a private entity. Which is a different “world” Private companies that fail have to close down. Why should it be any different with these systems? Either system is basically a breakaway from the DIV I FBS system. Again, we are talking mostly about public universities. A San Diego State University should not be penalized because they are not a p4. Why should g5’s continue with their sports programs if they know they can’t compete to win a natty? We have seen in the last few years that the sec is getting way too many entries into March Madness. They are getting these at the detriment of other programs. For both football and basketball, sports that generates money the g5’s are being pushed aside. We are basically telling them “How dare you that you want to compete with us” Remember friends we were in a g5 just a few years ago. I support a $20M’s number/limit that can be distributed within the sports department but again where is that $20M’s coming from? Is it us tax payers funding that $20M’s or donors? NIL should not be capped. Both should be regulated through a contract with the IRS making sure players are paying taxes. In no way shape or form should the g5’s be excluded from the cfp or any natty format going forward.
this is the equivalent of billionaires and celebrities asking how to fix a system they messed up when they could quickly fix with better distribution of wealth
I think a lot of what gets overlooked (or just not said out loud) in this discussion historically, is that a lot of fans have seen College Sports as more akin to International sports than Professional Club sports. We’ve expected that college commitments, like national team ones, were relatively permanent. Luka Doncic is Slovenian, and he’s not going to wear the Stars and Stripes. It doesn’t matter how much we could theoretically pay him, or how much better he would make our team, it cannot and will not happen. A breakout season isn’t going to lead to breathless media coverage about what team Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is going to represent in the 2028 Olympics, because it’s set in stone that he is Canadian, in the same exact way that a barista or plumber or software engineer in Toronto who roots for him would be.
In the same way, you and I were Houston Cougars for exactly the same reason that Case Keenum and Andre Ware and Hakeem Olajuwon were. The Transfer Portal throws basically every ounce of that right out the window, though. It makes the relationship between the player and the team (and thereby the fans) strictly transactional, in the vein of professional sports. That sucks. If I wanted to watch a team of guys who will never give my favorite team another thought the second someone else can pay them one red cent more, I’d watch the guys at 610 and Fannin instead of Scott and Holman.
So it’s not good for the sport to allow college athletes to enter the transfer portal because it’s transactional, but it was always good for the sport when coaches (both HC and position coaches) to leave for other opportunities after HS athletes already committed?