I want to put some context into the discussion on college football players and the benefits they receive. I’ll engage in some back of the napkin math, so please feel free to correct me if I’m off, but I’m really trying to illustrate a larger point than fine tune the math.
First, let’s look at what the NFL collective bargaining agreement provided. According to Wikipedia, the current agreement calls for the players salaries to represent 48.8% of the NFL’s collective revenue.
Now, let’s look at the Big Ten. They just signed a $7 billion media deal for 7 years. We all know this is driven by football, but let’s say Fox and others also get some men and women basketball content too, as the other revenue sports.
So, what do the players get? They get a scholarship for tuition books and fees, room and board, and health insurance. The value on that varies greatly, but let’s use a value of $50,000 per year for out of state tuition, $40,000 for room and board, and $10,000 for insurance for a total of $100,000 per year per scholarship athlete. Walk ons and non revenue sport athletes largely pay their own way, but you do have some partial scholarships and so forth.
Using 85 football, 10 mens basketball, and 10 womens basketball, there are 105 scholarship per schools per year x 16 schools x the $100,000 figure as the scholarship and benefits value. Doing the math, that’s $168,000,000 across the whole Big Ten in benefit to the players. The Big Ten is collecting $1 Billion per year, so that is a 16.8% payout in benefits to the college players, well below the NFL getting close to 50%. I am also not including any secondary revenue from tickets sales, which would likely drive the percentage payout down further.
On top of that, there are these considerations:
>NFL gets cash, not benefits like college players
>NFL gets post retirement benefits after three seasons of play
>The college student must perform on a primary job (football) and then work a 2nd job (school) to realize the benefits
>Colleges routinely funnel players into lesser academic programs to meet goals of job #1 reducing the true benefit of the education
>Colleges and the NFL have created a system where there is no viable alternate to pursue the job of football player without using their unfair system. No minor league and a two year wait after high school to be NFL eligible
>If you look at a an average Big Ten salary pool for head coach and assistants, I imagine that it will be close to $10 million per team, or $160 million per year across the whole conference. Thus, the coaches are receiving almost the same comp as the players collectively at a far lower head count
Anyway, I know this is fuzzy math, but I hope it illustrates my point of how unfair this system has become. I could also go into a whole narrative about why I think the players meet the definition of an employee, but I try not to bore people. And while I’m not a lawyer, I think I usually have sound judgment on these types of issues.