I'm not disgusted by any means, I just simply see zero leverage on the players' side and I don't think it's been thought out as well as it should have. I commend them for really pushing the conversation forward, though.
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Pac 12 players threaten opt-out of 2020 CFB season unless health and safety and other demands are met
- Thread starter Jens1893
- Start date
I still believe CFB remains the right answer for all parties by a long shot. It is far and away better than any minor league system would be for the kids, but it is just fundamentally flawed right now. I think it is easily fixable by instituting some kind of system equivalent to a salary cap. If every AD was limited in the amount of $$ resources that they could allocated to each sport, and use excess money to invest in the school and the long term benefit to the student athletes, I think it would fix a lot of problems and create a lot more parity (and interest) in the sport.
The problems with a FB minor league has many layers, but it would not work nearly as well as MLB or NBA minor leagues.
The problems with a FB minor league has many layers, but it would not work nearly as well as MLB or NBA minor leagues.
The NBA has to an extent done this. Most players do their required one year in college but for the most part the young stars aren't playing the college game. More frequently now even the guys who are solid NBA players/prospects are going into the draft knowing that they might spend some time in the G-league.
Despite virtually all the guys who would be upperclassmen stars being gone NCAA basketball is doing fine .
Take the upper percentage of players (maybe the top 150-250 prospects each year) and put them into a developmental league run by the NFL that pays players and lets them be full time athletes.
Just like with college basketball this won't make much of a dent in the popularity of college football. The fans will still support their teams, buy tickets, tailgate, have a great time.
We support our Buffs, other PAC12 teams have their supporters. It's a lot of fun to see a Viska on the field but we cheer just as loudly when it is a guy who isn't going to make the pros scoring against a DB who isn't going to get drafted.
And for those guys, even with the focus involved in playing big time college football, the educational experience is a significant value and worth their time invested.
A thought I had: The NFL benefits massively from the popularity of college football in this country. College fans tend to follow their favorites throughout their pro careers, and the star players are already developed brands when they reach the league. All of this translates to more eyes on NFL games.
They should absolutely be paying into the CFB kitty.
They should absolutely be paying into the CFB kitty.
Why wouldn't a minor league work as well for football? Literally, the only issue I see is the NFL not wanting any part of it because it has been free all along. Maybe long term injury issues? However, the P5 Schools can put a massive amount of pressure on the nfl to either fund something, or lose it completely.
The NFL is not going to fund anything they do not have complete control over.
It's purely a numbers game/problem. In order for it to work effectively, you'd have to be able to more accurately project a kids ability coming out of high school, and that isn't going to ever happen IMO because people physically and mentally mature so differently from one another.
What % of CFB players get a shot in the NFL? Maybe 1-2%. There are 120 some D1 CFB programs with ~100 kids on each team, and the NFL takes ~225 draft picks every year (from many different levels, schools and backgrounds). CFB teams need that many kids on each team because frankly, a lot of kids are not physically mature enough, or don't have the skill level at 18 to play against a 22 yo senior. Or they just aren't what you thought they were when you recruited them, and they wash out. To get anywhere close to the quality of player out of a minor league system that you get out of CFB as a whole, you would need to invest heavily in scouting, and put a TON of kids on each team so as to allow for, time, maturity and development to separate the "cream". To me, this means the minor league would need to dilute the financial incentives to each player in order to allow for it to make financial sense. Maybe pay each kid $20-$30k a year to play football? Because you are going to have WAY more misses then hits, and money paid to a "miss" is a throwaway.
Who is going to buy tickets to go watch these kids? What happens to the kids that wash out? How does anyone with financial sense invest in such a model? Honest question....I just don't see it working.
College football does all of this, and gives an opportunity for a college education to the 98-99% that don't make it. The problem with college football is they don't take care of the product well enough due to the archaic NCAA rules, and there is far too much disparity between the haves and the have nots. But there is still plenty of NFL talent that comes from "lesser" recruits and from smaller schools. You have to have the volume in the feeder system to keep the NFL product quality. The way it works now is best for everyone, except for that the people without a seat at the table (the players) are taken advantage of so that everyone in a position of power can reap a disproportionate amount of the benefits (Coaches, AD's, Conferences, NFL, etc...).
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I laughed hard at this reading like a ransom letter
No CU rep, man, we are last at everything.
247 must be singing the praises of our AD because none of our players felt so mistreated that they needed to join this movement. Recruiting is going to turn up sharply as a result of CU clearly being exposed as the best institution in the land to play for.
All good points. The only way it could work is if the NFL got involved as the money just wouldn't work for someone to take on the financial side of this. All professional leagues have minor leagues, but it is funded by the league itself, so they can take the financial hit.
A minor league system would work if the nfl wants it to work. I think this would solve the issue at the college level, at least somewhat (there would still be problems like there always will be). The evaluating system doesn't change as you still have kids that will always be willing to play. There are plenty of kids who are borderline P5 players who play G5, so on and so forth.
I generally agree with you, but I don't see the NFL doing that because they already know that they need to scour through every program in the land to find NFL talent.
I don't know what % of the NFL is currently represented by dudes that played in the Power 5, but I would make a wild ass guess that it's around 60-70%. So if the NFL wanted to do a minor league that is constituted with kids that would have gone to P5 schools otherwise so as to put a good product on the field that draws fans, that might make sense for the minor league. But there is still a large number of talent that needs to be sourced from elsewhere...which leads me back to fixing CFB as being best answer.
The NFL most certainly doesn't want to do that, nor would they. Why pay for something when you don't have to.
The P5 Schools would have to find a way to force this issue on them. I don't know how they would do that but that's my estimation. You then separate those who just want to be paid to play football. I just don't see how it works to pay players at the collegiate level. It's such a massive undertaking and I really don't think the players would benefit much from it (at least monetarily).
Agreed. I don't think paying players in college is the answer either. Honestly, I think the whole sport is improved substantially if players are given a few more benefits and all of the adults are forced to take a pay cut. The pay cut is probably not possible either, but this is becoming more and more of a problem as players see coaches making millions and jumping from job to job to make even more. If they could somehow figure out a way to slot salaries for coaches, that by itself would help college football enormously. The vast majority of P5 coaches aren't going anywhere else if they are limited to making $1.5 million a year. Go one step further and limit the arms race in facilities, and CFB quickly becomes a beloved sport by most people in America because the competitive landscape changes for the better over night.
College football is a free farm system for the NFL. Furthermore, it underpins the popularity of the sport. The NFL likes the current arrangement just the way it is. Anything that upsets the current system is bad news to the owners.
The universities accept the system because most of the benefits accrue to the school. If that arrangement gets worse for the institutions, because the players demand more, all of them will conduct a cost benefit analysis. Some will exit. Some already believe the cost benefit isn’t there, prior to any new demands.
The players have the least equitable deal, but this is particularly true for the obvious NFL talents that subsidize lesser teammates and more so, the non revenue sports. The partial scholarship athletes have a pretty good deal. Laviska Shenault, for example, had a pretty bad deal last year.
The coaches (and their agents) are ripping everyone off and have a ridiculously good deal in this system. (Personally, I’d love for the U.S. Congress to pass a law that in order to receive federal funds, a university’s highest paid employee cannot be compensated more than 8x the average salary of its tenured track faculty).
Bonus Angle: Europeans will continue to wonder why minor league sports franchises are run by universities in the United States.
The universities accept the system because most of the benefits accrue to the school. If that arrangement gets worse for the institutions, because the players demand more, all of them will conduct a cost benefit analysis. Some will exit. Some already believe the cost benefit isn’t there, prior to any new demands.
The players have the least equitable deal, but this is particularly true for the obvious NFL talents that subsidize lesser teammates and more so, the non revenue sports. The partial scholarship athletes have a pretty good deal. Laviska Shenault, for example, had a pretty bad deal last year.
The coaches (and their agents) are ripping everyone off and have a ridiculously good deal in this system. (Personally, I’d love for the U.S. Congress to pass a law that in order to receive federal funds, a university’s highest paid employee cannot be compensated more than 8x the average salary of its tenured track faculty).
Bonus Angle: Europeans will continue to wonder why minor league sports franchises are run by universities in the United States.
class01
Well-Known Member
Coronavirus: COVID Deaths in U.S. by Age, Race
While coronavirus is obviously concerning and a very real threat to some people (namely, the elderly and immunocompromised), these data also show that the risk for the rest of the population is quite low.
I think people are looking at this completely backwards. When far less than 1% of kids who play college football actually go on to make a career out of it, how does that equate to a farm system? I don't think college football should be destroyed for the benefit of a few hundred kids, to the great detriment of the thousands of others who are reaping the benefits of a free college education. Even the few that make it into the NFL have an average career length of 3.3 years. Sorry, but 3.3 years in the NFL is not going to sustain anybody for the rest of their life, so they had better have something to fall back on. I know 18-22 y/o kids don't think this way, which is exactly why such a minute minority of players should not be the main drivers of changing college football.
Even if you divorce college football from the NFL farm team concept, the issue persists: Does fairness warrant players receiving a larger portion of the billions of dollars made by the business of college football?
I see arguments on both sides, some good, some bad. However, if the guiding principle of college athletics is that it exists for the betterment of the athletes, I don't see how anyone can begrudge those athletes asking for more--especially when it has to do with their health.
I think you have to ask where is the money currently being spent, and what are you going to take money from to give more to the football players. The majority of football revenue not spent directly in support of football goes to supporting either other sports or facilities. So do we get rid of all sports that cannot support themselves? Do we reallocate money spent for facilities to pay football players? Cut coaches pay. The bottom line is that all the money brought in from football is not going to line a few peoples pockets, it is being invested into the athletics programs of the universities. Maybe the only intercollegiate sports should become football and basketball and everything else is a club or intramural sport. That's not going to make a lot of people happy, but it would be fairer to those that play football.
Well 1) all of the revenue doesn’t come from them 2) players are already compensated, is that enough? I don’t know but the amount of money that athletic departments put Into each student athlete is quite a bit 3) these are college sports and schools will always try to keep them that way
somebody
Well-Known Member
Elizabeth M. Whelan (/ˈhwiːlən/; December 4, 1943 – September 11, 2014) was an American epidemiologist best known promoting science that was favorable to industry and for challenging government regulations of consumer products, food, and pharmaceuticals industries that arose from what she said was "junk science." In 1978, she founded the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) to provide a formal foundation for her work.View attachment 38517
View attachment 38518
View attachment 38519
Coronavirus: COVID Deaths in U.S. by Age, Race
While coronavirus is obviously concerning and a very real threat to some people (namely, the elderly and immunocompromised), these data also show that the risk for the rest of the population is quite low.www.acsh.org
somebody
Well-Known Member
All Lives Matter with a tear in your eye is kind of a new wrinkle.
I wish I didn't have to pay my employees, I can see the appeal.
View attachment 38517
View attachment 38518
View attachment 38519
Coronavirus: COVID Deaths in U.S. by Age, Race
While coronavirus is obviously concerning and a very real threat to some people (namely, the elderly and immunocompromised), these data also show that the risk for the rest of the population is quite low.
I try to stay clear of anything political (and somehow a pandemic has become political) but can we please stop reducing this thing to the binary options of live or die. We do not know what the long term effects of this are but there is evidence that suggests it might not be like getting the flu where you go right back to normal.
It is causing structural changes in people's hearts:
SARS (which is our closest recent data point) was causing problems for survivors years later.
I don't disagree, and I'm sorting through my thoughts about whether football and men's basketball players should receive "payment" beyond scholarships and a stipend. The reality is that most college ADs do not make money and couldn't afford to pay any athletes. Also, though, Midnight Mel has a $30+ million contract, so there's obviously room to shift some money to athletes.
Another issue: The varsity blues investigation has set the market for entrance fees for USC and UCLA at about $200,000. Should that come off the top for athletes who would not have been accepted based on their academic profiles?
Okay well CU paid almost 20 million in 2019 for scholarships, travel expenses, sports equipment, uniforms, supplies, medical expenses/insurance, and food so this seems like a dumb argument.
jizzrag85
Well-Known Member
Stipend, scholarship, all the freebies and allowing them to make money on their likenesses i think is totally reasonable. Even a small stipend of say $1000 a month will cost the university roughly 1.5 million a year. $1000 a month when you have no bills? You could buy yourself a reasonable car, manage a payment and still have $600 left over for whatever you want. Along with the healthcare, that’s not even a negotiable, that should have already been happening.
Coaches salaries are out of control. We also look at the amounts athletic departments are getting from TV contracts and we forget it’s just an arms race. They need this money to survive so they can build fancy facilities and try and compete.
Coaching and facility spending is ridiculous there is no doubt about that but donors, students and the university also put money into the athletic department so keep it afloat from bleeding cash so this whole concept that athletic departments are just flush with cash and hoarding it from everyone is crazy.