Clay Travis, Boobs and CNN

Shrug. Don’t know what to tell you. There is a threshold for everything. NIL is doable. Making them employees is an enormous pain in the ass and it likely limits the movement of the athletes.

Anthony Davis had to force the Pelicans to trade him, and Pels got stuff in return. Kyler Murray’s not just gonna leave A&M because he wants to for another school, pocket his salary and fuck over the team he originally signed with in the future. That’s not how contracts work.

Again: the approach to all this, vis a vis the NCAA, has been childish “magic is real and it is always good!” Nonsense.

 

The contortions people have to go to try to defend the system are kind of mesmerizing. I mean, the NCAA already limits the movement of the players. You think that's a significant argument against changing the system?

Suggesting we can't pay the labor force in a billion-dollar industry because it would be "an enormous pain in the ass"... really?

 

They already have big compliance departments that could shift what their duties are. I'm not even saying they have to form an NCAA-wide union. NIL is fine. You don't need an NCAA-wide union to allow them to make money.

As for whether cutting half the FBS programs being "the equation we want to defend." I think that a) your point is paternalistic and b) assuming you're right, that doesn't mean big programs wouldn't still do it.

As for the Pac-12, they weren't going to play anyway. What'd the schools get? A lot of lost revenue they clearly don't want to be without.

You say this is all nonsense and magical thinking. What would you say the NCAA clinging to amateurism and pretending to have their best interests at heart and pretending there's no way to let people who generate revenue see any of it is?

Back to my original point, the players don't owe it to you, me or anyone else to play football during a pandemic.

 

Who said they can't? They can. They can do whatever they want.

I'm telling you there comes a point for some operations. And that point, at least for some schools, probably arrives the day you gotta start paying them as employees. That'd mean Title IX implications, a whole new wing of the athletic department dedicated to payroll and taxes and other shit, a complete overhaul of the NCAA, etc.

The, uh, "thought leaders" of the pay the players movement are by and large talking heads and columnists who long have and will continue to live outside the basic, functional reality of what it takes to do this stuff. They operate in broad, sweeping moral terms, as does a lot of this board.

It's similar in kind though not in degree to the personal rights nuts on the mask thing. The Michigan Chapter of Minutemen Freedom Fatsos, or whatever, doesn't appreciate the pain in the ass contact-tracing and quarantining becomes or the ripple effects of it. They don't do the work, so they don't understand the insistence behind the work or the science.

You can dismantle the NCAA and put something else in its place, make Jay Bilas the sports czar, or whatever, but when you break one system, you own the next, and it's you taking the heat, instead of dishing it out.

 

If the student-athletes become employees, does Title IX even apply? I have no idea. Would love to know.

 

OK, you didn't say they can't -- you said they would walk away from the billion dollar industry rather than set up an office to handle player payments. Semantic difference, but whatever.

You should read up on the actual Pac 12 players movement, because your characterizations of it are inaccurate and largely demeaning.

Here's the bottom line for me:

The current system uses the unpaid labor of (largely) young Black men to earn billions of dollars for white men in suits and their institutions. I don't care if rectifying that would require a new office within the athletic department. If they can decide cafeteria workers are worthy of the ungodly hassle of a payroll department, they can make that same sacrifice for the men whose labor is paying for the athletic department.

 

I take your point, but of course the people getting all the revenue don’t want to share it. They’ll even go so far as to gamble on losing it for a year and hope things go back to the same as before next year rather than acquiesce to a long term sharing deal.

these are also the same people who fought a playoff for so long because it would ruin bowls. They now have a playoff, more bowls and more money.

That the current system is the one that exists doesn’t mean a different one would automatically fail. The current system is already bad. A different one could be worse. It could also be much better.

 

Of course it does.

 

Your bottom line is a moral one. That’s fine. I’m not disputing your emotional, socio-philosophical impulse in any of this. It comes from a good place.

I am telling you what I think would happen. Moral applications - all the way up to the Big Man Himself - come with wins and losses.

It’s like with the college video games. The guy sued, made his point, and the video game went away. The exploitation, such as it was, went away. So did the game. Any Player who took any joy out of playing a game that had him in it, lost that joy, but gained some satisfaction that there wasn’t a video game maker out their profiting off of his digital image.

 

And I don't believe the colleges walk away from millions and millions and millions of dollars simply because they'd have to exploit the players less. I think they'd come around to realize they can pay the strength and conditioning coach a little less and maybe skip the imported tile in the massive athletic center lounge. It's absolutely doable. There is no good reason why they can't.

If I'm wrong and they decide it's too much hassle to stop exploiting the players and they'd rather walk away from the money and let the whole thing collapse, I'm fine with that too. Some of those steel and glass castles at my alma mater could be repurposed to serve actual students instead of football coaches.

 

Cross-posting in the politics thread as well.

 

We are in the dumbest timeline. I'm pretty sure this ends with us being in the "mirror universe" of "Star Trek" in which Spock has a goatee.