Clay Travis, Boobs and CNN

A stipend that doesn't cover the full cost of room & board while the conference and school make millions of dollars off their labor. And if they get hurt badly enough to not be able to play anymore, in many cases that all goes away. It's not an equitable system.

 

Listen, we're paying coaches millions of dollars and we have an $8.8 billion TV contract for just our basketball tournament, but the whole system is going to crumble if we give athletes a single cent more than room and board!

 

The room and board covers the cost of room and board.

I get what you're saying. I do. And the NCAA tried to fight it, frankly, in the 1980s, the skyrocketing costs. It tried.

NIL probably resolves most of your concerns. You start getting into revenue sharing and unions, and college sports is less likely to exist on anything but D3 level in most places.

 

Look. There's the childish, moralistic, "if only sportswriters could run the whole world stuff," and there's pragmatic reality. NIL is a pain in the ass, but it can be done. You start screwing around with athletes being "employees" and involving unions, and schools will just get out. They will.

One of the first rules I ever learned - from men who know - about contract negotiation is: The one thing a union can't make a business do is stay in business. And that point does exist for a lot universities. They will walk.

 

I agree that paying athletes as employees is an existential threat. I therefore wonder how much they cut and have football and basketball revenue and Title IX compliance. They’d have to amend rules to cut the minimum number of sports necessary for D-I membership. Could an athletics department with football, volleyball, men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s basketball and one spring sport for each gender meet legal requirements? I don’t know. But I’ll bet someone has started asking.

 

So in your pragmatic reality, schools that derive large incomes both directly from big time sports and indirectly from having students go there specifically for big time sports are going to give all that up rather than share some of it (which as you acknowledge they don't even have to do with NIL)?

 

Canceling the football season is reportedly costing the Big Ten upwards of one billion dollars. One billion dollars for one lost season.

Do not tell me the schools are going to just walk if they are told they have to give their largely Black workforce a cut of that billion dollars.

(To be clear: I think walking away from big-time college sports would be a great thing for these universities. I would like to see education become a priority. It is not going to happen.)

 

Yes. Sure. The "large income" mostly comes from football, after all.

Some schools will never say it out loud but they're closer than you'd think. Athletic departments have become increasingly harder to run, liability is higher than ever, players transfer all the time and that's a pain, you're one asshole criminal kid or staff member from a scandal or a lawsuit, at least one of your coaches on staff will be investigated for abusing players, etc, etc. It's a giant hassle. And if you have to make these athletes employees with benefits and workman's comp and pension plans and all that shit? Forget it. It's over. A lot of schools just won't do it.

 

There are 120 FBS schools. Would Tulsa or Utah State do it? No. Would Alabama, Ohio State and the other big programs who run things and put shit like water slides in the football facility because they have so much money do it? Of course they would.

 

There comes a point with anything where it's not worth the irritation, the hassle, the structure you need in place just to run the damn thing, etc. It just isn't.

What'd the Pac-12 United movement got those players? Not a single concession, not a season, nothing. The Pac-12 probably wasn't going to play anyway, but, once that campaign came out, it sure as hell wasn't going to happen. Too much hassle. Do college kids understand that? Of course not. They're swept in whatever message they thought they were sending with their demands.

I happen to be in favor of the minimum wage, personally, but there's an hourly rate out there where, once it becomes the minimum, you're essentially telling small businesses not to open, or, if they do open, to be family businesses only.

 

I don't think it's that simple. The ecology works for a reason. You can't cut all the Tulsas and Utah States and presume, because it's a sportswriter's fantasy, that all's square with the 65 power teams.

Still, let's say that happened. So the loss of 55-65 teams with scholarships and educational opportunities and job opportunities that extend way beyond those four years is worth it to make sure a handful of super elite maximize their personal earnings? That's the equation we want to defend?

 

1) The argument that a billion dollar industry isn't worth the "irritation" of paying the labor is not an argument I would be comfortable making.

2) The Pac-12 United movement had a lot of parts, with health concerns being a major component. Did you think all of those issues would be wrapped up and resolved in one month? Do you think the players should have no voice in their own health and safety?