Northwestern football players seek to join union

A nice indoor practice facility for the football team is usually built as an inducement for recruits to choose your school over another school. If you get good players, you stand a better chance of winning games. A D-1 football program that wins a lot of games, rakes in a lot of cash. Those facilities are investments. Plus, they are usually funded by wealthy alums. If Joe Blow wants to build a nice basketball arena, what school is going to tell him they don't want his money unless some of it can go to fund women's field hockey.

A woman's program that makes no money, has nothing to do with the football program, which is profitable. Same as your notion that you could take the money that football earns and pay every student at the university. Why should a school do that? The couple who live next door to me make a shit load of money. We could take their earnings and distribute it to everyone in the building, and they'd still be OK. Does that seem reasonable?

 

What do you mean by "co-mingling" revenues. Also, why does that suggest to you that the money that football players account for should be given to students that have nothing to do with the football program?

Typically if an athletic program is profitable, football and basketball make money and the other sports are losers. They get subsidized by money from football or basketball or from elsewhere. Is that what you mean by "co-mingling of revenues" and if it is, why is that a reason to take what the football program earns and hand out checks to everyone enrolled at the school?

 

Which sports team (and more specifically, who were the players) were directly responsible for those profits?

 

It's not a matter of what you think is the right move.

If I am a football player at Alabama, I know the leverage I have. Sure, the Alabama name drives revenue and profits, but without talented football players that win a ton of games, that name is only worth so much.

Under the current system, I may make a calculated decision to allow Alabama to make a ton of money off my talent and work, because the NFL is in cahoots with the NCAA and won't allow me in without doing a free apprenticeship.

It doesn't mean I am happy about that set up. It's just the calculated decision I have made given the choices I have to work with -- currently. If I can change those choices, though, knowing the leverage I have. ... I know that my talent and work on the football field are worth a lot of money -- someone is already making a ton of money from what I do -- and I am going to want to see some of that money -- as much of it as my leverage allows me to negotiate for myself.

That is what is in play here.

 

As per my post above. ... if I am a football player for a football program earning millions of dollars off my talent and work, I could give a rats ass what the "NCAA says." I know what I am worth, and I have no reason to dilute my worth if given the chance at a fair negotiation. I am not there to benefit someone else who doesn't have the same negotiating leverage I have (for example, a water polo player whose sport needs to be subsidized in order to exist).