Northwestern football players seek to join union

You keep saying that it has to be one or the other. Why can't it be both? Treat them as employees and let them have a full scholarship. If other employees want a full scholarship, they can unionize and negotiate their own.

 

I can't bet you, because there's no way to really verify who's right. But I would be very surprised if that's the case, especially if we looked at it on a cash-flow basis (even if we added in depreciation). The largest "expense" is, I would assume, the scholarship -- which costs virtually nothing.

 

The Mizzou women's basketball coach makes $300,000 a year, coaching a team that plays home games before 2,000 fans per game and travels by air about a dozen times a year.

The Mizzou baseball coach earns $238,000 a year, coaching a team that plays home games before fewer than 1,000 fans per game and takes at least eight out-of-state trips per year. (I don't know how many are air travel, my guess is half or more, but the hotel stays are 3-4 nights as well.)

Add in assistant coaches, trainers, tutors, SIDs, cost of travel, keeping the lights on, etc. and I think you'd have a difficult time reaching the break-even point in any of those sports. This is particularly true if you assign each of sport a percentage of the salaries that fall under "athletic department" instead of any one sport's budget.

But I don't know why the cost of a scholarship would be zero, unless you just say every student on campus individually costs the school zero, which would negate the need for tuition.

 

The marginal cost of any individual student is zero. True, that idea doesn't work very long if you extend it across the entirety of the student body. But Mizzou has an enrollment of close to 35,000. Proportionally speaking, the athletes don't exist.

How many athletic scholarships, in total, are awarded? It's what, 85 for football? Another 12 to 15 for men's or women's basketball? I just did a quick-and-dirty Wikipedia thing and found that, for a school awarding the maximum in every D1 sport, the total number of schollies possible is 451. That's not a rounding error (vis-a-vis enrollment), but it's close. And a significant (I don't know how much) proportion of the Mizzou athletics donor fund is oriented toward those schollies.

Again, there's no way to get a really clear picture of these expenditures. But many, many, many of these losses are on paper only.

 

You quoted the policy yourself. Employees get up to $10k a year as a discount off their tuition. If they want to be employees, they can enjoy $10k off their tuition, and pay for their own room and board.

Why should it be both? What's unfair about treating them like any other employee, if that's how they want to be viewed? Employees get paid. Students get scholarships.

There are two big problems for the "pay the players" movement, particularly where Northwestern is concerned: (a) 99% of those athletes are there for the education, and screwing up the system for the benefit of the poor 1% forced to get an education so they can try to be pro athletes really doesn't seem like a solution; and (b) the market value of a typical Northwestern athlete is roughly dick. You could take their entire roster and replace them with walk-ons, and the difference would likely be 0-8 in conference instead of 1-7. What's the value over replacement for a second string lineman at a 1-7 Big Ten team?

 

You'd have to shutter entire sociology departments without intercollegiate sports!!!!

OK, leave the scholarship value out of it.

I'd guess the cost to operate a non-revenue sport would be at least $500,000 per year for any sport and as much as $1.5 million to $2 million, possibly even more. (I believe the coaches are all state employees with benefit packages.) And the revenue doesn't come close to matching the costs. I would not be surprised if there is paperwork somewhere that suggests it does, because the school could split up the value of a large sponsorship however it likes and could do the same for athletic department salaries, but in reality all those sponsors are paying for football and men's basketball and the rest of the programs are just the cost of doing business.

ETA: regarding total scholarships, my favorite quick-and-easy way of explaining the wacky world of the NCAA:

MAXIMUM ALLOWABLE SCHOLARSHIPS, MEN'S BASKETBALL: 13
MAXIMUM ALLOWABLE SCHOLARSHIPS, WOMEN'S SWIMMING: 14

 

Because for the regular employees, their primary compensation is their salary, plus their health benefits, vacation, etc. The $10K scholarship is a secondary compensation.

For the athlete-employees, their scholarship would be the primary compensation, with whatever stipend or additional endorsement money that they can get. For Northwestern stars, it'd be pretty slim. For Ohio State stars, they'd be rolling in money.

 

Ok, treat them like anybody else that is there on scholarship. Let the make money outside the University.

 

Quoting both to make a point: being realistic here, what you're really advocating is ending intercollegiate sports as we know it. And I mean, anything resembling what it is now.

If players get a financial free-for-all outside the university, it's about two years before a points-shaving gambling scandal blows up the whole thing.

And if the new system means Ohio State players are "rolling in money" but Northwestern players aren't worth the scholarship they're getting, the system collapses. You end up with Texas, Ohio State, Oregon, Alabama, USC and a few other schools competing and the others left with intramural squads.

The Big Ten is imbalanced enough as it is. How long does it last when the 3rd place team is losing 63-0 to Ohio State every year?

I'm an Oregon grad. The system would work out nicely for the Ducks -- we'd play USC for the conference title every single year, with the winner playing Ohio State in the Rose Bowl every single year. And I'd rather see college sports end than see that.

And again: we supposedly need to do this because it's so unfair that Johnny Manziel has to spend a couple of years in college before going to the NFL. To be fair to Johnny, we have to completely fuck up the system for nearly every single other guy on his team.

 

I think you're really underestimating the earning power some of these guys have. Look up the case of Albert Means -- a recruit who never amounted to anything yet was worth someone laying out $150,000 to secure his services in the 1990s, long before the real TV money arrived.

 

Means was a high school all-American and top-rated recruit, and the money was from Alabama. He's the kind of guy who would cash in.

 

But think about the difference in money.

Alabama considers every recruit vital to the core mission. AJ McCarron might get something well into six figures. A guy who is, say, the 15th recruit could reasonably expect something like four-year guaranteed scholarship plus $100,000 -- especially because if he is Alabama's 15th recruit, he is top-five to a lot of Alabama's conference opponents.

Hell, it could even end up strengthening the college game by requiring reimbursement if the guy leaves early.