Spencer Hall's "Broke"

People who have are always waiting to be people who have not?

I'm not sure that's really a thing other than by a select few who are insecure about everything.

 

Simple. Offer them the same scholarships, but allow them to make money off their name, and allow unlimited gifts by boosters.

A booster, as long as they don't represent the school, doesn't have to give a female athlete a car just because he gave one to the quarterback.

That would mean the athletes get the market rate, just like the coaches get. As far as 30 teams being great while the rest aren't, what makes you think that isn't happening now?

 

Simple!

 

It's the simplest thing
there isn't much to it
all you've gotta do
is doodle-e-do it
I like the rest
but the part
I like best goes
doodle-e
doodle-e-do
DOOT DOOT!

 

Well, besides the selfishness and greed of the NCAA, coaches and administrators, what is so hard about it?

 

This strikes me as a little naive. Shit, when they "give" the houses to people on Extreme Makeover, at some point, they gotta take over taxes/payments or sell it.

The last person who personally bankrolled a college program that I'm aware of was DuPont, and he was insane. I just don't think it'd work like this.

More likely, the schools would get a handful of "sponsors" and the players would get a cut of that.

 

Not giving one to the female athlete would make him a bigot, though ...

 

The system is fucked up, but so is the notion that these athletes aren't getting anything for their labor. Tell that to someone who graduates with $120,000 in student debt and is forced to live far worse a lifestyle than a college football until they move out of an entry level job. The underlying premise to all of these polemics is that a college degree is worthless to THESE KINDS OF KIDS, which is a kind of fucked up way to think in itself when you actually peel back the layers. The problem is that, in a pay-for-play system, the vast majority of college football players would not command a market rate high enough to pay their way through school. As Alma noted, the first step would be for all the BCS schools to agree to trim rosters from 85 to at least 65, given all the money it would save. Gradually, schools would drop out of D-I as they realized that it simply did not make sense to pay more than the cost of a scholarship for more than X number of players. Does it make sense for Vanderbilt to pay the third-string linebacker more than a scholarship? See ya. Where's Duke's threshold at? Stanford? Like Alma said, eventually you'd have a league of 30-40 schools who could make a legit business out of it. Everybody else would continue to play with all the kids whose market rate is equal to or less than the cost of attendance, which is most of them. Even in The League, I'd be surprised if anybody bid more than the cost of a scholarship for the 53rd man on the roster, since so much of the money would flow to the top 22 players on each team.

I really think everybody drastically overestimates the market value of all college football players outside of the starters in the top 30-40 programs.

 

I think you're right with this. On the margin, very, very few players could command the kind of compensation people have in their heads when they look at the total dollars in college football.

 

Well, there is no value for most of those players, either, in terms of gifts and endorsements. Offensive tackle Fatty McGee isn't going to sell a single car, his chunky face on a billboard.

The other crazy thing is some of kids who are 5-stars ain't worth a shit. They're just dudes who made the Rivals and Nike camp circuits and worked out nice in tight shorts.

 

I think this is dead-on. The system actually works very well for the vast majority of student athletes, but people want to blow it up because they think Johnny Football was oppressed.

 

Advocating to pay college athletes is the hip thing to be for in sportswriting circles.