Will COVID-19 be the needle that finally bursts the sports bubble?

The problem isn’t the players being paid nothing while generating billions of dollars for schools. The problem isn’t sanctimonious coaches on multimillion dollar contracts preaching the virtues of amateurism and the myth of student-athlete. It’s the political and worldview of the media.

 

pandemic disrupts afterschool activities

 

Players were getting paid under the table going back to George Gipp. Red Grange was criticized for going pro and asked his coach why it was OK for him to get paid to coach, but not OK for himself to get paid to play.

The NCAA started using the “student-athlete” term in the 1950s to avoid paying worker’s compensation to a widow whose husband died after suffering injuries in a football game.

It goes back a lot longer than 20 years, and it’s about a lot more than just money.

 

This is just fantasy chatter.

First, they are paid something - a stipend.

Second, they’re compensated beyond that, of course. I don’t know what you want to call that compensation for education and room and board and meals. It’s something.

Third, the majority of student-athletes don’t generate a dime of profit. Basketball does, but mostly because roster sizes are small and the evil NCAA has created and manages a basketball tournament so wildly successful that generates hundreds of millions each year. The sport that generates the money is football and, yes, you’re right, the compensation there seems out of whack.

Fourth, athletes from all over the world, including that beacon of enlightenment, Europe, are thrilled to be a part of this rampant exploitation.

Please commence with the Taylor Branch links, Bilas protestations, etc.

 

And are not allowed to profit from their own god damn name.

 

There are trade offs to it.

Somewhere along the way, we decided the most important thing about life is maximizing our financial worth.

 

Bullshit. A kid should not give up the rights to his own name for a scholarship. There is no reason they can’t have both.

 

You blame any anti-NCAA press on some political agenda of the media. To me, pointing out that players don’t get paid anything near what they generate when coaches, administrators and schools all line their pockets is just factual. But to address your points

1) an athlete getting a couple of thousand dollars is better than nothing but it does not come close to representing what they are generating for the university.

2) I argue that most basketball and virtually all football players don’t live the life of a student and that the housing, food and cost of tuition are the means to an end of having the players be part of the program. Read for example about the Clemson football experience and tell me that they are anything approaching normal students. Heck, Joe Burrow didn't even attend in person classes at LSU — at the big time schools for the majority of players the classroom experience is largely worthless.

3) the fact that the basketball and football programs pay for other programs just means to me that that these players are even more underpaid. It’s not their job to pay for a swimming program.

4) for the most part, those foreign athletes who come here are in non-revenue generating sports. They typically are not good enough to be professionals in their sports at home and are either using American colleges to continue their otherwise dead careers for a few years or to get a free education. I don’t begrudge them for either, but again, all of this is being done on the backs of the players who actually generate the money.

 

Foreign athletes on golf scholarships in the US go on to the PGA Tour regularly if not in great numbers.

 

Michigan's president will have a busy day on his email.

 

My hunch is the quote is saying more obvious than we think. If there's college football in the fall, I would think Michigan is playing.

I still expect some journalists to crow and tut on Twitter today about how wrong this all is, athletes going back to empty campuses to run wind sprints.

I enjoyed the headline, too. "Measured approach." Who's unmeasured?