Jim Delaney's Answer to Pay for Play: Let players bypass college

Unfortunately he can't control whether the leagues let players go straight to the pros so thats a pretty big cop out.

I think at a minimum they should let all athletes profit all their names and likeness. If a player can make cash signing an autograph he should be allowed to. The more I've heard people talk about it the more it occurs to me how insane it is that they can't. Seems like a violation of their rights.

 

The problem is that anything you allow can and will be abused. If players can get paid for autographs, some booster will offer all the top players $100k for their autograph if they come to their school, etc.

 

One proposal that I heard that I do like is that the NCAA sell merchandise with player names, and the profits are released to the player upon graduation. It takes the boosters out of the equation and rewards popular players. It also only rewards players who graduate - people who leave early won't care because they are presumably getting millions in the NFL or NBA.

There's still a negative in that it favors big schools over small ones, though.

 

I said this before and it'll never, ever happen. It's stupid. Nobody would go for it. But it's fair.

You take 100% of the revenue and distribute it equally among every single person involved in college athletics. Socialist structure.

Kids cant profit but everyone else can? Okay, change it up then. Now nobody makes ****.

It's amateur sports right? University's are about academics first and foremost right?

Nobody makes money. Boom. Done. Fair.

I say this mostly to illustrate how absurd it is that kids aren't paid. But God forbid someone dips into the school's or coaches' pockets.

 

I think the whole dleague/minor league option idea is kinda cool as a fan. Get a minor league for the NFL up. We would have more quality pro sports. Draft out of high school, go down and play minor ball for a year or two and get called up. I would definitely attend a 'Sugar Land Outlaws" game on Thursday nights

 

Yes! In between the massive bowl game payouts, boosters, ridiculous merchandising, multi-million dollar renovations, coaching and TV contracts, CFB is run like any other profit seeking venture. Then why the dissonance regarding remuneration of the actual athletes?

If the NCAA had any decency, they would cap game payouts and coaches salaries across the board. There is absolutely no reason why a college coach should get anywhere near the cold hard cash they get while the athletes get imaginary scholarship money. And how vile is it that every athlete is aware of the tens of thousands of dollars exchanged openly in every game they sacrifice their bodies for?

And is Delaney seriously saying that the NCAA would allow a minor league to develop? If you give a kid an option between going to school vs. getting paid, without a noticeable difference in the support staff and publicity, what do you think he will choose? TV contracts would drop substantially, entire fanbases will shift to cheer for the local team with the better players and College programs would be decimated nationwide.

The NCAA understands all of this and knows it is in full control. Keep the big money coaches, the massive TV exposure and relationship with the NFL -> Prevent the success of any prospect of a minor league system. This level of strict control is the only reason why the NBDL is allowed to exist and will never supplant college basketball.

 

It's generally in the collective financial interests of the NBA/NFL anyway to keep using the NCAA as a proxy/unpaid minor league - however all it takes is for a few of the owners to cheat and start picking up high schoolers eventually the whole thing will unravel.

This is just a distraction though ultimately; it doesn't really change teh fact that even if a few players go pro, the parasitic reaping of the NCAA and the farcical concept of the unpaid "amateur" studen athlete in revenue sports is an embarrassment that needs to cease existing.

 

Top universities get top players anyway. If a booster wants to go past the going rate for a left tackle to sit on the bench behind two other left tackles who got more than the going rate ad the kid would rather sit on the bench then so be it. otherwise you wont have much of a different situation than you do now, the top players going to the ttop schools.

and just like the pros the better players get more money which is the way it should be or at least there isnt anything fundamentally wrong with that.

 

Talked a lot about this in this thread starting here:

http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=208250&page=103

If they NFL were to ever open up the gates to high school grads, or even better, start a Spring developmental league (of which there is absolutely a market for now), it would do more to clean up college football than anything possibly could. Let kids who want to be athletes go learn to be one. If they don't make it, let them take their money they made and go to school with it (if they actually want to go and qualify).

By doing this, the NFL makes money and gains greater control over its product, the kids make money and have more say over their future, the colleges will now be significantly less able and willing to break rules (as well as far more willing and able to actually serve and benefit their student athletes). Everybody wins, except the profiteers on the NCAA level... but screw them, they're the problem in the first place.

 

Europe and the rest of the world says hello.

 

Except there is a huge difference in publicity. College games are televised nationally - minor league games? Unlikely. Just look at college basketball vs the NBDL. So you're trading a great experience / exposure for upfront money. I think it's a harder decision than just "everyone will take the money".

 

I understand what you are saying but true minor league football would be ridiculously more lucrative than the NBDL.
Do you remember the XFL? Three televised games a week.
Hell, even the AFL continues to get decent coverage.

No AFL or XFL style gimmicks to draw in viewers because the players would be legit NFL prospects.

However, I do agree that college would be a substantially better experience. Considering how many college players have risked everything for improper benefits, I don't think they'd agree.

 

But no one watched XFL (and it went bankrupt, despite fairly small salaries). The problem with those leagues is that if they are in NFL towns, then people are focused on the NFL team. If they are in smaller cities, you don't have the huge market to attract an audience. What college teams bring to the table is a loyalty that's independent of the players, and even of the quality of players. People watch their college teams even when they suck.

But the chance of getting caught is low. They might trade a 2% chance of getting caught for getting both the money and the experience. But would they trade a 100% chance of losing the experience for the money?

 

This was the XFL experience:

The WWE and NBC each lost a reported $35 million. On April 21, 2001, the season concluded as the Los Angeles Xtreme defeated the San Francisco Demons 38-6 in the XFL Championship Game (which was originally given the Zen-like moniker "The Big Game at the End of the Season", but was later dubbed the Million Dollar Game, after the amount of money awarded to the winning team).

Though paid attendance at games remained respectable, if unimpressive (overall attendance were only 10% below what the league's goal had been at the start of the season), the XFL ceased operations after just one season due to low TV ratings.[13][14] Facing stiff competition from the NCAA Basketball Tournament, the NBC telecast of the Chicago/NY-NJ game on March 31 received a 1.5 rating, at that time the lowest ever for any major network primetime weekend first-run sports television broadcast in the United States.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFL#End_of_season_and_failure

 

your reply to major for shooting down the xfl argument should be

"hehateme"

 

1) I wonder what the actual cheat-vs-caught rate is. I have no idea is 2% is accurate, high or low.

2) I think a lot of it depends on what a salary would be. If it's enough to cover tuition for a player, then I think most would choose the money option.

3) IMO, the "experience" is sometimes as negative as it is positive for NCAA players.

4) This whole XFL thing is really running the discussion in the wrong direction. I think the given here is that any minor league that succeeds will have to be under the direction of the NFL. That, or this mythical "D4" the major college programs are thinking about creating. I haven't met many people that think an independent start-up league can survive, let alone thrive.

 

But seriously, everyone knows what happened to the XFL.
My point wasn't to provide a trajectory for the success/failure of minor league football; it was to give you evidence that America can never have enough football and networks are not afraid to take a chance on an unknown.

THe XFL failed because not enough people were willing to invest long term and the outcomes meant nothing. Destroying the sanctity of American football with gimmicks like wrestling and McMahon didn't help.

If you set up a minor league the looks and feels like the NFL, has an actual playoff and features some of the best kids in the nation, you can make a serious dent in CFB. People will give it a chance by default. They will stick around because they will invest themselves in NCAA-violations-free recruiting and can follow their stars all the way to the NFL.

Regardless, it doesn't matter. This a lot of wishful thinking on my part. I just want to see these kids get a piece of the pie, one way or another.

 

I agree. I made that number up - but really, we get maybe a handful of guys suspended each year for this stuff by the NCAA. With 115 or so NCAA teams and 80 players on each, that's 10,000 NCAA FBS football players. 2% would be 200 guys getting caught annually, so I'd guess it's far less.

Absolutely true - but then I'd point to the NBDL. College players generally aren't leaving early to play in the NBDL, though I don't know how much NBDL players gets paid.