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Re: Broke

#41

Post by santaclaus »

hkmurakami wrote: post #38
joeyyang wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Football is a different case from other college sports for one main reason: physical development. Your average NFL squad has players that are much bigger and stronger at every position. A receiver who is 5'9" has a fighting chance to be successful in many college conferences where there aren't monstrous cornerbacks but absolutely no shot in the NFL where size is a requirement. Undersized and underdeveloped players al…

The same conditions hold true for most baseball players drafted out of high school. They spend several years in the minors for this reason. Why not have a football minor league?

Baseball is a non-contact sport, probably less chance of injury.

Re: Broke

#42

Post by nkurz »

vacri wrote: post #39
nkurz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long ago were you thinking? I think your suggested salary numbers are off by about a factor of 10. The average salary is about $2 million/year. The median salary is about $1 million/year. The minimum salary for a first year player is over $400,000. Here's an article with lots of details for 5 years ago: http://work.chron.com/much-money-nfl-player-make-year-2377.h... And here are links to team-by-team numbers: htt…

It was a while back, yes. It looks like the players have had a significant win in the meantime - minimum player salary increases by $15k/year for the next four years: http://www.spotrac.com/blog/nfl-minimum-salaries-for-2015-an... $400k for a 3-year career is a lot better than the picture I was painting, thanks for the correction. edit: link fix

Thanks, that's a better link than I found. It also shows that the minimum combined salary over 3 years for a player starting in 2016 would be $450K + $540K + $630K = $1.6M. Even assuming that they had no other employment for the rest of their life, that's significantly greater than the current median lifetime earnings for college graduates: http://www.businessinsider.com/college-majors-biggest-lifeti...

Re: Broke

#43

Post by wldcordeiro »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #37
nkozyra wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Secondly, your premise is incorrect. It's the NFL that has a rule against drafting players out of high school, not society. I'm not sure how you could have interpreted my post any other way. When I refer to "collusion" I'm speaking of that between the NFL and the NCAA. I'm aware it's the NFL's rule (in collaboration with the NCAA). > That doesn't solve the problem. Even if football athletes could go straight from h…

Let me get this straight. Your proposal is to force the NFL to draft players out of high school? How would that work? They'll simply say that none of the athletes are developed enough and pick them out of the college programs as they do now. How would the regulators know? More importantly, even if players could be recruited out of high school as in basketball, it doesn't solve the problem , and we know this because i…

I think the user's proposed solution is really more in line with kill/modify the NCAA so that it is a minor league and emulate the baseball style drafting system so that players can go straight to the sport.

Re: Broke

#44

Post by nkozyra »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #37
nkozyra wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Secondly, your premise is incorrect. It's the NFL that has a rule against drafting players out of high school, not society. I'm not sure how you could have interpreted my post any other way. When I refer to "collusion" I'm speaking of that between the NFL and the NCAA. I'm aware it's the NFL's rule (in collaboration with the NCAA). > That doesn't solve the problem. Even if football athletes could go straight from h…

Let me get this straight. Your proposal is to force the NFL to draft players out of high school? How would that work? They'll simply say that none of the athletes are developed enough and pick them out of the college programs as they do now. How would the regulators know? More importantly, even if players could be recruited out of high school as in basketball, it doesn't solve the problem , and we know this because i…

> Your proposal is to force the NFL to draft players out of high school?

Force? No. I have no idea where you've conjured that.

> More importantly, even if players could be recruited out of high school as in basketball, it doesn't solve the problem, and we know this because it hasn't solved the problem for basketball.

Well that's because basketball still has a similar rule. You must be out of high school one year. It's the same disingenuous nod toward academics and amateurism. The NBA had this solved before one-and-done was (re)instituted.

> The second tier players will still play in college, where all the non-athletes involved with the NCAA will still make bank, and the athletes will still stay broke.

I don't think you read what I wrote. I proposed that by eliminating his rule the NFL would likely go back to having a developmental league where kids could either get drafted out of high school or go to college, depending on their goals.

Re: Broke

#45

Post by Thriptic »

chroma wrote: post #11

I agree with pretty much every criticism in this article. Where I differ in opinion is the solution. First, there's the "me too" effect. If colleges pay football players, other athletes will want to be paid. They'll ask, "What makes football special?" and they'll have a point. Then we'll run into some unhappy truths regarding sports. For example: If colleges base compensation on revenue, the wage gap between male and…

> First, there's the "me too" effect. If colleges pay football players, other athletes will want to be paid. They'll ask, "What makes football special?" and they'll have a point.

What makes it special is that it's what more people will pay to see. There's more demand for it and so athletes should be paid more to play it. I would imagine college basketball players will also rightfully demand large compensation to play.

> Then we'll run into some unhappy truths regarding sports. For example: If colleges base compensation on revenue, the wage gap between male and female athletes will be massive

This gulf is already massive in professional sports, but I never hear anyone complaining about it. It's fairly well understood that men's college basketball is more popular than women's college basketball for example (at least by any metric that I can think of), and salaries will probably reflect that.

> Then there's the problem of mixing sports and education. If these athletes are paid, do they still have to attend classes? Do they have to get good grades? Are they given scholarships in addition to monetary compensation?

No, players who are paid will be employees of the university and will receive a salary and benefits. They will not be students. Perhaps there could be a mechanism in place to allow for some players to receive a scholarship in lieu of payment if they choose to (with the caveat being that they need to be admitted to the University under the same criteria as other non-athlete students), but in reality most of these players in top D1 programs are there to play football or basketball, not to go to class.

> Can athletes switch colleges if another school will pay them more?

Why not?

> It seems to me that most of these problems would be solved by creating a minor league separate from college. If people are so attached to college names, then the colleges can sell naming rights.

I agree, and that's basically what this will be. These sports teams will be discrete entities affiliated with the University, but their players will not be students.

Re: Broke

#46

Post by basseq »

Thriptic wrote: post #45
chroma wrote: post #11

I agree with pretty much every criticism in this article. Where I differ in opinion is the solution. First, there's the "me too" effect. If colleges pay football players, other athletes will want to be paid. They'll ask, "What makes football special?" and they'll have a point. Then we'll run into some unhappy truths regarding sports. For example: If colleges base compensation on revenue, the wage gap between male and…

> First, there's the "me too" effect. If colleges pay football players, other athletes will want to be paid. They'll ask, "What makes football special?" and they'll have a point. What makes it special is that it's what more people will pay to see. There's more demand for it and so athletes should be paid more to play it. I would imagine college basketball players will also rightfully demand large compensation to play…

I like this a lot. There's certainly no social stigma against paying for athletics (e.g., multi-million dollar coaching salaries, stadiums in the hundreds of millions). There's no stigma about students working for the college during undergrad (e.g., TAs, lab assistants). And there's no stigma against non-student college-aged adults working for a college. So...

Let's call a spade a spade. Let's be fair to the real scholar–athletes that the NCAA trots out in their TV spots. Let's stop comparing apples-to-oranges student statistics and trying to put a price on opportunity.

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