If you thought Nick Saban was going to move quietly into the night upon retirement, think again. Last week, the former Alabama head coach went to Washington, D.C. to participate in a roundtable discussion on the future of student-athlete NIL rights. You’ve probably already seen numerous sound bites from his comments but I wanted to look at things a little more closely.
Below is a full video of the discussion and I’ll walk through each of Saban’s comments. My apologies for the inclusion of Ted Cruz on this website, please try to ignore him as much as possible.
Saban’s comments are summarized accurately, although not always 100% exactly what he said.
Timestamp 4:10 – 6:05
“The issue is not NIL, it’s a great concept for young people. It’s something we tried to promote when we recruited.”
Saban would mention this several times over the hour-plus roundtable, but it largely got glossed over in the press.
“The idea of boosters being able to contribute money to collectives and establish a pay for play model is not in the best interest of the future of the sport, nor for the athletes themselves. It doesn’t enhance creating value for their future like we were all dedicated to for many, many years.”
One thing about this is that many people don’t view Saban as a legitimate messenger for these types of comments. He’s become generationally wealthy beyond his dreams, a ton of people don’t like Alabama, and many others roll their eyes when he talks about developing athletes off the field.
Even if many agree with the idea that collectives dumping money rather aimlessly at athletes is a pretty bad idea. It’s a difficult sell to say, “These kids shouldn’t be getting money this way!” when you’re filthy rich yourself.
“You’re actually going to college to create value for your future, not see how much money you can make while you’re going to college.”
I’m guessing there will be a lot of pushback on this comment. It’s easily taken out of context, for sure. A lot of people are struggling with NIL kicking down the door to the bigger schools throwing a lot of money around during the recruiting process. Others seem to be okay with it. But, a guy making $15 million saying college isn’t about how much money you can make while you’re there is going to fall flat.
Timestamp 20:33 – 23:50
“The free agency and transfer-whenever-you want system, along with the pay to play system, have negatively affected the ability of student-athletes to be successful, particularly in a life after football.”
These comments will appeal to Notre Dame fans pretty well. The transfer system especially seems to have thrown the sport into chaos and while many aren’t shedding tears for the coaching staff’s who have to deal with it, there’s a good discussion to be hand about whether this is ultimately good for athletes. Should a larger organization be responsible for athletes and not allow them such freedom of movement? If it’s not bad for the athletes is it bad from a sporting perspective?
“How does this impact other sports? Relative to Title IX and non-revenue sports? There needs to be a competitive balance. A system that benefits whomever can raise the most money is not in the spirit of college athletics.”
College sports have always been this way though, right? The rich teams win. I wish Saban had gone more deeply into a system that supported other sports and women’s sports, but his comments ended up being pretty superficial.
“I’ve had 2 NFL coaches tell me the players come to them less developed, with more entitlements, and less resiliency to overcome adversity. If that’s true in their football development how does that affect their academic or personal development?”
This was the big quote that Saban was probably better off leaving out of his comments. This system hasn’t been around that long and I find it strange that so many players have changed so quickly with their priorities and are suddenly worse off as football prospects. Maybe it’s true, it’s just not something I think passes the smell test right now.
“Every time you transfer you decrease your chances of graduating by about 20% and now we have guys transferring 2 or 3 times. Some of the goals that we’ve had over the last 20 years like improving graduating rates and improving healthcare and mental health for players is going to start sliding in the wrong direction because we are not promoting a successful environment for personal development.”
This feels spot on. How much freedom of movement should student-athletes have? Right now, it feels like the Wild West and I don’t think it’s great for athletes from an academic standpoint. Some might argue they should be able to do whatever they want (particularly if a coach can pick up and leave at any point throughout his career) and that these coaching staff’s are also being self-serving in wanting to keep things restricted. However, I think it’s a little of both. Curtailing things is easier for coaching staff’s but also probably better for athletes in the long-term.
Timestamp 24:08 – 25:41
“All the things I believed in for 50 years of coaching, no longer exist.”
This seemed way overly dramatic!
“My wife asked me why we were still doing a Sunday breakfast with recruits and their families to explain how they will be developed when all the families are worried about is how much money they will make.”
I reacted to this similarly to Saban’s comments above coming from the NFL. Part of me doesn’t believe this happened with his wife. I also wonder whether all of these families are exclusively worried about money and nothing else. Even if families are heavily tilting more towards getting money during the recruiting process, can we really blame them?
This came off as blaming recruits and their families far too much. I’d agree the system is now incentivizing, even good families who care about education, to now also inquire heavily about their son being paid–but I really don’t blame the recruits because that door is open to them now.
Timestamp 27:00 – 27:50
“The NCAA has had a tough run over the last 5-6 years because they can’t enforce their own rules due to litigation.”
We needed far more details from Saban about the NCAA. Again, this was just a brief comment without much added on.
Timestamp 54:33 – 58:20
“An independent agency outside the government could run things but the government has to set guidelines so that this agency can run with some protection from litigation.”
Now we’re getting somewhere!
“The system in the NFL would be better than the current model now in college because it creates competitive parity.”
Is it weird that the former coach at Alabama of all places is making these comments? I’m not sure how to take this because college football especially has never had parity at any point in history. But, I think he mostly meant that the NFL has strict rules around their players and college football is falling quickly in the other direction. That’s fair.
“My main point was that college isn’t a business. The money made is reinvested throughout the school to other athletes and other sports.”
I guess, technically this is true. There are plenty of people working at these schools getting fat off the success of football but that doesn’t bother me as much as say, someone working for the NCAA, and getting paid handsomely for what purpose these days? Or what about those fat cat bowl executives?
“Nobody takes a profit in college athletics.”
Well, Saban probably has several hundred million in his bank account.
“A solution would be some kind of revenue sharing plan that did not make players employees of the school.”
Saban mentioned this a couple times. This is the stuff that everyone should’ve spent more time on not how the NFL feels like players are suddenly worse prospects coming to the league because of money. All of this stuff feels like too much noise until they figure out the employee and free agency aspect to college athletics.
Timestamp 1:10:20 – 1:12:15
“We are searching for something that is equal in all US states. A revenue sharing model should be the same in West Virginia, or Texas, or California, or Alabama. The issue now is we don’t have that. We have collectives that are raising huge amounts of money against people that don’t have the funds to pay players. There are no guidelines.”
True, and the NCAA is handcuffed right now.
“You’ll create a caste system where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Eventually, the fans will look at it like ‘I don’t want to watch this team.'”
The experience for fans will vary. Notre Dame has dealt with a little bit of craziness in recent seasons, although I’m sure some fans would really be pissed off if Benjamin Morrison decided to transfer to Georgia this year. Maybe that’s what is best for him but it’s a tough pill to swallow to leave and be immediately eligible while also grabbing a nice bag of money.
The funding of collectives isn’t sustainable. People have come to me and said they don’t want to continue doing this because a player transferred and we didn’t get to see them at our school.”
Many believe the current set up will likely collapse on itself eventually. Pay for play is difficult in the best of times, and if there are so little restrictions to player movement and a constant re-recruiting process coming from all over the country, it doesn’t seem like a system that will last very long. As best as Texas A&M may try, the money is not unlimited.
Timestamp 1:17:30 – 1:19:11
“Bryce Young had national deals with Nissan and Dr. Pepper but he earned those. That’s what NIL was supposed to be, not something where we were supposed to pay players.”
Isn’t revenue sharing paying the players, though? I get Saban’s point and honestly it seems to come down mostly to the recruiting process and the result of spending money on talent that is incentivized to leave for more cash somewhere else at the first sign of promise. Even though Alabama has been paying recruits for years, decades even, while there may be plenty of hypocrisy involved it also may be true that things have reached an entirely new level of absurdity that is likely to be miserable for mostly everyone involved.
***
I don’t really buy the criticism that Saban is being a hypocrite because pay for play took away Alabama’s recruiting advantage. They still recruited at an elite level! I’d argue that makes Saban’s point even stronger. If they were paying players in the past, it probably wasn’t nearly to the extent as today, it was less of an issue in recruiting, and he feels like it’s led to a general instability for football, while also throwing in some platitudes about it harming personal development and life after football which could also be true given his experience.
It’s going to be a difficult way forward because it feels like there’s a large segment of fans and alumni at all of these schools that don’t trust the NCAA, or the leadership at all of these universities, nor the coaching staffs who have profited handsomely for many years and who haven’t built up the trust to guide this sport and college athletics into a new era.
Yet for the lack of a better term, someone has to ‘run’ college football and the quicker we move away from the ultra-influence of television executives, work out revenue sharing, and figure out employment, eligibility, and a coherent transferring process the better everyone will be.
Right now the tide is turning heavily in favor of the players–which is great and it should have in many areas–but there are still some legitimate concerns about the future of college athletics that aren’t going to be solved by simply throwing cash blindly at recruits, kicking the NCAA in the nuts, and telling the powers-that-be they created this mess.
Yeah. Would have been way better had the video included Bernie Sanders or the Squad.
This was the one last ND sights where there were actually good posts and comments but lately you (Eric) feel the need to include not so subtle potshots against conservatives. Whatever……
I’m curious as to what makes you think there is anything negative about conservatives in this post; I took it as more of an apology that a politician made it into this post in general.
Victims gonna victim
The responses from drick and eric should be example enough that he wasn’t apologizing that a politician in general made it into the post.
Call a whambulance, sir.
Nah, I’m good. But you keep bowing down at the altar of Eric.
You’re simping for Ted f-ing Cruz. I have no clue what a guy I’ve never met thinks of Ted Cruz, but if it’s like most of the rest of the country, he probably thinks Ted’s a huge tool.
You do you drick…keep fighting for those open air drug markets…..
Stop it, you’re falling into the trap in more ways than one!
He did nail me on how I’ve been “fighting for open air drug markets” though – how can I not respond?
(Can you imagine the smell in an enclosed, improperly ventilated drug market? No thank you. Under God’s blue sky is where I like to sell my opium.)
Proper ventilation is key to the best drugs.
Imagine going to bat for Ted Cruz
I’m not going to bat for Ted Cruz….not ONCE have I defended “Ted Cruz” in my posts.
Imagine throwing a hissy fit about right wingers being made fun of
Wow really defeating his point about the tenor writing here
Who cares? He’s throwing a fit about the dumbest thing. Logic and rhetoric went out the window
You clearly care, so does everyone who’s commented to some extent
Yes, enough to make fun of him
lol….a hissy fit??? Just pointing out what clearly has been proven true given the number and tenor of responses from Eric and his loyal followers. So much for tolerance and inclusivity of the “left.”
Like I said, I truly do enjoy the site, the content and the comments. Just don’t see the need for the not subtle shots in recent months.
Just curious, what were some of the horrific not so subtle shots in the past and how do they compare to someone saying the above comment after Ted Cruz was disparaged?
If I squint, I would guess we are discussing two recent articles:
1. The Ted Cruz joke above
2. A commenter mentioned the Lou Holtz podcast
Only someone who is looking to have hurt feelings will have hurt feelings from those two absolute soul crushing jabs.
He’s got most punchable face on Capitol Hill, get over yourself.
I liked his tough guy steel coffee mug.
I like to think that conservatives and open-air drug market enthusiasts can all agree the Ted Cruz is just the pits.
Reminds me of my favorite Al Franken quote: “I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.”
This face?
Is that my boy Rafael underneath that mask?
The mask was supposed to cover up the scary part, no?
I still think Saban has no ground to stand on here, and that his input is kind of useless. If he hates college football now, there’s a league that he completely failed at that he could go try again.
NIL (and transfer rules) is pretty far down my list of issues right now. The disastrous conference realignment is clearly the number 1 problem with college football (and athletics in general). Then, the desire to completely destroy the way the ncaa football and basketball postseasons work is also more important.
Fixing the NIL and transfer issues could actually be pretty easy, but the ncaa has to relent (or be forced by the NLRB, courts, or congress to relent) on its most fundamental concept: the players are students, not employees.
If the players are employees, you can create a salary cap. You can create non-compete clauses that say an employee has to sit out a year if they transfer. You can make most sports club sports, make basketball and football and any other revenue sport a Job, and Title IX Rules likely apply less broadly. You have the ability to change so many rules, in so many ways. You just have to relent.
(I would note that I’m actually personally opposed to most of those things happening. But it’s hilarious to me that the ncaa still fights this despite all of the potential upside. Yes, it would be costly up front. But espn is paying billions of dollars per year for college sports. The ncaa can easily afford it, but then there would be no need for the ncaa to exist after that)
Education = core value. Need to protect it. ND is right.
Not that anyone seems to care.
Heavy sigh and handwringing…
I agree completely. Making players employees wouldn’t mean they no longer need to be educated though.
I actually had a job in college working for the very university at which I attended. It’s very easy to do.
Conference realignment and post-season changes have been happening for over 100 years, though. If it’s worse now, isn’t everyone used to it?
I feel like that’s relatively small potatoes in the grand scheme when we’re talking about employment, salary caps, and what eligibility means, etc.
For example, I think Saban would’ve conceptually understood the current realignment and playoff outcome if you told him that back in 1985. The other issues would’ve blown his mind and wouldn’t believe it could happen.
Teams from California are joining conferences with “Atlantic Coast” in their name. This is different than it has ever been, in a pretty obviously drastic way.
True, but I’d also say that stuff like that probably won’t last. We can’t even guarantee the ACC will still be around in 15 years let alone that Cal would still be a part of the league 10 years from now.
Sure, but we can’t even guaranteed tackle football will exist in 15 years. But as things currently stand, asking the Cal baseball team to play 2-3 road series on the opposite coast in the same month is going to completely destroy those athletes lives. I truly don’t think the ADs put more than a few moments of consideration into whether or not this would be a net positive for the athletes.
Perhaps I’ve overlooked the #1 biggest problem right now for college athletics: the people running it don’t seem to actually like it or care about the athletes at all!
How so? It’s not as though they’re jumping on the Empire Builder to get to Duke.
The next installment of the top 10 best decisions series (spoilers!) features Notre Dame traveling–according to my research–over 5,500 miles by train over a single month to play 4 games.
This stuff has been in the blood of ND Football and college football for over 100 years. Imagine 4 days on a train to play a football game!
“Notre Dame has dealt with a little bit of craziness in recent seasons, although I’m sure some fans would really be pissed off if Benjamin Morrison decided to transfer to Georgia this year.”
TBF we just did this to Duke.
Yes, of course.
Are people seeing a lot of these banner ads in articles, particularly on PC?
Adsense is running experiments that I’ve tried to turn off.
I haven’t seen them.
On II podcast they said the Bama AD said that players aren’t being paid the money they’ve been promised. That’ll get messy, no ?
Also the talk was if the players become employees, say goodbye to all but BB and FB. (revenue producers) Anyone care to explain if they think that’s true or not and why ?
Was the Bama AD saying that about other schools?
I believe they (II) said that Bama AD said Bama (Booster?) NIL promises weren’t being kept.
I’ve gotta imagine there’s going to be a ton of that going on especially with players who are effectively one-and-done.
I could see that, but also a weird thing for the Bama AD to admit?
None, only related posts. I think I’ve seen them on the side bar before but to the extent I see them here (if at all) they’re pretty unobtrusive
Thanks for the info.
I see them on my PC. Still less annoying than the mobile ones that need to be collapsed.
Hmmmm…
On mobile for this article alone I counted 7 ads all for “Holiday Horror Story” both interspersed between paragraphs and also one at the top and bottom that scroll with me. Figured it was out of your control to manage them, but it is sometimes funny to me that it’s the same ad over and over on the same article.
Am I a bad guy here for having adblock?
Lost a subscriber due to your wokeness now you’re losing ad revenue – as your uncle might say, you’re “getting too old for this shit”
https://www.tiktok.com/@barstoolsports/video/7189748146069638442?lang=en
Lost me at “Tiktok” and then again at “Barstool”
Oh no!
Anyway
Please just make it the early 90s again. That’s all I want.
(noises from Nebraska)
The NCAA has been one of the most inept orgs. on the planet for at least 20 years so I do not expect much from them.
I do think the NCAA is inept but they also have their hands tied behind the backs when it comes to enforcing rules – lack of subpoena power hurt them a lot in going after certain schools – and public opinion has gotten to the point that if they try to enforce basically anything, there’s a massive hissyfit that how dare you punish a teenager.
I think this is a huge, huge part of any problem solving for the future.
The reason the NCAA is inept is because at no point have they actually tried looking to the future and attempt to solve really obvious problems. They just keep trying to not change.
They should never have been focused on enforcing bad rules. They should have been focused on making good rules (i.e. rules that wouldn’t need to be challenged in court because schools and athletes would both benefit).
The current trajectory has seemed likely (generally speaking around player payment and empowerment) since O’Bannon vs NCAA. A definite possibility as far back as 2009 (lawsuit filed), and near certainty by 2015 (ruling). Since 2009, the internet has been coming up with ideas on ways college sports could function, while allowing players make money from the billions they help generate. But the NCAA has done nothing unless forced to.
You realize how extremely loaded that is, right? Until very recently, ‘bad rules’ included “you shouldn’t be able to give a kid a car to entice him to come to your school” or “commitments are for four years, if you want out you have to sit a year.”
“But those are bad rules” you’ll say, which goes back to my original reply above – any rules is a bad rule if you decide you don’t like it.
But these have been probably bad rules for 15+ years and are now explicitly illegal rules. I didn’t decide if they were “bad”, the courts did. And the writing has been on the wall for a long time.
I don’t see how them being able to enforce those rules better, regardless of their quality/legality, would have now put us in a different spot than we are.
Yup, the public has largely done a 180 on a lot of those ‘moral’ issues and that’s not really the NCAA’s fault.
Of course the NCAA is full of ineptness (is there any debate??) but I don’t know how anyone is supposed to quickly and easily cook up new rules for the future given the players involved on each side.
Only winning move is probably to not play – i.e., wash their hands of it for football. Basketball is a much thornier issue because it’s still big money. The rest of college sports are small enough that they can probably still rein things in. But for football, we’re going to end up with a bunch of players going broke or boosters stiffing kids on payment or who knows what else and it’ll be “how dare the inept* NCAA not fix this”, except every moment prior to then it’ll be “how dare the NCAA consider stopping this.”
Oh and add in that individual states will throw a stick in the NCAA’s spokes at random too.
*I want to emphasize I do think the NCAA is pretty inept.
Nothing was needed quickly. They had a decade! (responding to E’s comment).
I basically agree with everything in Steens reply. I don’t think the NCAA necessarily could have done anything, but they don’t appear to have even tried, which to me is the biggest testament to their ineptitude.
Even not playing is a move they could have made, or floated into the ether, and might have been the difference between them collapsing and existing for the smaller sports.
Part of me wonders if the NCAA did float that idea to university presidents and conference commissioners, since the idea has been out there for a decade or so, and the schools/conferences said nah, just keep making us as much money for as long as you can.
I think there’s a good chance of this. But also that football and the NCAA tournament pay for everything else directly and indirectly. How happy are people going to be when a football school doesn’t have to provide dozens and dozens more women’s scholarships for Title IX reasons if football becomes a non-NCAA sport?
Yeah. There seem to be some theoretically reasonable solutions to just football and/or basketball. But I have yet to see much that doesn’t make me think nearly everything else will end up as basically club sports.
What do other countries do for their university sports?
Seems like the rest of the world revolves around professional clubs having academy programs for young people.
My beloved Tottenham Hotspur has an academy to train players from 8 years old to 23 years old. You have a hundred of these for most soccer clubs in Europe.
Others have entire athletic clubs that support other sports, too. So you can be a Real Madrid basketball youth academy player at 13 years old.
I knew about the clubs for soccer, but didn’t realize that those clubs drove the rest of the sports as well. Thanks.
I think most well-meaning CFB fans would agree that the pre-NIL pre-portal system was completely unsustainable from a legal perspective and also made (for the most part) for a more enjoyable fan experience, especially if you’re a fan of a team whose top players keep getting scooped up in the portal. Like, just for a random example, Duke or Wake Forest.
That can also be said alongside the obvious opinion that the constant search for more TV money by all parties involved (conferences and the CFP most notably) is a far bigger and more annoying issue than either NIL or the portal.
Whether all this stuff is actually better in the long run for players – we know it is in the short run – I guess we’ll find out.
Pretty clear that the B1G and SEC are gunning for a “NFL on Saturday” model. We’ll see how well that does. Most competitors to the NFL die very quickly.
I read “open air drug markets” as “open air dung markets.” I hear West Lafayette has a lovely one.
That’s famously Champaign’s offering, sir
I celebrate the B1G West’s entire symphony of odors.
Enjoy the new LA-themed scents!
Open air refrigerated gum markets.
While the idea of freely transferring any year is a nice freedom for the players, it kind of sucks from a fan perspective. It seems like, now more than ever, we are rooting for laundry rather than players. Not sure what the fix is — perhaps NIL including multi-year contracts? Or us fans learning to live with it?
On the issue of NIL, I cannot fathom the idea of ever giving money to collectives that funnel money to incoming students. As Texas A&M has experienced, that seems like throwing money away, as many of those students have left after a year or two (and probably did not see the field or make much of an impact in that first year or two). It seems like a lot of schools like ND and Michigan realized pretty quickly that a wiser investment would be to put money into retaining your good players as they get further along in college
The college football industry generates revenue at least the equivalent of the GDP of a small country, attracting entrepreneurs seeking to maximize their profits. i rarely see purists anymore in the college football industry, in which I include the major sports publications, recruiting services with their rankings and the stakeholders – networks, conferences, coaches, players, etc, etc. Blogs, writers and their companies play their part to stimulate profitable growth with appealing content, focusing on creating communities, subscriptions, and revenue growth from ads and clicks.
The low-hanging fruit here is 18 Stripes which has all the challenges of any business, minimizing costs, reporting taxes from revenue streams, striving for individuality among competitors, while potentially appealing to a national audience built on the decades of Irish football at a university whose purpose is becoming an outlier. In my opinion, that university mission that impacts all its athletes is to be celebrated, continues focuses on a real student-athlete model and which keeps me connected.
As college football has changed over the last few years, I reviewed Eric’s five year anniversary article wondering what “a long, strange trip” it’s been for a personal retrospective up to that time including with the monolithic SBNation built on that industry.
And let’s take a look to see how SBNation is doing!
No one wants to hear this, but the most logical solution is to adopt the baseball model. An NFL feeder league would dilute college football in a huge way. But if it is really about what is best for the kids, why are we forcing them to go to college? Allow kids to be drafted out of HS and the ones who want college can opt to do that.
I love CFB, and know this idea would be a sea change. But it makes the most sense to me. College Athletics is not a logical way to develop athletes for the NFL. Too many of these kids don’t care about a college education.
I realize that Universities will never go for this because of the revenue that CFB brings in. And the NFL is perfectly happy not to pay for development of the players. $$ always gets in the way of common sense.
How many football players are physically ready to go straight from high school to the NFL?
Zero. Eh mayyyyybe a kicker. But almost definitely zero.
Adrian Peterson.
Him, maybe like Jadaveon Clowney and, I dunno, Herschel Walker?
The “logical solution” proposed here applies to maybe a dozen people in the the history of modern football.
Oh yeah, I was making a half-joke. I’m not even sure about Clowney but I am absolutely sure Adrian Peterson would have been one of the 20 RBs in the NFL as an 18 year old. He was the one guy in the high school all-star games in the mid-aughts who looked like he was on an entirely different athletic plane than the rest of his peers.
They would still have to develop in the farm league, even if they got a big signing bonus. Even Mike Trout played 2.5 years in the minors (though he was probably held down that last half season for contract reasons). Bryce Harper was one of the most MLB-ready prospects of all time and he spent a full season in the minors before getting called up.
What’s the average shelf life of an NFL player versus MLB? Gut says that the NFL career is shorter, and presumably, rougher on the body.
Shorter (3.3 vs. 5.6) but part of that I think is a huge number of guys only being in the league for one-ish years for the NFL. But even adjusting for that, MLB is still a big longer, just can’t find the numbers right now.
I hate the framing of this as “logical” or “illogical” not that you’re the first, only or last person to do it. “It’s not logical that schools are the de facto minor leagues”. Okay? I don’t care? I like the history of it being tied to schools and it’s still very high quality football, why do I have to blow that up and go root for the South Bend Shamrocks instead of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish? Where’s the logic in destroying something that’s been around for well over a century – and longer than pro football – because it doesn’t neatly match other sports? And have you seen the pay and hours for minor leaguers? Even just the old scholarships, room and board only is a sweet deal in comparison.
The point is that ND would still exist and the farm leagues could be irrelevant, just like it is for baseball now. The top 1% of prospects would forego CFB and the enjoyment of watching wouldn’t decrease at all because it would affect all schools equally. But you could impose amateurism rules with a straight face because there’s a market-based alternative for players for whom the value of the education + training + exposure is well below their actual value.
This is my question, can you though? CFB probably would still make more money than a football farm league. How could they say “If you want to get paid go to this league then, but you can’t get paid in college even though there’s way more money in the system.”
The G-League existing doesn’t change anything for hoops.
I don’t feel like the main issue at hand is simply the need for a farm league and all of these issues suddenly go away in college.
I don’t see why you can’t. The vast majority of CFB players are getting compensated far beyond their actual market value with the scholarship, training, exposure, medical care, housing, and food they receive as student athletes. If you have a release valve so the Trevors Lawrence of the world can get a $20m signing bonus and go straight to high A ball, you take a lot of the wind out of the sails of the argument that the system is unfair. It gives you a market comparator where someone who gets drafted in the 8th round out of high school would face a choice of taking the CFB route or the $150k signing bonus and $30k/year he would get by going to the minors.
It would also deflate the “the scholarship is worthless to players who don’t want to go to school” argument. If you’re good enough to get drafted in a slot round, you can choose between the intangible value of the education for the tangible salary in the minors.
Legally, I just don’t think it’ll work. I could be wrong, but all these court cases across the country aren’t going away with a NFL Jr. league.
There’s a fairly strong doctrinal case for a sports league being able to regulate things in the name of competition. For example, you could view teams agreeing to play by a common set of rules as literally collusion. Maybe I—hypothetically an incredible kicker—would be worth more money if FGs were worth 7 points instead of 3. By agreeing to only award 3 points, the universities have collusively fixed the market and hurt me financially. But holding them to that standard would undercut the product entirely, which I think is secretly one of the reasons SCOTUS has exempted the MLB from the Sherman Act for more than a century.
Leagues normally circumvent this with collective bargaining agreements, and I don’t really see a problem with the NCAA just doing that as well. I’m also not a sport lawyer, so I’m probably missing something. I think if the NCAA had been proactive and leaned on the NFL to change the system, they could have made a straight-faced claim that amateurism is part of the nature of the product they’re offering. Under that theory, paying players market rates undercuts the product itself. (I myself buy this argument as my interest in CFB has dimmed significantly over the past 5 years.) In any case, it’s a little harder to make that argument now that NIL has been in the mix for a few years and revenue is still healthy (I assume).
Part of the problem in the Alston case was that the university collusion in limiting player compensation drove it below what the market would otherwise give them. If there’s a market option and the universities say, “you can play in our league under amateurism rules or you can play in the minors for pay,” that takes a lot of the sting out of the collusion argument. You can still make it, of course, but a court is much more likely to buy the amateurism argument if a player can opt out and get paid whenever they want. In my opinion, it’s the coercive nature of the CFB arrangement that’s the problem more than the literal violation of the Sherman Act, which sports kind of have to do in the first place to exist. I would argue it’s actually a result of the collusion between the NFL and the NCAA to provide the NFL a free farm system and divide the market more than the collusion between the universities. This is all the rambling of a bored 3L who has taken one semester of antitrust though, so take it with a huge grain of salt.
Please stop, you would get laughed out of court.
It’s an intentionally silly analogy, but it’s true that sports rely on collusion to exist and agreeing on the rules of the game are an obvious example. That’s why the NCAA got rule of reason review in NCAA v. Board of Regents. Sorry that my football blog comment wasn’t court-quality!
We all have our blind spots
No, they do not rely on collusion to exist. Having rules and structures and agreements is not collusion.
When teams agree on a common set of rules, that’s literally a horizontal restraint on trade. That’s what I mean by collusion—an agreement to restrain trade. To the extent that “collusion” implies secrecy or illegality, you’re right, it’s not secret or illegal when sports teams do it because they have to do it for the product to exist.
By your logic, aren’t things like “measurements” and “money” and “time” acts of collusion?
No. Collusion requires secrecy, an intent to defraud, or some level of dishonesty both in its common definition and in legal terms. From Black’s:
https://thelawdictionary.org/collusion/
And here’s the OED for common usage:
https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=collusion
“Touchdowns are worth six points, here is the rulebook saying so” is not collusion. “The thirty two teams of the NFL can pay their team up to a combined $250MM per year (or whatever it is now)” is not collusion.
I’m a lot less interested in discussing the semantic definition of collusion because I was using it in the context of antitrust law, where it has a slightly different meaning. Even on semantic grounds, however, the Black’s definition I see says: 1. An agreement to defraud another or to do or obtain something forbidden by law. COLLUSION, Black’s Law Dictionary (11th ed. 2019). Here’s the Wex definition of collusion in the antitrust context: “Horizontal collusion exists where competitors at the same market level agree to fix or control the prices they will charge for their respective goods or services.” In the antitrust context, horizontal restraints of trade are forbidden by law, so an agreement to restrain trade is collusion, secret or not.
Also, in your touchdown example your hypothetical person is pointing to a rulebook that’s literally agreed upon by the various teams! If a grocer was pricing cereal based on a pricing book that was agreed upon by General Mills, Post, and Kelogg, that would be the textbook definition of collusion under the Sherman Act. In the sports context, it’s only not collusion because it’s literally required for the product to exist. My point this entire time has been that antitrust is weird when it comes to sports, so intuitions about what will be allowed and what won’t aren’t necessarily availing.
The NFL won’t go for this because then the NFL has to pay for its development
I’ve always thought the Canadian major junior hockey league format would work best for college football–sans the whole draft system.
Players are paid, finishing school/college is part of the process for most players, and the team works to varying levels to ‘accommodate’ players with perks (like a car) depending on their status in the league.
Makes sense to me. The point being that the NFL SHOULD pay for a developmental.league instead of using universities that are first and foremost about education. Lord knows they have enough $$.
Why should an 18 year old athlete be forced onto an academic institution where they have no interest in being educated?
The major argument I am hearing is that many 18 yo’s are not ready for the NFL. That applies to hockey, the NBA and baseball (particularly pitchers). It also applies to CFB where most frosh do not play except the ones that are physically ready.
Pretty easy to come up with a model that makes minor league football safer than the NFL.
Diluting the talent pool for CFB would make the product on the field worse for fans. But I have no doubt that it would be better for the players. And better for the NCAA.
My question would be how does a NFL minor league change things for colleges?
Presumably, revenues for everyone at the college level would decrease substantially. TV contracts would be renegotiated for far less cash.
We’d still have all the same problems in college though, right? Just on a smaller financial scale?
Or, is the belief that money at the college level would be reduced so much that NIL, employment, eligibility ‘problems’ go away?
Yes, but it will never happen. MLB is actively trying to dismantle their minor league system (they scale down more and more each year). The NBA has 5-10 players per year skip college completely and go to the G League. These leagues are just too cheap to actively want to pay to develop a bunch of kids, when they can have someone else do it for them for free.
Yeah, irregahdless if it makes sense, there is no incentive for professional leagues to invest in minor leagues.
That said, it looks as though SEC/BIG are essentially moving toward a minor league. Wouldn’t surprise me if in 5-10 years, that conf/league pays players on contracts, has their own playoff system, and more or less keeps within itself.
I’m not convinced it would make the product worse for fans at all. Like even slightly. In fact, it would probably improve the product because there would be more parity without some teams getting windfalls of players who would otherwise be able to maximize their value better in the farm leagues.
The real reason that this isn’t going to be solved is because people are completely unwilling to promote realistic options. College sports revenue is often described as billions or tens of billions of dollars, but even if you exclude the low revenue G5 conferences the total amount of money being generated isn’t enough for any of the current plans to change things to work.
The Power Five Conferences generated $3,326.1 million last year in shared revenue (television, bowl, CFB playoff, NCAA tournament participation revenue, minor other revenues). That covered 69 schools with we’ll say 98 revenue sport scholarships, or 6,762 revenue athletes. That’s $491 thousand per revenue athlete. At the Power 5 level. In the AAC revenue athletes generated just $79k each.
Has anyone proposed a negotiated solution that pays players less than a million dollars each? Because it gets you sports journalist credits to spend other people or fictional money, I have not.
And that $491 thousand is just revenue, take away the costs of running the programs, travel, coaching, providing scholarship, housing, and healthcare and you’re not looking at a lot of left over funds to begin with. Then consider the remaining money is already spent by law on a variety of non-revenue sports, and an additional amount is spent voluntarily expanding sports programs and scholarship opportunities.
The money that you want to give to football players has to come out of one of those other pools.
For perspective Walmart generates $291 thousand per employee, and their employee count includes the support staff that aren’t included in the revenue per revenue athlete numbers above and I’ve never heard great things about how much Walmart pays their employees.
I’m gonna throw out, maybe pay them somewhere between $491,000 and $0
Sure, pay them in the cost of tuition, room and board, a meal plan. But even do it in a non-taxable way so they aren’t left with something due at the end of the year. It’s worked pretty great for a long while.
In addition to tuition, room and board, food, training, and healthcare, players currently can already receive cash payments of $5,980.
As things are currently only 12 public university athletic departments out of 232 are self-funding as is, the rest take transfers from the university, state government, or non-athlete student fees.
I personally don’t have a problem with allowing some increased cash payments to athletes, but I haven’t seen any proposal that could be considered serious within an order of magnitude. Well, other than the NCAA’s suggestion that the colleges fund a two hundred million dollar per year players compensation
slushfund for the NCAA to administer, which seems unwise given my low opinion of the manner in which the NCAA operates currently.What does a “highly” paid intern make? 60-80k? Could start out with a scale in that area with increases for every academic year completed, plus team-performance bonuses.
Or have a range for each academic year, so you can offer more to certain recruits, with a salary cap in place, or average pay for each year.
I think that if you were to go onto the set of ESPN and say that maybe we could pay players $70,000 per year you’d be screamed off the premises for taking advantage of the players by paying so little, if you’re lucky, and beaten to death with a microphone stand if you’re not.
Anyway, that’s nearly $500 million across the Power 5, (more if it’s taxable income) so you’ll need to set aside some serious time to cull the opportunities that football currently funds for others.
It’s roughly $7mm per school (or 11 Jimbo Fisher buyouts), which is much less shocking than lumping all of the payments together. Lots of schools came into more $ with their recent TV deals.
Can we take some from the pool that pays coaches? Seems like an easy solution to me because that feels like a bottomless pit.
I think this is where most of the money would come from if you structured the player’s payments to increase from where they are now each year so that there was time to adjust as contracts rollover.