THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I don’t think “coming up” with a plan is the difficult part.  The difficult part will be the Title IX roadblock that is glossed over at the end of the article.
vr, Xei

Xeifrank said pretty much what I wanted to say.  His Title IX argument is essentially wishful thinking.  Men’s basketball players get $650,000 in salaries and lifetime health insurance while women’s basketball players get bupkis simply would not hold up under Title IX, and the law is not going to be changed, so a proposal that simply wishes that away is not worth discussing.

A good alternative was alluded to at the beginning: Treat them as employees of the university, not as students. For those interested, they can take classes (at the standard employee discount).

I don’t know how anyone could argue that the present system is okay - it’s an unmitigated disaster.

I simply want Basketball and Football to do the same thing that Baseball and Hockey do, which is to run minor leagues themselves.

Hockey in North America has “Major Junior”, where most top prospects come from and play from ages 16-19/20 - they are drafted and often play away from home (within their region). They don’t get paid, but get a forum to be noticed by pro scouts.  It’s a minor league, but without the affiliation to major leagues, and many of the best european and US players get a few spots as well. The players are still going through high school and generally given a pass to university by their teams (if they want it). University hockey in Canada is a non-issue (almost no NHLers come from it), although it still has some local cache in some US schools. Note that Major Junior does not have to pretend to be about academics though - players are traded, cut, etc.

Each NHL team also has a minor league team as well, and there are some independent leagues out there, in the US.

Now, this is HOCKEY - it’s freaking expensive to play, to have an arena, it’s dangerous for the players (like football). Hockey manages a pretty comprehensive minor league system, with the massive help of rabid popularity in Canada. But it still pulls it off.

The main advantage of baseball and hockey is that great young players get thrown into competition that challenges them. No super athletes going 30-0 in high school basketball, or local high school football teams going undefeated for 10 years because they stack the teams and recruit players.

I don’t have a fully formed idea for what it looks like in football/basketball, but “more like hockey and baseball” seems like a good place to start to me. I’m completely baffled that neither of those sports has a minor league in the US. Football especially - there is nowhere else to play it but the US, essentially. Vince McMahon might have set back football pro development 25 years. I think he had the wrong idea - spending $100,000+ future college tuition on the best 400 high schoolers in the country and starting a junior football league - there’s a winning idea for a crazy rich guy. College football dies pretty quickly if the best players aren’t there. It won’t happen because if someone puts up $500 Million for players and stadium use, etc., the US colleges would probably change overnight and put up even more money for players to keep what they have. You can’t have both big time college football and a big minor league system, I don’t think.

a college scholarship in exchange for playing sports at school is still a lopsided deal for the vast majority of student athletes. its only the very top percentage that will definitely be going pro where the injury risks make tuition, training other perks worth less than taking what would amount to a minor league deal.

i would start with trying to get the NFL and the NBA to develop more younger players. maybe setting up minor league systems fully formed is too much to start with with but they can certainly sponsor academies the way MLB does in the Caribbean or euro soccer teams have all over. im surprised the sports agents arent more active in this regard, at least the less established ones who dont mind ruffling feathers in the pro leagues, since theyre the ones totally missing out on any of the benefits of college sports.

then you start by making all scholarships 4 year guaranteed based on much stricter academic achievements. salary caps on coaches (that may be trickier). sort out the bowl games so that all the profits go back to the schools and not to bowl game “executives”. im sure theyre other reforms needed. but basically pay students in education. if that doesnt seem like a good deal to them, they shouldnt go to college to play sports.

If the NCAA actually wanted to keep college sports amateur, then it really would be easy to do:

1. Ban the payment of coaches, required them to be faculty who maintain academic standards just as much as the student-athletes - require head coaches to be tenured and senior assistants to be tenure-track or tenured.

2. Set a maximum ticket-price for all college games.  Something like $20.

3. Prohibit the sale of broadcast rights; declare that the games are in the public domain and can be freely rebroadcast; any broadcaster wishing to produce coverage must accept these terms (but, in return, pays no rights fees to the college or the NCAA).

4. Prohibit donations being made to athletic departments, or teams, or being made to the institution with any designation relating to athletics.

5. The only legitimate sources of funding for the athletic department are then the tickets to the games and funding from the academic institution.

If there isn’t the big money coming in, then there’s nothing to pay the players with in the first place.

Without doing something drastic to get the money out of college sports in the first place, then some form of payment - to all student-athletes, not just the ones in revenue sports - is inevitable.

As far as I’m aware, there’s nothing in Title IX that would stop a college from sponsoring a professional sports team, and doing so as a purely-business proposition.  The players wouldn’t have to be students (though they might be part-paid through a scholarship, perhaps one that they could take up after their playing time was over), and their academic progress (if any) would be completely irrelevant.

Non-revenue sports (ie everything except football and men’s basketball) could continue under the current system; college baseball works well enough, in part because players can go into the minors instead of college.

”a college scholarship in exchange for playing sports at school is still a lopsided deal for the vast majority of student athletes.”

#5)
I don’t like this argument.

Being the 25th man on an MLB team and making ~$450K per year is a lopsided deal, too. The league would survive without those players, and there are plenty more of similar quality waiting in the wings of AAA making peanuts.

That said, those players got “lucky” and are in the show.

The same can be said for the worst players at a big time football school. The schools, by and large, are making a LOT of money off of their football programs, and the kids (stars and scrubs) make next to nothing. So everyone (even the bad players who are “lucky” to be there) should get some compensation.

#7

I think it’s a much fairer point in relation to every sport bar (men’s) football and men’s basketball.

It could be debated whether they are really getting the “college” education they are being “paid” with their scholarship money.

Colleges ...
1. Allow sub-standard student to enter as student athletes.
2. They restrict the time available to study. Often, the students that need the most academic time have the least available (athletes).

This is basically THE model you would use if your goal was academic failure. take kids that are not ready for college classes and reduce the amount of time they have to study.

Getting 2-3 years of half-ass college paid for them, is about as useful as a few self-defense classes is for us .... yeah, you learn just enough to go get your ass kicked.

-----------------------------------

I would like to see colleges have a universal entrance criteria for ALL who attend.

Those that do not meet the criteria can ...
1. Get their grades up.
2. Go to JuCo.
3. Something else. If there are pro potential players out there that cannot meet college entrance requirements ... someone will find a way to exploit them, I mean show them off ... and they won;t need colleges to do it. Unfortunately, colleges really enjoy the money.

In sports where colleges don’t make a ton of money, you see sponsored teams or club teams. See Showcase Travel baseball for example ... or AAU basketball.

Colleges have become the only realistic avenue for some of these kids to play pro, even though they have no business or desire for college. They don;t want to pay athletes because it will compromise the integrity of amatuer athletics.

It is really embarrassing the institutions representing our highest level of education would make such a statement while acting in a completely opposite manner.

@#6

Right freackin’ on.

Richard: I like that.  Open Source college athletics.

College football and basketball are generating $6 billion in revenue per year. How much revenue would be generated if we instead switch to a system of purely amateur college sports plus a minor league system for football and basketball? You are not going to get a minor league team that pulls 100,000 fans to a game, or that can support it’s own sports network. It doesn’t make any sense from an academic standpoint, but it sure looks good economically, doesn’t it?

One point that many of these solutions ignore is that Universities are making a lot of money in the current arrangement and aren’t going to agree to any solution that zeroes out that income from TV and ticket sales.

I like the idea of a minor league system, but the only way to do it to get everyone on board is to have the Universities run the leagues, not the NFL. And so, that brings us back to players being employees of the schools, with the nice added benefit of cheap classes if they’re so inclined.

There are some exciting possibilities here, too. Imagine the Dolphins and FSU, OSU and the Browns or USC and the LA Rams working out some sort of business arrangment, similar to AAA-MLB relationships.

@12 - you already get 100,000 fans to minor league games, they just happen to take place on college campuses.

I love the university employee idea, which opens it up to a full-fledged minor league system. Would you still put limits on years of eligibility, or let the best non-NFL players play, regardless of age?

The current system will only change at the demands of the players - Universities get money, NFL/NBA gets minor leagues they don’t have to pay for, TV gets very popular product. Everyone above is making hundreds of millions in actual or saved costs, all on the backs of the somewhat compensated (scholarships, kickbacks) players. The players need to organize and simply refuse to play until they get paid fairly. A union, one might say.

Paying the players would also limit the crazy head coaching paydays in colleges, at least in my head. Right now major jobs can pay almost anything, because they are so profitable.

The problem with university-sponsored pro teams is that the universities will start to ask why they should then give the players to the NFL after four years.

Why not keep them, and keep playing them?  Sure, you’d have to pay them pro salaries - but why not do exactly that?

They’d end up in head-on competition with the NFL, but college football, delivering a pro-quality product, would have a very good chance of breaking the NFL, especially as it would force the NFL to establish a minor league in order to get access to players at 18.

@14

Take any college team that now draws 100,000 per game and take away the college affiliation and put it in a minor league. Now how many fans do you get, 10,000 per game if you’re good/lucky. That’s my point. You lose a lot of value by taking the teams away from colleges and putting them in a minor league. A lot of the value is in the college affiliation.

Richard has an interesting idea about letting colleges effectively own the minor league teams so that you can retain that affiliation. As most universities are non-profit organisations his suggestion may not be possible legally.

i think you’d be better off trying a pay for play scenario at junior college or the NAIA. i dont see the NCAA ever adopting it.

the most important reforms to me are still on the academic side, making the schools live up to the “student-athlete” term. if you had the NFL sponsoring paid juco squads you would then have an option available for athletes who either dont want to play for a scholarship or can’t hack it academically at the reformed D1 levels.

You lose a lot of value by taking the teams away from colleges and putting them in a minor league. A lot of the value is in the college affiliation.

Is this really true?

Can we look at some of the major rivalries from 50 years ago that are now games no one watches because the talent is not there? My guess is that “smart schools” used to be pretty damn good in sports back then, but since suffer because they refuse to lower their academic standards.

Isn’t that basically the game we play now? Which schools will lower their standards enough and make poor exceptions in order to be better in sports and draw more attention/money to their schools?

---------------------------

To an earlier point, why the heck should colleges pay the athletes a professor’s salary and give them lifelong health insurance?

Why not just pay them as if being an athlete is their on campus job, and pay them an hourly wage or entry level salary and health benefits only for the duration of their employment?

It has to be a very strange situation for a university’s football coach to make more annual money than the entire science department.

I think people will watch “the talent”, wherever it’s at ... and I think the NCAA knows this, which is why it threw such a fit when players were going straight from HS to the NBA. Some of us watched Lebron James’s HS games. Why? because it was a game game between two HS powerhouses? No. Because it was a pro talent.

No one is watching Auburn without Cam Newton, just like no one really wants to watch the Wyoming-Idaho showdown regardless of how much they hate each other or if it decides who wins the I don’t care big sky mountain west horizon league.

If the NCAA does not retain pro talent, they don’t retain the viewership. No one except alumni watch ivy league football. No one except alumni would watch NCAA football if all the pro prospects are playing in another league.

Not trying to be argumentative, but what is stopping the good college football players who are pro prosects from playing in the Canadian Football League for a couple of years before joining the NFL?  Does the CFL have an age limit?  It seems like there already is an alternative out there on the open market for college football players who are good enough.  The fact that they aren’t to me is saying that the offer that the NCAA provies (scholarship plus showcasing of skills to NFL) is a better package.

And NCAA hoops have plenty of international leagues willing to pay for play.

Thoughts?
vr, Xei

#18 - i disagree. you’ll see some casual fans drift away from the NCAA game but i dont think any big time program will lose too many fans or interest, as long as theyre still winning games, if the top talent is all the sudden signed away to a new league. the ivies dont offer scholarships and havent been competitive in the top 25 for something like 75 years now. people will watch top 25 college match ups no matter what. and big state schools with big alumni bases and state wide fan bases are going to stay as rabid as ever. there are only a handful of pro caliber players on the field at any given moment now, and NCAA football is as big as ever. i mean if you want to go back in history, most of the best football players used to retire after college because the NFL didn’t pay enough. but obviously the NFL emergence didn’t relegate NCAA football to obscurity.

There are 8 CFL teams, with a maximum of 19 “imports”.  It’s not a viable alternative.  How many of these young guys would the CFL want?

why can’t the NCAA system just take away the restrictions on athletes earning outside income?  That would solve most/all of the problems and instead of the colleges paying the top players, rich boosters would.  No other students have restrictions on how much income or what type of jobs they can take.  No title IX junk either.

I think Patriot nailed the obvious Title-IX-immune first step in the last thread ("Shame of College Sports"):

Don’t have the schools pay the players.  Stop restricting what the players can take from third parties.  Allow them to engage in the same types of economic activities that anyone else would be allowed to engage in.  The end.

I would add to that allowing athletes to negotiate with schools for 4+ year guaranteed scholarships (revocable only with cause) and for better health/disability coverage.

why wouldn’t the CFL want the young, pro caliber NCAA athletes? if they are good enough to get drafted in the NFL then they better than anyone playing in the CFL. Unless its the players saying they need to get paid a premium to play in canada, theyre basically saying a D1 scholarship is worth more than the CFL league minimum, which according to wikipedia is $42,000.

@19

There is no age limit in the CFL, I believe.

However, the jump from playing high school to professional football is quite large and it seems unlikely any player from high school would be able to immediately step into a CFL game and play.

In addition to that, the coaching required to develop that young talent would be a completely different skill set than that required to coach professional talent. Even if a team was willing to hire additional coaches to train these high school kids, those kids would be missing out on game experience and would likely not develop very well anyways.

I think it is just too cost prohibitive for CFL teams to venture into this area. Even if you did develop the occasional star, you wouldn’t have much control over him leaving for the NFL and would almost surely not recover the cost to develop him. It’s not like baseball, where you spend millions every year on development costs knowing that players that make it are under your control for 6 years.

i disagree. you’ll see some casual fans drift away from the NCAA game but i dont think any big time program will lose too many fans or interest, as long as theyre still winning games, if the top talent is all the sudden signed away to a new league

You’re probably right.

The name brand of the NCAA and their schools combined with the superman stats that the top pro prospects put up against the non-pro prospect opponents are what fans enjoy watching.

They want to see Tebow put up 6 TD performances against whoever, rather than see diminished stats against fellow pro prospects playing for newly developed teams/league.

It’s hard to argue that anything can be better than the current viewing experience of college football. It’s entertainment at its best.

why can’t the NCAA system just take away the restrictions on athletes earning outside income?

That’s a great question. IIRC, the reason they can;t have jobs is because some player would make $100 a practice for turning off the lights in the weight room or gym as their “job” and the NCAA didn’t think that would be a good deal.

Realistically, the valid concern that the NCAA has with 3rd party payments is the temptation scenario of a 3rd party having influence over potential player performance and/or outcomes of games.

With payments coming from anywhere and everywhere, it might be very hard to monitor “pay per performance” payments by 3rd parties, including those payments that might go to a player with the incentive to underperform in a specific instance.

The problem is that due to time constraints an athlete really can’t have a job, even a weekend job, that would allow them to earn some spending money even if the ban on “jobs” were lifted.

So, it’s basically pay them some money for being an athlete, or let the open market take its course, and give Cam Newton’s dad whatever he wants for his kid to come play at your school.

Realistically, the valid concern that the NCAA has with 3rd party payments is the temptation scenario of a 3rd party having influence over potential player performance and/or outcomes of games.

But we all know that 3rd party payments take place now.  And since the payments are “banned”, the most lucrative potential income source for superstar players (endorsements) are absolutely off the table. Many other legitimate outlets (like paying a player to sign autographs somewhere) are also off the table because they are too conspicuous, and thus the players are much more likely to be getting income from shady third parties now than they would be if the act of paying them was not declared to be inherently shady itself.

Wow, just wow.  Colleges and Universities are in the business of education only, and I hesitate to use the word “business,” at least as far as the public or semi-public (receiving government or taxpayer subsidies) schools are concerned.

Period, end of story.  Colleges don’t sell jeans or fix computers to make money. They don’t give haircuts in the student lounge to make money. They educate young people, the most important thing you can do in a society, bar none.

Any talk of reform or restructuring should be in terms of how better to provide an education for anyone who attends the school.  Not how to enrich the students or spread the wealth that the University makes from their athletic programs.

The notion of having an employee/employer or sub-contractor relationship with athletes is absurd.  Why not hire construction workers and have the University be a general contractor?  Or the colleges can be defense contractors and they can hire employees for that? If a college is a private one, with no taxpayer subsidy - fine.  They can do anything they want.  If they are going to be using my tax money, I want them to do one thing and one thing only - provide the best education they can to all of their students.

If having various athletic programs allows more students, some of them who would never go to college otherwise, to be educated, great! The reform should be making sure that they get the best education possible, the same as all the other students.

How can anyone with a straight face suggest that a public education institution that is funded by the taxpayers be in the business of professional athletics? Are you going to advocate publicly funding the Dodgers or Mets and let them also hold a few classes for students, and then call it the University of Mets or Dodgers?

I read that entire article and there was one small paragraph devoted to how this program the author suggests might actually benefit the students’ education!  That was allowing them 2 more years of free education after their sports eligibility is expired.  One freaking paragraph with the other 50 paragraphs reading like a business proposal.

These are freaking public educational institutions!  Any discussion should start and end with how best to educate all the students! If that means ending these athletic programs then that’s where the discussion should go. If it means dismantling them as we know them and starting all over, then that’s where the discussion should go.

If you want to talk about how to enrich these young people while they play football or basketball, that discussion does not belong in the context of a discussion about colleges or Universities or education in general…

The one thing that struck me was how the coaches or university controlled the one-year revocable/renewable scholarships.  That I thought was very weird.

It’s one thing to pull the scholarship if the student is doing poorly in his classes, but it’s another to pull it because he’s doing poorly (or the coach is assessing as such) in basketball or football.

I don’t know all the ins-and-outs, but is it possible that someone is granted a scholarship, gets straight As in his engineering degree in his first year, gets hurt playing basketball, and then have his scholarship pulled?

is it possible that someone is granted a scholarship, gets straight As in his engineering degree in his first year, gets hurt playing basketball, and then have his scholarship pulled?

YES!  EXACTLY!

Sometimes schools will transition the injured student to a non-athletic scholarship, but that is totally at the school’s discretion.

From Peterson’s college guide:

If you suffer a career-ending injury and can no longer compete, some institutions will not continue to provide you with an athletic student scholarship. A new coach may not be willing to maintain your athletic scholarship. Check with the athletic department at the college to see what its policy is for each of these situations.

http://www.petersons.com/college-search/understanding-athletic-college-scholarships.aspx

28/

When’s the last time you had a good hard look at a large University?

They have hundreds or thousands of employees, including those involved in marketing, retail sales, construction, endowed chairs in military technology and so on. The only one missing from your list that I can tell is barbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some school does has an on-campus hair salon. But you can be sure there are plenty of doctors and dentists currently on school payroll that bring in huge amounts of income to the school by doing surgeries at University-owned hospitals.

Your view reflects what Universities were like perhaps 50+ years ago, and perhaps at small liberal arts colleges today. But at big schools, that’s just not reality now. It may not be “correct” but that’s most certainly how it is.

The point about public funding is a big-time red herring, too. Public funding for higher ed has been on a precipitous and sad decline. UC Berkeley gets less than 15% of its funding from the state govt, and that’s headed to 10% in this year’s budget. I was involved in school govt when I was there and the general consensus was that we needed to plan for at time when we’d be getting $0 from California.

I whole-heartedly agree with you on what universities *should* be doing, but in the context of how universities currently work, the sports arm of the university should be in synch with everything else.

Sounds like colleges wrap themselves with the flag here.  You can’t be a school-first entity, and then be able to pull a scholarship like this. 

The reality is that there are TWO purposes for this entity, one of which is education and one of which is big business, and instead of having a Chinese Wall (which is theoretically common on Wall Street to ensure no conflict of interest), the schools will shift money around at its discretion between the two competing interests.

Why is it when it comes to sports, the least American principles are applied to it?  This sense of ownership, of controlling people, of everything that America does not stand for, is being protected at all costs?

MGL/28: I don’t disagree that education *should* be the mission.  But note that the athletic teams being discussed are the ones that are substantial profit centers.

So in the case of publicly funded universities, the question actually becomes: are you willing to pay *higher* taxes (or get less return for your tax $) in order to purge these profitable endeavors that are of questionable educational merit?  Richard/6 offers a 5-point plan towards accomplishing that…

Why is it when it comes to sports, the least American principles are applied to it?  This sense of ownership, of controlling people, of everything that America does not stand for, is being protected at all costs?

What happens isf a student develops a product that receives a patent and ends up making a large profit, under the umbrella and equipment usage of the university?

Does the earning go to the student(s) that developed the product or the university?

My guess is the university.

I recall some years ago that Iowa State University developed and produced the “muscle-building” supplement HMB. Again, my guess is the university receives the profits and any “work” the students as developers performed is counted as “course work”.

I’m not sure a student could use the university’s materials, resources, etc to develop a product for which they would have control over. Likewise, an athlete couldn’t use the university’s resources and environment to create their own “brand” with earnings.

I think college’s pretty much control anything that was developed on college time and/or with college resources.

College coaches being able to pull a scholarship on a yearly basis, while being able to leave for another job at any time ... while the player’s must sit out a year to transfer, is another inconsistency among coaches/players.

That seems to be the big issue here is that the coaches make a whole LOT of money, but the players do not ... and then the coaches show the players zero loyalty when it comes time for them to leave/stay ... like the coach who recently took another job and then informed his players via text message. The lines they use during the recruiting process about family and loyalty really piss the players off when the coach leaves for more money after their second year.

Rather than change everything in regards to the players, why won’t schools just agree on strong limitations on compensation for the coaches.

Again, the big deal doesn’t necessarily seem to be the money that goes to the schools from sports, but that the adult coaches make a lot of money and the players don’t make any.

i think mgl is 100% correct that a school prime directive should be educating students. the fact that a school’s scope of traditional activities has expanded does not mean sponsoring a professional football or basketball team is a good idea.

but i do not consider myself in the ‘things are good the way they are’ camp. there is plenty of room for improvement. the specifics of how to improve are myriad, sprawling and complex but they do not include paying students to play sports. the revenue generated by any sport (not profit, fyi. few schools make a “profit” on any sport, but schools are non-profits so its just revenue anyway) is just a bonus to help the school’s primary goal. its like the concession stand at the school theatre. the money goes back into the program to help defray expenses that the school would otherwise pay for with student fees and other subsidies. schools arent going to start hiring professional actors because the sell a bunch of tickets to the school plays.

and even if some schools decided to drop out of the NCAA and ignore title IX and play players and make the whole scheme work, most schools won’t, because they wont have to. lower the caliber of players all you want and they’ll still be able to sell tickets and media rights. the traditions and the constantly replenished alumni bases arent going away.

CC/34:

Rather than change everything in regards to the players, why won’t schools just agree on strong limitations on compensation for the coaches.

If the NCAA tried to create a salary cap for coaches, I believe that would be a clear-cut case of collusion.  The coaches would sue and win.

The NCAA could do what Richard/6 suggested (use unpaid volunteers as coaches) but that would unravel the cash cow.

======

kendynamo/35:

few schools make a “profit” on any sport

For the 2010-11 academic year, there were at least 62 football programs and 59 basketball programs that were profitable by more than $1 million.

That is just according to accounting numbers, which almost certainly miss some ancillary revenue and possibly exaggerate real expenses (notice that a number of high revenue programs report net income of exactly $0).  I don’t know how huge long term costs (like stadium/arena/facility construction) are accounted for.

http://businessofcollegesports.com/2011/06/20/which-football-and-basketball-programs-produce-the-largest-profits/

http://www.bizjournals.com/memphis/news/2011/10/13/cinderellas-make-headlines.html

It’s only like the “concession stand and school theater” if people attend the drama events only for the concessions ... and they spend 100’s of times more money on snacks and drinks than they do drama tickets.

I think that college sports have approached the point where they, in some cases, are greater than the university in name and (probably earnings). I know ONE thing about the University of Alabama and Kansas University. I wonder what affect Oregon Football has had on the university as a whole? Has the university grown over the last few years? How about alumni contributions? Enrollment apps? new structures? Increased revenue?

I don’t think there are very many examples that could be analogous to what is going on with college football/sports. They money being made by the universities is amazing. I hate it, but my feeling is insignificant.

We see major sports teams fight over how close to 50/50 the owners/players get in regards to money.
Be interesting to see where that is for NCAA athletes.

I think the idea of “amateur athletics” is dated and obsolete. I think amateur has come to mean “easily exploitable”, as more and more non-pro organizations/leagues/tourneys obtain corporate sponsors and money ... and that money goes to people that are non-players.

The debate resides around whether the compensation of [1] college tuition & stipend and/or [2] opportunity to attend college that may not exist without sports scholarship is enough compensation.

#36 yeah but you have to look closer at where that revenue is coming from. few schools cover all their expenses with just ticket sales, media rights (which usually come from conference payouts) and merchandising. most need extra subsidies from student fees and contributions to count as “revenue” (ie alumni donations and tuition).

it’s not as easy to navigate but the USA Today compiled a database with more detail http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/ncaa-finances.htm

its a little unreliable because they requesting public documents which are self reported and use different internal standards. but its still better than just looking at “revenue” and “expenses” and determining “profit”, since in a for profit company you’d have completely different numbers. 

but yeah, the texases and the ohio states make enough money to cover everything and potentially pay players. instead they fund a bunch of olympic sports that are giant multi million dollar money pits.

#37 i only wish i was exploited in college as much as some of the amateur athletes at D1 schools are.

kendynamo/37:

The USA Today database you reference reports aggregate athletic department financials (usually 15+ sports teams), and most of the institutions included have non-FBS football and second-tier basketball programs. 

I hope we can agree that this discussion is not about institutions like Central Arkansas or James Madison and not about sports like fencing or gymnastics or swimming. 

The institutional support you refer to is almost always for the dozen or more athletic teams that do not capture much revenue.  Universities would not be signing coaches to multi-million dollar guaranteed contracts to run programs that required external subsidies to survive…

#40 - even looking at big schools, the athletic programs aren’t operationally profitable. like everyone’s favorite profitable school, louisville. in 09-10 they made only 18.4 in tix, 7.5 for media and big east money, 6 for merch and sponsorships, and we can throw in 5.5 for other.

thats only $37.4m in total from their ‘customers’. the rest is student fees, institutional support, the all encompassing “contributions” other sources that dont come from selling tickets and media rights. the expenses are $61m. it costs between 0.5 and 2m for your non revenue sports. so lousiville can report it however they want but the “profits” are meaningless.

and yes, schools sign multi million dollar guaranteed contracts to couches and end up without enough money to pay them all the time. like maryland just did. so they cut about 6 sports. and that still might not be enough.

kendynamo/41: We’re talking past each other. 

You’re looking at the athletic departments in aggregate.

I prefer to look at each sport independently. 

Why is it the responsibility of the Louisville basketball squad to subsidize exactly 19 non-revenue athletic squads?  And why limit it to just athletics?

If the basketball program suddenly ceased to be profitable, what would happen to those other sports?  Would they be cut?  Scaled back?  Would the school find money from elsewhere to continue them?  Either way, the answer measures the value (beyond any educational value) of the basketball squad to the university.

Re: 39-- I would gladly go back in time and trade places with a pre-MLBPA big-leaguer if I could.  That doesn’t mean they weren’t exploited.

#37 i only wish i was exploited in college as much as some of the amateur athletes at D1 schools are.

This reminds me of another popular sentiment, “male porn stars get paid?”

Same ol situation. when we see others that are in an eviable situation, they should do what they do for free, and be glad about it.

When others see us as being in that enviable situation, and suggest that we should do it for far less money, or even less money, they should mind their own F-Business.

Attending college costs money. It’s a social group. Sure, athletes can eat in the cafeteria for free. Sure they get some team clothing and stipend to pay for some things. But there’s also things like dates, entertainment (video games, etc), going out, getting home for a weekend, that cost money. Real money.

Since the NCAA prevents you from getting a job to make a little cash and/or receiving gifts, you’re kinda screwed in some ways. If you had a great year and your efforts and hard work are really appreciated by the local guy that owns the dealership, he cannot give you a rental car to drive home. With no job and little to no income, you may not have money to get home for a weekend or break either.

Sooner or later, being a D-1 athlete isn;t going to be the “dream of dreams” it appears to be on the outside.

I always think back to Chris Weber’s comments about trying to borrow money from other kids wearing Michigan #4 jerseys, so he could scrounge up some McDonalds. But, i also wondered if those were accurate stories, since CWeb attended a private prep school rather than the public league like Rose.

#42 - you can look at the numbers in aggregate or by sport, its all come from the same self reported sources released through Freedom of Information Act requests and the Department of Education. all the numbers are meaningless when talking in terms of profits as if they were real companies or publicly traded.

and im not saying some programs arent raking in tons of money. clearly they are. im saying those “profits” arent what people think they are. they are usually much smaller or non existent. even just for basketball and football.

as to why football and basketball (but mostly football) should help subsidize women’s sports, well, you may have a point. i think its an all right arrangement.

and i guess i have a different definition of exploited than some people. I dont think a guy who has no chance of going pro but is still getting a scholarship to play D1 sports at world class facilities (academically and athletically) is being exploited. no matter how much revenue the program generates.

i mean hey, maybe girl scouts are being exploited. people are paid a living to produce those cookies. i enjoy eating them. but the girls providing all the labor dont make a dime. shameful.

#43 - i guess we disagree then. for the most part, i dont have much sympathy for people complaining about their salary if there are people who would do the same job just as competently for less money. usually. it’ll depend.

for scholarships, most people are getting a great deal. some people are being blocked by things like the NFL age restrictions, but the vast majority of college athlete’s aren’t worth paying the equivalent of a college scholarship. so who exactly are we feeling sorry for? in most cases?

the vast sums you see being thrown around are for the value the school brand generates, not the players. if all that value was coming from the players themselves and their athletic ability, then they’d all be making money post college in sports. but most dont. so the schools are educating people for free just because they have athletic talent that is worth zero dollars to the rest of the world. i fail to see the exploitation there.

but again, there are cases where players are in less than ideal situations. a guy like weber isn’t doing himself any favors by going to college. not with the current set up. however, the absolute worst case scenario is either he goes to school for a year and is broke for a year, or he doesnt go to school for a year and is broke for a year. it sucks. i would do things to change the current system if i had a magic wand. it still wouldnt be have a school like michigan pay him tens of thousands of dollars. i think there are better solutions.

Wow, this thread has grown, I will have to go back and re-read the comments.

I think it would be enough reform for me if they just lifted many of the restrictions off college athletes that are not placed on other students.  Want to sell your jersey?  Fine.  A bowl ring?  Fine
A booster of the school wants to hook you up with tattoos?  Fine.  A booster wants to give you a kush job and care little how well you perform or even show up? Fine.  They want to offer a recruit money to attend their alma mater?  Fine

The NCAA could stop wasting time investigating petty stuff and spend time on academic eligibility. 

My only hope is that any benefits of the boosters would be no strings attached.  If the recruit gets booted, flunks out, gets injured, whatever the booster would not be able to regain their unwise investment.

We have to keep our scenarios similar.

Girl Scouts - We don’t mind that the girls aren’t getting paid because we assume that the money they earn goes right back into activities and programs that the girls want and will benefit them. If we found out that the regional director took all the money and bought herself a 350K house, we would probably feel differently.

As one that turned down a D2 scholarship to attend a private D3 school with a better baseball team I agree completely about the scholarship aspect. I could have saved myself 70K in loans which is going to be a whole lot more by the time I eventually pay it off.

The point could be made that many of the athlete’s don’t even earn their scholarship money through on-field performance.

What bothers me is Andrew Luck cannot get paid for giving private throwing lessons, but his QB coach can. Same with any other player. There’s money to be made in private instruction. The college coaches making this money aren’t feeding it back through the program.

The other issue is merchandising. It’s one thing to sell a Stanford t-shirt. It’s another issue entirely to sell a #12 Stanford replica jersey.

Ed O’Bannin challenged this a while ago when video games, who can’t use real names, use the players likeness and associated attributes. For example NCAAF cannot include the player Tim Tebow, so they put a fake name to a 6’3 245 pound left handed throwing #15 wearing great rushing QB. They do this with every player so the game is very realistic without using real names. Then guys like me will change the names to their real names and share those files through the Internet.

That’s what I mean by exploited.

Anyone want to buy a jersey without a number on it? Anyone want to buy a video game with random players where Army is the 3rd ranked team and Alabama is #112?

Again it’s one thing to pay for a kid’s tuition and books, but the cost of attending college doesn’t end there. Being able to earn spending money is something they should be allowed to do.

If Tim Tebow signs a football for me, I can sell it for whatever I can get. But Tim Tebow cannot sign a ball and sell it himself.

I can’t pay Richardson to appear on my radio show, but I can enjoy any profits made from his appearance. His coach on the other hand can have his own show and host and dinners, etc.

I’m saying that’s not right and can be exploitation in cases where the athlete is not being compensated anywhere close to the amount of money everyone else is making off him. That they might eventually make big money as a pro isnt justification IMO.

the vast sums you see being thrown around are for the value the school brand generates, not the players.

No, you need both.  The school brand AND the players.  Texas Tech and South Carolina’s football programs (for example) apparently lacked a school brand and failed to generate “vast sums” before they recruited players that won games.

What revenue would you expect them to generate if they moved from FBS to FCS?

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if all that value was coming from the players themselves and their athletic ability, then they’d all be making money post college in sports. but most dont. so the schools are educating people for free just because they have athletic talent that is worth zero dollars to the rest of the world.

If by “most” you mean literally >50% then sure.

If you mean that the exceptions are few and insignificant that’s absolutely wrong.  There are 10,933 U.S. college alumni who have played pro basketball in the US or overseas in the past 5 years.  If 85% of them played Division-I (WAG) that would be over 25 ex-players on average per school.

http://www.usbasket.com/Ex-College-Basketball-Tracker.asp

In the case of football, there isn’t the same global audience, yet there are at any time about 30 schools with 20+ players in the NFL.

Considering that the average NFL career is 3.5 years and that there are 85 football scholarships per school (roughly one-fourth of whom might be graduating seniors or departing underclassmen with NFL ambitions) that’s not too shabby a percentage of pros among those who are recruited by the top schools.

And all this goes without even mentioning that if someone wants to test the financial viability of a large minor league football operation, the college-run NCAA monopoly would be the biggest competitor and obstacle.

#47 - how can you possibly say Andrew Luck has been exploited? he could have entered the draft after his last year after his sophomore year because he redshirted a year. he chose an extra year at stanford over being a first round draft pick. if the scales were in anyway whatsoever not in his favor he should have left.

im not going to tell you there aren’t rules that should be tweaked or changed. its obviously not perfect. eventually we’ll get to a semantic argument but i see very little exploitation going on, and a whole lot of net positives for student athletes.

#48 - im aware college football teams requore actual players for the games to take place. my point is if you lopped off the top 5% of all players in D1 and gave them a million dollars to play in a pro league, you are not going to diminish the value of any of the teams. if a team drops off in performance they will lose brand value. but if everybody drops off the same amount of talent and the teams dont change quality relative to each other you are not going to see teams lose may fans. i said before, maybe some casual fans leave but overall not much of a difference.

texas tech and south carolina were able to increase theyre already enormous team values by winning more games, yes. a lot of that, probably most, was due to better recruiting. yes. i think the money those teams created should be plowed back into those schools. i dont think the players deserve any of it. i hope there is a day when any player who would rather not play in college has an opportunity to develop his skills professionally or at least semi professionally, like they do in baseball or hockey. it sucks that they can not now. if some new league came in and swooped up all the players between 18-20 that want to do that, the best teams would still be the ones that recruit the best of the kids that want to go to college, and i dont think you’ll see much of a drop in popularity or revenue generated by those schools.

i could be wrong about that, but i see no reason to believe otherwise right now.

and how can it be the monopoly of the NCAA stopping a pro league? one pays and the other doesnt. its the NFL monopolizing the pro leagues and then setting an age restriction that is the obstacle. the UFL operates right now and pays $40K a year. kids choose college over it. the UFL will gladly take the kids that think 40K is worth going to college if they’re NFL caliber.

and thats great there are more options for basketball players. hopefully soon no one will “need” to go to college that doesnt want to. as it is they only “have” to play on a college team for one year. i think we can all agree that its a good thing if more and more kids take a year after high school to play in semi pro and foreign leagues instead of wasting a year being exploited in college.

kendynamo/49:
I reject your premise that you can lop off the top 5% of D1 players without affecting relative team quality.

Players talent follows a bell curve and the top players are not uniformly distributed among teams.  The top 5% are heavily concentrated among relatively few teams.  Some of those players are even second stringers on the powerhouse teams.

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i think the money those teams created should be plowed back into those schools. i dont think the players deserve any of it.

So who does deserve it? Just the coaches and the AD?  Or the fencing, tennis, and swimming teams?  What criteria are you using to judge what each interested party deserves?

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how can it be the monopoly of the NCAA stopping a pro league

The incumbency advantage in sports is enormous.

ESPN et. al. have wall-to-wall college football coverage every fall Saturday and long term contracts valued at >$1 billion/yr invested in preserving that. 

Any competitor for top high-school talent would have to invest a large fortune and probably accept losses for many years as it tried to build a brand and gain traction.

Athletes might be scared off by the possibility the league could fold and leave them stranded without a place to play. 

And if the NCAA eventually felt its revenue was threatened, it could opt to simply reform its rules to entice the lost athletes back and thus eliminate the new league’s main competitive advantage.

#47 - how can you possibly say Andrew Luck has been exploited?

Replace the name “Andrew Luck” with any other name of a player that would like to earn some spending money, but is not allowed to. I simply picked a “popular name”. I also used Tebow, Richardson, etc. I could have said Herschel Walker, maurice Claret, and a whole host of other names. I picked Andrew Luck because I just watched him play a couple days ago, and his name is the most recognizable in the 2011 season.

Lots of players could make some money selling autographs, providing individual instruction, working football camps, working an actual job, etc.

I don’t view this as black or white situation: It’s not heaven or hell for the players. That Andrew Luck can’t earn spending money may not make college a bad situation for him. I recall watching a Stanford baseball game where the starting pitcher’s father was the chief cardiologist at a major hospital. The SP was presumed to be a top pick and get a million dollar bonus. I’m guessing that life in college for him is maybe a little bit different than the typical college athlete.

Andrew Luck came back for a senior season. Maurice Claret wanted to leave after one season.

I don;t think either situation serves as the hammer that determines whether college players should be able to make some spending money and/or are exploited by lots of people making money off them, while they cannot.

What kendynamo is saying is that you can lop off the top 5% of talent in college football and the distribution of talent would remain the same. The elite college programs would still have far more elite talent than the others. This wouldn’t change. Alabama, Florida, and Ohio State are still going to be powerhouses. They’re still going to pack their stadiums each week. They’re going to remain atop of the NCAA polls and plays in the same bowl games creating the same revenue for the school.

Since this is thread is about ideas I thought I’d list a few to improve upon the system.

Scholarships

NCAA teams can have a maximum of 85 scholarship players on the roster. From 2007 through 2010 Auburn signed 119 recruits. The current NCAA regulation is 25 recruits per year, but many teams regularly oversign, especially ones in the SEC. The way the current system is set up it encourages teams to essentially throw darts and keep the ones who are best while cutting those who aren’t. The non-guaranteed scholarship has been discussed in this thread and it’s a huge problem.

My suggestion is to throw away the 25 per year limit and make it 85 every four years. If the NCAA wants to cut the roster size then the scholarships over four years should equal the number of scholarships allowed. For now that is 85. This is something that would be easily accomplished. The University of Iowa signed 88 recruits from 2007 to 2010. Dropping that a few would have had little affect. There’s no reason a school should be allowed to sign nearly 120 players over four years.

Secondly, all athletic scholarships should be guaranteed with a couple exceptions. It’s justifiable to revoke the scholarship for misconduct and grades. However, a university cannot revoke the scholarship of one student for something like public intox unless they revoke the scholarship of all players for public intox, or whatever else you want to come up with. The university cannot create misconduct rules to eliminate certain athletes from the roster and scholarship. It must be consistent. If they won’t revoke the scholarship of Johnny Quarterback for something they can’t revoke the scholarship of Backup Bobby for the same thing.

Universities can also revoke the scholarship if the athlete underperforms in the classroom for two consecutive semesters. However, after the first semester, the university should be required to assist the athlete in any way possible, including cutting back on practice time without affecting his eligibility to play on Saturdays.

Finally, the NCAA should set up an oversight committee that is funded by the richest athletic departments and run by an outside agency. This committee operates at all BCS universities and is responsible for overseeing the academic progress that athletes are making. They are to ensure that all tests are being taken by the athlete and if caught cheating he is immediately ineligible to play for two years. The information is turned over to the university and they can kick him out of school if they wish.

Any player who is injured keeps his scholarship. Any player who follows the conduct and performs acceptably in the classroom keeps his scholarship regardless of how disappointing a football player he may have become. Most importantly, the 85 scholarship limit per four years remains 85 regardless of the number of athletes who are dismissed from their scholarship for various reasons. They can’t take away 5 scholarships over 2 years and then be allowed to sign 90 players. The coaching staffs must become more responsible for the athletes they sign.

A high school player who signs a Letter of Intent to one university, but does not meet the academic standards to attend the university is free from that LOI. The university cannot stash this player at a local JUCO waiting for him to get better grades. This has helped create the system in which teams oversign. They intend to sign players who need some JUCO and then cut the other guys as soon as they’re ready. This must stop.

Revenue

For every dollar the athletic department spends making their facilities nicer, they must send a dollar to the university to help in other departments. Few athletic departments give back to the university even though some are quite capable of doing so. Since the university isn’t going to be paying the athlete they do not need state of the art athletic facilities that are comparable to the NFL. It’s more important to put that money to better use than creating a dream facility that is completely unnecessary.

Injuries

As mentioned already, injured athletes retain their scholarship. Above that, they also have any costs related to the injury paid for by the university for the rest of their lives.

Education

This is actually the easiest one to write. The university must help in every possible way to ensure the athlete graduates from college. If he or she does not do so in four years as most do not, the scholarship is extended until graduation as long as there is acceptable progress. As said before, if this requires extra attention practice time is cut and it will not affect his eligibility on game days. Education is first. Athletics is second.

If the NCAA did all of this I’d be quite happy.

I wish there was all this talk about exploitation when I was an aspiring chef. Like many many others, I worked for free for two years. I made not one nickel, worked an average of 50 hours per week and the only thing I got in return was a couple of names I could put on my resume. This, by the way, was after attending culinary school. Walk by any higher end restaurant and you can be assured that at least 25% of the kitchen staff is unpaid. Charlie Trotter spent 5 years working for practically nothing in Chicago and Europe.

It would be one thing if this wasn’t common, but it’s quite common. Most culinary schools have an unpaid externship as part of the curriculum. Many continue working for no pay as I did. I haven’t heard a word about how higher end restaurants are exploiting young and talented chefs for their own gain. Go to a city like Chicago and New York and there are far more aspiring chefs being exploited than there are college football players.

You won’t find many who don’t see the benefits of that system though.

As mentioned already, injured athletes retain their scholarship. Above that, they also have any costs related to the injury paid for by the university for the rest of their lives.

That is patently false.  You might want to tell that to Joseph Agnew or Chic Kelly for example.

I’ve already provided a link to the Peterson’s College Guide which states otherwise.

Schools often move injured athletes to medical scholarships that don’t count against NCAA limits—in part to avoid the bad publicity of dropping an injured athlete.  But they are under zero obligation to do so.

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As for the 5% argument, do the same thought experiment for MLB or any other sport.  You don’t think that removing all the (say) 4 or 5+ standard deviation talents from the player pool will affect parity?  Especially so when there is no mechanism like a “draft” or a “salary cap” designed to uniformly distribute the stars?

@53:
If you really want to make the chef apprentice analogy comparable:

You would need to have collusion among every restaurant in the country.  They would have to agree not to offer anyone under a certain age a paid position, regardless of talent or productivity.

And if an unpaid apprentice tried to play entrepreneur and make any money on the side on their own, they would be blacklisted by the entire industry for several years.

Michael K/54 - please read my comment again. I was talking about my suggestion which ensures they keep the scholarship. I addressed the fact that they do not at this point.

No, it won’t affect parity. Right now Alabama is getting the best talent in recruiting. If they take away the top 5% they are still going to come away with the best talent in recruiting. If you take the top 50% Alabama will still recruit the best of the remaining 50%.

In baseball if you take away the top 5%, the Yankees are still going to have a higher payroll than other teams and will get the most talent.

Say you take 10 players away and now the 11th player is the best. The Yankees will sign him. The 12th best, now the second best, will go the Red Sox and so on. The distribution of talent will remain the same.

I believe there is far greater collusion with chefs than with college athletes. The schools that teach culinary arts are actively engaged in helping higher end restaurants succeed by providing cheap labor. The established chefs demand labor be provided for free because of their popularity. I’d also strongly suggest you spend a few days in one of these kitchens because the abuse these unpaid employees take makes the abuse these college athletes take look like a dream job.

For most aspiring chefs, you need employment with a top chef. In order to do that you have to be willing to work for free because many others are. You have to be willing to put up with the $hit from the executive chef that will inevitably come your way. You can do that or you can hope to manage a restaurant that had terrible food and horrible service (like an Applebee’s). That’s the equivalent of riding the bus in Rookie League at the age of 35.

@57:
In 2011 MLB, the top 5% accounted for what, about 30% of the WAR?  The next 5% account for about 20% of the WAR by my quick and dirty math.  The top 50% I would hazard to guess account for over 90% of the WAR.

That’s probably not completely fair—I’m conflating talent with performance.

Then again, a league with a very narrow age range and 9,000 athletes (FBS football) figures to have an even bigger disparity between star level and replacement level than an all-ages league with 750 athletes (MLB).

And you can’t look at the 21st century Yankees, Redsox etc. because there is nothing analogous to the amateur draft to create parity among NCAA schools.  Look at the pre-1965 Yankees, Dodgers, Cardinals, Giants, etc. and imagine that all the HOF talent they could sign and stockpile was off the table.

If you took away the top 10% of FBS athletes, the affect on the MAC would be negligible, but the SEC would have a hard time distinguishing itself from the Big East.

If you remove the top 5%, 10% or whatever the replacement level baseline changes. the only thing that changes is that the next best player becomes the best player. He’s now the most valuable player in the game. A league average ballplayer now might be a legitimate superstar at his peak if 5% or 10% of the best players were gone.

The best available talent is still going to choose to sign with Alabama, LSU, Florida, Ohio State, and so on. The next tier of talent will sign the next tier of teams and the rest of the talent will sign with the Big East, MAC, and so on. Every team gets a little worse, but relatively speaking they’re as strong as they ever were.

@60:
No, it’s not linear.  It’s a bell curve (or at least the right tail of a bell curve).

Compare the variance among player stats in FBS vs. FCS if you’re still not convinced.

I remember a senior at my high school being offered $50 an hour to watch a door… that was the college’s method of trying to bribe him away from another college. The idea is he could get paid while doing homework, listening to music, or whatever as long as he was near the aforementioned door.

Late here, but

So who does deserve it? Just the coaches and the AD?

is the least discussed aspect of this entire topic, yet I believe it’s the biggest issue.  Whether you think a small percentage of players being insufficiently compensated outweighs a larger percentage of 18 year olds getting a free education based on their abilities in a sport that society at large clearly doesn’t value very much probably depends on what you believe about the value of having more 22 year olds with college degrees than there otherwise would be without amateur athletics.  I take no position here because I honestly don’t know what’s more preferable from a public policy standpoint.

But from an efficient allocation of resources perspective, the entire system is a monopsony in which the higher-ups at “non-profit” organizations profit massively off artificially depressed labor costs.  Just because universities flush most of their football and basketball revenue down the drain on other sports doesn’t make it okay for the institutions to do so because as tax-free, non-profit organizations, universities don’t care about bottom lines.  But many university employees have salaries tied to the success of its football and basketball programs that are not tied to the overall plus/minus figures of the athletic department.

The obvious one is the football coaches.  Turner Gill, for example, made over $2MM last year.  But what about the ADs?  The assistant ADs?  There are probably other “non-athletic” university employees whose job security involves the success of the football and basketball programs.  If the question is “who’s actually getting the money?” off big-time college athletics, it’s the people who are moving the money around, maintaining a cushy salary while the entity’s bottom line fluctuates.  Didn’t Jeff Skilling do that same thing?

-sorry for the delays, lots of good points.

@50 - others have brought it up but you can take as many players out of the NCAA as you want, as long as every school is following the same rules, youre still going to have a top 25 and those top 25 schools are going to generate revenue no matter who plays for them.  the best basketball players are only “forced” to stay in college for 1 year at most, and the tournament is making more money then ever. if losing all the best players to professional leagues had a negative affect on the quality of play, its not manifesting itself in loss of fans or revenue.

as for who “deserves” the revenue. the schools do. and thats who gets it. then they decide what happens to it.

@51 - i dont see it as black and white either. the point was you have a guy with a choice, A is $10M. B is something else. He chose B. that anyone would think that someone is being exploited after choosing option B shows how out of hand the discussion has gotten.

i think it basically comes down to if you think it is ever ok for schools to raise revenue by staging sporting events. i think the idea of educating kids for free is an awesome idea. i think the idea of raising money to do this by selling tickets and media rights to sporting events involving these students is also great. if the NCAA and the schools started making huge bucks on television rights to the college world series or the frozen four, would there be any problem? i dont think so. i think its because the biggest “injustices” are caused by the pro leagues, and it is the private, for profit industry that should be fixing them.

in my opinion, the discussion on NCAA reform should focus on how to get the schools to put academics first and sports second, not the other way around. get them to stop making a mockery of the term “student athlete”. but no one school wants to be the first to do this because they’d lose out if everyone else doesn’t follow suit. and the NCAA is too cowardly and corrupt to try and instigate it themselves.

youre still going to have a top 25 and those top 25 schools are going to generate revenue no matter who plays for them. 

1) College baseball and college hockey have a top 25 also.  What kind of revenue are they generating?  Note that those are the 2 most comparable sports (to football and basketball) were high school seniors have better options.

2) Do you dispute that sports talent (whether it’s football, basketball or gymnastics or whatever) follows a bell curve, just like practically any other skill?

If there’s a normal distribution, there will be many more 3 SD talents than 3.5 SD talents, and many more 3.5 SD talents than 4 SD talents etc…

Let’s say you remove all the 3.5+ SD talents from the NCAA pool.  Even if the recruiting pecking order remained exactly the same, there would be far more parity.  Where 4 SD talents competed against 3 SD talents previously, now 3.4 SD talents might be competing against 2.95 SD talents.  The result would be more competitive contests, even if the old favorite is still the favorite.

If you want a more concrete example, let’s look at the MLB player population as a guide:

MLB expanded by ~50 players in 1998, 1993, 1977, and 1962, and by ~100 players in 1969.

Where was the big drop in replacement level each of those years?  Here is an effort by Colin to track replacement level over time:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=12377

Do you see any effect of expansion on replacement level?  Me neither.  Whatever tiny expansion-effect exists is hard to measure and easily lost in the noise. 

On the other hand, what would happen if the top 50 MLB players were recruited away to play baseball on another planet?  As we’ve just seen, replacement level wouldn’t be affected by a reduction of 50 players.  But “star” level would be affected very much: we could expect the top MVP candidates to be worth around 6 WAR instead of 8+ WAR. 

The Yankees and Redsox might still sign the cream of the remaining crop.  But those players might have names like Konerko or Beltre or Hamels.  Meanwhile, the Royals, Astros, et. al. would have gained relative ground.  Their below average players would be much closer to the league average.

the best basketball players are only “forced” to stay in college for 1 year at most, and the tournament is making more money then ever.

Those 1-year players are often the biggest draws.

And if it were a truly free market with no collusion, players would be able to test the pro waters (like baseball players who are also recruited for another sport) and then opt to attend school on athletic scholarship at a later date if things don’t work out.

As it stands now, a player who tests the pro waters is forever black-listed from that sport by all NCAA institutions.

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as for who “deserves” the revenue. the schools do. and thats who gets it. then they decide what happens to it.

So you approve using it for any purpose whatsoever regardless of how it relates to education?  If so, why shouldn’t a university be allowed to decide for itself if its athletes deserve a portion of it? 

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the discussion on NCAA reform should focus on how to get the schools to put academics first and sports second, not the other way around

Richard/6 offered some suggestions for exactly that.  Any objections? 

The problem is that any equitable reforms that put academics first invariably involve leaving money on the table.  And few if any university Presidents have demonstrated any willingness to make that trade.

Some schools did make the trade a long time ago.  100 years ago, the Ivy League was the pre-eminent football conference.  And they ultimately decided to put academics first (at least moreso than their peers).

#65 - 1) yes, as ive said, you’ll see some casual fans drift away if the top talent coming out of high school in football and basketball had a thriving minor league system where most of the best players went. however, because of the traditions and nature of the fan bases, i doubt you’d see much of a drop off for the two revenue sports. as ive also mentioned, ncaa baseketball has been slowly losing talent to the NBA (which only “forces” players to go to 1 year of college) and other leagues and has not had an appreciable drop popularity.

2) i believe everything you’ve said here. that doesnt change the fact that regardless of changes to the distribution of talent, you are still going to have a top 25 (and top 50, and top 100) NCAA football teams and people are going to spend a lot of money following and watching those college teams. there are D1-AA teams that make lots of money with zero pro prospects. college sports are different than pros, people dont just follow the talent. if the university of michigan is one of the top 50 or so schools in the country, they are going to sell out a 100,000+ stadium every game. period.

by the way, if i wasnt clear, i think the system in baseball and hockey is better. but no matter what system develops people are always going to follow college sports.

#66 sorry if my formatting is confusing, i havent figured out any of those tricks yet

1) yes i like the idea of keeping access to education open when things dont pan out professionally. the specifics are beyond me at the moment but i also dont like how college basketball players are forced to make so many seemingly arbitrary choices so early with such long lasting repercussions.

2) yes, for the most part the schools are free to do whatever they want with it. throwing a $500,000 crack party for the trustees like tryone biggums is probably out of the question, but otherwise most things within reason are fine. and yes, if schools want to pay people to play sports for them, i dont care. theyd have to secede from the NCAA but that would be there choice. i think for most schools its a terrible idea. for JuCos or the NAIA i think it may be worth a try.

3) im not a big fan of a lot of the suggestions from Richard/6. i dont know why you’d want to limit the amount of money coming in. i would want to increase the amount of money coming in so you could have more scholarships and opportunities to educate kids.

and i think if more schools were like the ivies it would be better, although i would allow scholarships. plus its not like the ivies dont lower their admission standards for athletes. ideally i think the service academies offer the best example. high academic standards, guaranteed scholarships, no worries about spending money.

there are D1-AA teams that make lots of money

Do you have a source for that?  I’m not aware of any examples, setting aside rare short term (1 or 2 year) surprises.

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if the university of michigan is one of the top 50 or so schools in the country, they are going to sell out a 100,000+ stadium every game

The nosebleed seats wouldn’t be going for $85, and the TV networks wouldn’t be investing > $1 billion/year if the top pro prospects were playing in some other league (especially if that other league scheduled games on Saturdays).

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i dont know why you’d want to limit the amount of money coming in.

Because the pursuit of that money is what drives the institutional focus towards activities that at best have little to do with the schools’ academic mission and at worst are counter-productive with respect to that mission.  (High-salaried coaching carousel, new stadiums with luxury boxes, shoe/apparel contracts, conference re-alignments etc.)

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PS-- You can use:
[ quote ]text here[ / quote ]
(remove the spaces between the brackets) if you want to indent something you’re responding to.

#69 - sure if you check out this link here (the one that shows all the athletic departments generating revenue but not “profit")

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/ncaa-finances.htm

you’ll see lots of small schools with no pro talent generating revenue (still no profits tho). i just checked ap state, 2009-10, almost $3m in tickets, another few million in conference/tournament money, another few million in merch, etc. montana had $4.7m in tickets alone.  delaware $2.3m in tickets. thats just the first few i thot to check.

as for lower demand for tickets and tv contracts if the talent left, i dont know how you figure. evidence? basketball has thrived before, during and after players started leaving early for the NBA. i dont see why it would slow down if the NBA eliminated their one year waiting rule. as for football, again, i dont see how. the college fan is drawn to the institution, not the players. its an alumni base and a regional identity. again, maybe i’m wrong, but the notion that NCAA football popularity will drop due to talent flight doesn’t make any sense. talk to some die hard fans (there are heaps of them). they’re not throwing out their jerseys because more guys leave. the NFL could eliminate their waiting period, expand to double the number of teams and double the roster size for each team and you arent going to see any (ok, maybe a tiny percentage) college fans quit on their teams.

and we agree that the relentless pursuit of football and basketball revenue can have deleterious affects on a school. not to open a whole nother can of worms, but penn state is a glaring example. but IF the system is run right, (and it is not right now), then i see no problem with huge stadiums, coaching contracts, shoe sponsorships or conference realignment. e.g. bowl games where all the revenue goes back to the school? good. bowl games were the bowl “executives” siphon off hundreds of thousands of dollars to do whatever it is they think they are doing? abhorrent.

and thanks for the tip on quotes. im not positive i’ll get this right so i saved it for the end here. let me see.

[ quote ]rutgers has an exemplary college football program[ / quote ]

hah! well i blew that simple task!

@71: No spaces between “[” or “]” and “quote” or “/quote” (you’ll know if it worked when you Preview)

@70: I interpret “teams that make lots of money” to mean profitable programs, not programs that are revenue neutral.

Montana and Appalachian State might be the 2 most prominent FCS programs.  Here is Appalachian State’s filing from 2009, which shows a tiny profit:

http://www.goasu.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=21500&ATCLID=204814658

And here is the Montana AD in 2010 claiming that his program is the only one in FCS to break even:

http://www.montanagrizzlies.com/news/db.aspx?n=8670&m=

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If you’re looking for evidence that absolute talent levels (not just relative talent levels) affect revenues, you could:

* Compare baseball/hockey NCAA vs. pro revenue with football/basketball NCAA vs. pro revenue
* Look at schools that moved between FBS & FCS
or Division I and Division II in basketball
* Examine all the pre-game promotion and media coverage that focuses on star players and especially their draft stock (including postseason all star games)

Just using common sense, if you worked for ESPN, would you really be so quick to bet hundreds of millions of dollars that losing all the coveted pro prospects won’t ultimately affect ratings?  Even if games featuring the departed higher caliber talent were competing head-to-head?

Where is the objective evidence to demonstrate that only school brands (and not talent level) matters?

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Lifting the NBA and NFL waiting periods would be a nice step, but it’s just one piece of the problem.  18 year-olds are still maturing physically and NBA and NFL franchises (unlike their MLB or NHL counterparts) are not structured to carry and nurture future stars who are not quite ready to contribute.

And as we already covered, the NCAA’s rules that black-list athletes who test the pro waters are another anti-competitive practice which can have a major impact on a high-school athlete’s decision making.

Ken, the proper html for quoting something is this

text text text

What? You can’t even use special characters for the < and >? I’ve never seen that before on a site.

< blockquote >text text text

Those blockquote elements should be without any spaces at all.

Here, check this out: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_blockquote.asp

#73 - it goes well beyond montana and ap state. again, just off the top of my head, and looking them up, maine, north dakota, north dakota, ND state all raked in millions. or how about all the lower rung 1A schools that have no pro talent but still generate revenue? and again, there are very few “profitable” teams. and even then the term is meaningless since they are no profit institutions. there is only various levels of revenue.

as for espn, they are going to televise whatever brings in peoples eyeballs. they care not one rip about true talent levels. and college football is going to bring in eyeballs no matter what is going on in the professional realm. i mean have you ever met a notre dame fan before?

re: baseball/hockey vs basketball/football - they are different sports with different traditions. and there are still plenty of college hockey programs with inferior talent that have big followings.

re: schools moving up divisions in the NCAA - that is a school moving up relative to its peers. schools that win their conference or move up in the rankings or just win more are going to generate more revenue. if they have more talent but lose, you will not see a similar rise.

re: draft hype, that is because the pro leagues are a big deal.

for objective evidence, i’d like to point out for yet another time the popularity of college basketball, despite the best players no leaving for the NBA. or the history of college football. it used to be the most talented players were in college and then retired. the NFL teams would get beat by the best college teams. now it is the reverse and people are still mad for NCAA football.

and again, if the NFL simply double or tripled in size next year and drafted twice as many players from college, all of them underclassmen, and the talent level dropped uniformly across the NCAA, you would not see a dip in fan support, except maybe i tiny percentage of casual fans but i doubt it.

if all people cared about was true talent level, zero people would watch college football, because everyone of those teams would get annhilated by the worst NFL team. yet the jacksonville jaguars struggle for fans and ohio state will sell out 110,000 seats during a 6-6 year.

having been around many ardent college football fans, i find it impossible to think that their support for the team would wane one iota should the talent level at the NCAA drop across the board.

its all kind of beside the point though. regardless of what would happen to college football talent levels, i think it would be good if there were robust minor leagues, and no blacklisting, etc. if that causes interest in college football to collapse, so be it. i cant see that happening though. the big schools still have huge student populations and massive alumni networks. yes so do the ivies and no one cares about them, but thats because they stink compared to other schools. if they were in the top 25 people would be wearing columbia and dartmouth hats the same way they wear duke and stanford hats now.

The talent level at the college sports level is laughable. I’m really surprised anyone is arguing that if you took more talent away from the NCAA that fewer people would watch. Simply put, the talent level at college is a joke. The entire state of Iowa doesn’t have its eyes glued to the television on Saturdays because of the talent level of the teams they’re following. Iowa is a solid FBS program, but inferior to many. In recent years they have had a lot of players turn pro. They’ve had some 11 win seasons and some 6 and 7 win seasons. You’re a fan of a college team for reasons other than talent level. If talent level is what interested people most wouldn’t even pay attention to college football yet it’s a billion dollar business. Does anyone really think that Ohio State and Michigan fans care about the talent level when those two teams are playing one another? There’s going to be more than 100,000 in attendance if you replaced the entire team with a different one. And as long as attendance and viewership remains high advertising won’t be affected.

In my opinion, I think it’s quite likely that an additional league would serve as a playing ground for those who do not have acceptable grades in college. Some of them are very good, but the bulk of the talent would choose to remain at college. If that league chose to play its games on Saturdays it would be very short lived. It already would be, but choosing to do that seals the inevitable fate of the league even sooner.

There is no evidence at all that the NCAA would lose fans if some of the best athletes left yet there is evidence that it would succeed as well as it has been.

Michael K, are you a college sports fan? I ask because I find it hard to believe any college sports fan would be arguing what you are. I can’t help but think it takes a misunderstanding of why college sports are so popular to believe that if some of the best talent left that it would hurt college football or basketball. I see this all the time by those who are primarily professional sports fans.

re: baseball/hockey vs basketball/football - they are different sports with different traditions.

If you don’t see the relevance of this then you’re completely missing the forest for trees.

*WHY* do these sports have such different traditions at the collegiate level?

Ivy League baseball was once enormously popular and was among the first programming telecast nationwide with the advent of television.

If you swapped the structures of pro baseball and pro hockey with the structures of pro football and pro basketball 60+ years ago then each of these sports would have very different traditions than they do today at the collegiate level.

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Re: Notre Dame, Ohio State, Michigan, and irrelevance of W-L records etc.

How many alumni do each of these schools have?  How many alumni does Cornell have?  How many alumni does the Ivy League have overall?

Which schools boasted the football powerhouses and the most fervent fan bases 100 years ago?  Why can’t Yale—even when it contends for the league title—fill the Yale Bowl to even 50% of capacity anymore except for the Harvard game (and even that game doesn’t sell out)?

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for objective evidence, i’d like to point out for yet another time the popularity of college basketball, despite the best players no leaving for the NBA

What is the benchmark you’re comparing to?  This is not an entirely recent development-- it’s older than Moses Malone and Michael Jordan.

Do you really dispute that college basektball would be slightly more profitable if the likes of Jordan or John Wall or Carmelo Anthony played a few extra seasons?

Are you really comparing a sport (basketball) where less than 0.5% of recruiting targets leave for the pros before completing 4 full years with sports (baseball and hockey) where 35+% of recruiting targets never play a game?

@78:

There is no evidence at all that the NCAA would lose fans if some of the best athletes left yet there is evidence that it would succeed as well as it has been.

That’s some statement after you’ve ignored every piece evidence to the contrary in favor of nothing but your personal opinion.

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The talent level at the college sports level is laughable.
...
Michael K, are you a college sports fan?

Are you a college sports fan, David Mlck?  If so, you must be aware of basketball teams where at least 3 or 4 of the 5 starters saw pro action?  Or football players who saw pro action even though they weren’t good enough to play for most or all of their college careers?

Would you characterize the talent level of minor league baseball as “laughable?”

Minor league baseball is a multi-million dollar business at the upper levels, even though it is not structured to be independently competitive; it’s structured entirely to serve the benefit of it’s billion-dollar parent business.

Of course the ~$200 million spent by MLB teams each year on draft signing bonuses (even with artificial restraints in place) speaks for itself.

What evidence? That Yale and Harvard were once powerhouses? Might that have to do with the fact that they were two of the very few programs in existence early on? And that as more and more programs were created they lost fans? In other words, there were few alternatives, but years later there were many and the fans chose the others. Could it have to do with the establishment of the Western Conference, which unified numerous teams throughout the Midwest and then conferences were created elsewhere. That Yale and Harvard were once quite successful only means that there weren’t that many alternatives. The Rose Bowl was created in 1901. The Michigans and Ohio States had taken what Yale and Harvard were doing well and did it better and did in a way that interested more people.

You only need to look as far as the Big Ten here. It’s not close to what it once was. Despite that, the Big Ten commissioner has led the way in recent years. The Big Ten still generates more revenue and profit than any other conference’s athletic departments. They have the largest fan base and the most graduates. The Big Ten’s next football tv contract will set a record and half their games are on their own very successful network. Despite a considerable drop in talent in the Big Ten it remains the most profitable athletic conference in the nation and will continue to be.

There was no NFL for a very long time. It’s been around for a long time now and college football is more successful than ever. As Ken has said repeatedly in this thread, NBA teams are taking young players from college teams and it’s as successful as ever.

There should be no age restrictions for the NFL or NBA. If someone wants to start an alternative league they’re free to do so. They can take as many players from the NCAA as they want. There is nothing stopping anybody from doing this. If someone doesn’t want to start this league it either means they’re stupid or that the research shows there isn’t enough money to justify the start-up expenses. I’m pretty sure it’s the latter, but regardless of what it is, it’s not college football’s problem.

if fans only care about the talent level theyre watching, why does anyone follow and pay money for bad pro teams? wouldnt we all just be fair weather fans? why does anyone in scotland give a hoot about rangers and celtic? each would get demolished by any EPL squad. why is anyone following college football team period? people in georgia could watch a quality falcons squad. why do they bother caring about the vastly inferior georgia tech or bulldog teams? why did boosters of the University of North Dakota spend $100+ in 2001 to build an ice rink for the hockey team?

its all kids of besides the point too. lets basketball has a minor league system like baseball. kids now have a choice, college or pros. are people going to stop watching the tournament? is the problem that some kids are going to choice college over a 100K/year development contract and supply the NCAA with all this free product voluntarily? is it just wrong period for the NCAA to try and raise as much money as possible with their sporting events.

and even if you had massive talent flight AND proportional drop in popularity, which i dont find plausible, but whatever, so what? will will still have some money coming in. just as you still have some money coming in for the rights to broadcast the college world series. why wouldnt you maximize this revenue?

@81:
Michigan regularly played Ivy League schools from 1881 to 1940 (it didn’t do so well in the early years). 

You’ve been arguing that the fans don’t care about the absolute talent level on the field, just the relative talent.  I demonstrate a counter-example, and your response is:

The Michigans and Ohio States had taken what Yale and Harvard were doing well and did it better

According to your own reasoning (absolute talent doesn’t matter, right?) , why wouldn’t Yale continue to benefit when it out-recruits or out-coaches its intra-league peers?

And what exactly did these Big Ten schools do “better” other than recruit elite talent?  That and being large schools with large alumni bases (I notice you didn’t mention Purdue).

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NBA teams have always been taking young players from college.

If we’re being objective analysts, why don’t we quantify the rate at which this happens for the NBA vs. MLB vs. NHL?

Why don’t we quantify and compare the ratios of net income between NCAA baseball:MLB vs. NCAA basketball:NBA?

Why don’t we look at the scope of and the income generated by minor league baseball vs. minor league (CBA/D-league) basketball?

#84 - why dont we look at when the NFL and the NBA changed their draft eligibility requirements? for your theory to hold, popularity of those leagues would see dips or spikes due to talent depletion or influx.

comparing baseball to basketball is meaningless because you are comparing apples and oranges. college baseball has no tradition. college hockey less so (but i bet BC, Minnesota, etc still raise plenty of revenue). college football and basketball were once upon a time the only place for top talent to go. now the top talent is elsewhere, but the teams are more popular than ever.

and what if the university of texas is able to raise $10M a year for the rights to broadcast their baseball games? lets say it only costs $2M/year to run the program. is there anything wrong with making that deal?

@82: I explain in @50 (last paragraphs) how the NCAA could leverage it’s incumbent monopoly status to crush a league that might otherwise be viable.

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I’m not arguing that school brands don’t matter.  They obviously do.  Some people (especially alumni) would watch no matter what.

My point is:
(a) that brand alone doesn’t account for 100% of the revenue.  We could debate whether it’s 40% or 60% or even 90% or whatever. 
and
(b) brands don’t necessarily maintain their status in perpetuity.  Many of today’s most distinguished school brands were not so hot a few decades ago, and vice versa.

Many people watch college athletics even when they have no connection to either school.  Some people like to watch young, up and coming stars in action.  Whether that means watching MiLB or NCAABB.  And if over the course of decades, those up and coming stars increasingly perform outside the NCAA, that would invariably have some effect on NCAA member brands.

While it’s true that if you take the top X number of players out of NCAA there will still be a Top 25, still be a champ, and still be award winners.

However we’re not talking about removing these players and putting them in outer space. We’re talking about taking them out of NCAA and placing them on teams that will compete with the NCAA. Sort of forming THE super-conference.

We see teams scrambling to get the best teams and players arranged in the same conference in a battle for supremacy and money generation.

A league that features most of the best 18-20 year olds playing in games on tv at the same time as colleges games might draw huge amounts of attention if. It can sustain.

A minor league championship game featuring 20 potential 1st round picks might dwarf the BCS national championship is that game doesn’t have big name players in it. The teams in the minor league might make current FB’S teams look like FCS teams.

If the minor league teams have NFL team affiliation it might even be more powerful, where the best HS talent signs minor league deals rather than letters of intent.

But, if a league features essentially ALL of the top 100 ‘amatuer’ players and has televised games on Saturday, it might be a force. If those teams feature players that have been drafted and can be called up to their respective NFL teams during the season it might be even stronger. All of the sudden watching a big NCAA game might not have the appeal it does now.

Watching a game featuring “Top 10” players at each position might be much more inviting than watching two popular college teams with no high draft prospects. It would literally be a “future stars” game/league, but unlike baseball many of the players would be in the major league the following season.

If these players are eligible for amatuer awards, then we might see an organization like ESPN come up with thei own awards and presentation that would dwarf traditional college awards. It’s unclear whether these players would be amateurs eligible for awards and draft or whether they would be pros free to sign with NFL teams whenever, even during the season.

It’s tough to know how this would all play out since there’s really no comparable league elsewhere. It’d sorta be like the USFL for ‘amatuer’ players.

if just watching future stars is such a draw for fans, why is minor league baseball such a zilch? the top AAA teams should have proportionally more talent per team than the top 30 NCAA football teams. but even FCS playoff games are nationally televised and get decent ratings, where i cant remember the time i saw a minor league game on espn.

and the ivy league football brands have devalued because they chose not to compete at an elite college level. if they had taken the route of stanford, duke (for bball anyway), notre dame, northwestern, etc, theyd have big sports brands. same with the university of chicago.

however, i personally love the idea of started a rival football league that taps into the under utilized 18-20 year football player labor pool. play in the summer and pay a livable wage and for community college in the off season. you should also be able to sign the scout team level players from the NFL. dont even bother home “territories” or bother trying to play in massive stadiums and just let everyone follow it online. you should be able to sell live broadcasting rights before too long. with tv rights for the NFL now through the roof it would like like a bargain to the broadcasters desperate non DVR’able programming. ticket sales are more of an after thought. i think sports agents should be spearheading this, since theyre the ones losing out on the commissioners of the NCAA kids and the just shy of NFL caliber players.

i think that would succeed where the UFL is failing, since the UFL is just the USFL take 2, making all the same mistakes.

anyway, thats my dream job, starting that football league. anyone have like, $10m they want to invest?

why is minor league baseball such a zilch?

MiLB is not structured to make a profit for anyone other than MLB.

And in spite of that, according to Forbes, the top-20 minor league teams average $3 million/year in profit.

The biggest revenue discrepancy between MiLB and big-time NCAA programs is the TV money.

If you wanted to make MiLB a stronger standalone business product, you would probably significantly reduce the number of teams (in order to concentrate the talent).  Next, you’d want to protect those remaining teams from in-season roster raids (so that the Bryce Harper’s and Domonic Brown’s will stay put for the whole season, even if they have a stratospheric month).  And you’d want each team to operate independently such that goal #1 is winning, not player development.

Of course none of that would be appealing from MLB’s perspective.  But the ~$200 million/year it invests in draft signing bonuses alone, should serve to help demonstrate the value of that MiLB player talent to MLB.

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college baseball has no tradition

That’s very debatable.  By my quick count, there were 112 Ivy League baseball players who debuted in the majors between 1901 and 1940.  That was mostly before the days of signing bonuses that exceeded the cost of tuition.

Here is a photo of Gehrig batting for Columbia in 1922:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/gehrig.html

MiLB features teams that have maybe one future pro on the team, maybe that player will be a star in 3 years.

This league would feature ALL prospects (perhaps) and many would be NFL starters the next year.

I’m thinking of the effect travel teams have on prep teams, where HS ball now serves as “spring training” for showcase teams. The travel teams offer more prestige, better competition, better venues, and much more attention from scouts.

We have the #2 ranked baseball player in the state. As a junior he signed a scholarship with the big D-1 school in our state. Scouts have not seen him play a HS game. However there were 80 combined pro and college scouts at his showcase team’s scrimmage.

If the elite travel teams forced kids to choose, via playing at the same time as HS ball, the best would choose travel. It wouldn’t really be a choice if they wanted to play at the next level. This is a real fear among coaches, that travel teams will start asking players to sit out and practice with them instead of play HS. Those that don’t would find themselves down the depth chart or not on the team.

If such a league existed to compete with NCAa and was sponsored by UnderArmour or Jordan brand, and hosted by ESPn exclusively, and gave players stipends/pay, not have to go to school, and had more attention from pro scouts ... it would be very attractive, especially is scouts started ignoring NCAA teams.

Note: If MiLB reduced the number of teams to 30 and only had it to where players played 1-3 seasons before MLB, it might be very popular especially if they had a TV deal.

Athletes have shown that the more athletic a sport, the better young players can do. One of the knocks on NCAA football is the question of whether certain players games will “transfer” to the NFL due to them running an offense that no pro team does or by playing against competition that is subpar. That would be eliminated.

why dont we look at when the NFL and the NBA changed their draft eligibility requirements?

I don’t see how those requirements, as they exist, are germane.

The NBA effectively had no age requirements from 1971 to 2005 and since then has had a minimum age of 19.

On the surface, the age limit should have been a slight boost for NCAABB, and yet more players are leaving early.  Perhaps out of fear of the increasingly large pro-windfalls they stand to lose if they get hurt or fall in stock?

Further blurring any effects is the fact that over the same time-frame, international recruiting has increased dramatically in scope.

The NFL AFAIK hasn’t changed it’s requirements fundamentally for decades.

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what if the university of texas is able to raise $10M a year for the rights to broadcast their baseball games? lets say it only costs $2M/year to run the program. is there anything wrong with making that deal?

Excellent question.  I would pose 2 counter-questions:
1) Is that $10M a year being offered to Texas for doing what they were going to do regardless?  Or did they compromise their academic mission along the way to lure that $10M?
2) What do they plan to do with that $8M surplus?

#91 - 1) no. texas signs the contract tomorrow having changed nothing about their program over the last 10 years 2) the same thing they do with all the other money they get from sports

i guess we just differ in thinking of how much value the comes from the school and how much is because of the talent level. i cant buy that most of the value is the talent. otherwise why do the lower tier FBS and upper tier FCS schools generate millions of revenue? why are millions being spent on college hockey programs? why is college basketball as popular as ever when the talent is arguably as diluted as ever, with so many more kids leaving early or exploring the NBADL and foreign leagues?

to think that college football would see a drop of in popularity if the NFL doubled their rosters and filled it with nothing but underclassmen is just not believable. not if you’ve ever been around college football fans.

but hey, maybe we’ll both get our wish and a robust professional developmental league for football will start up and the NCAA will get drained of top pro level talent. then we can see for ourselves if the NCAA suffers. i would bet money that it doesnt, but won’t feel bad if i’m wrong (unless I lose a whole lot of money on that bet). in the meantime, i think the NCAA could stand a heap of reforms, but for the most part their mission of educating kids for free is pretty great. and im glad they do it. and i think it would be a horrible mistake if they stopped doing it, because hundreds of thousands of people benefit from it, and a small handful of year are forced to differ big paydays. sucks for those guys, wish they weren’t stuck in that situation. but i wont lose sleep over it.

@92:

1) If we’re talking about the real University of Texas, then I can’t quite buy into the premise because the baseball coach already makes more than the school president.

If I suspend my disbelief—let’s call the school FictionalU—then I’d have no problem with it.

However I would expect for the student athletes to have the same freedoms (e.g. to transfer to another school or defer their education) as any other student or US citizen.  My central gripe is not that the students deserve a certain % because of their talent.  They simply deserve a free market where every single school hasn’t colluded to adopt uniform rules and restrictions that are not necessarily in their best interests.

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If you still assert that revenue is 100% about school colors and 0% about athlete talent, and that there is something inherent to just the games of football and basketball (but not baseball or hockey) that will magically produce rabid collegiate fans in perpetuity regardless of pro league structure and pro compensation structure (in spite of historical evidence to the contrary), then this discussion is going nowhere fast and not worth continuing.

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I’d be pleased to see robust development leagues develop.  However, I’ve already explained why I’m pessimistic.  It’s not so much because such leagues wouldn’t be viable long-term, but because the up front costs would be enormous and because the NCAA could opt to leverage it’s incumbent position and rule-making process to take retaliatory actions to suffocate any competitor that threatens its revenue stream.

"They simply deserve a free market where every single school hasn’t colluded to adopt uniform rules and restrictions that are not necessarily in their best interests.” @93

Totally agree. Athletic students have become property/assets, and to control their assets, they have banded together to make rules which are not made in the interest of students.

Recommended reading:
http://www.ncsasports.org/blog/2010/03/03/ask-coach-taylor-can-you-explain-the-transfer-rules-part-2/

Excerpt:
• If a recruit is enrolled full-time in a 4 year school they need to get a written letter from their AD or compliance officer.
• If a recruit signed the NLI they will need to request a release from their coach.
• They can write to any NCAA college, but they can’t receive a response until that coach has your permission to contact and/or release papers.
• The recruit’s current school can deny permission or their release. They can also determine where they are allowed to transfer to. Intra-conference rules will vary.
o In this case you can appeal or you will have to sit out a year.
o If you sit out a year, you must pass a full-time schedule without taking summer classes.

What kind of bull is that? Things change, and it doesn’t make sense that a college kid should be held to a choice they made at 17. Scholarship money is nice to have, but it’s always a carrot on a stick - the kind of stick your mom would use when you stepped out of line.

Better than taking out a bunch of loans, I suppose.
http://www.edutrek.com/for-students/student-loan-facts