re: Unless you’ve been a college athlete under the NCAA you wouldn’t understand...

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If you think college basketball and football are still amateur sport in any way other than by legal definition, you are fooling yourself. They are billion dollar industries.

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They are billion dollar industries in their current form.

In the NFL, salary caps, rules, roster size, etc. are collectively bargained between the owners and the NFLPA. While the two sides are usually negotiating against each other, they do have one common goal: “protecting the shield”. Both sides know that the entire system hinges on putting a quality product on the field that will keep the fans interested. NFL players are working, educated adults and they have a future to worry about.

Contrast this with college football. Players have a maximum of 4 years eligibility. They are 18-22 years old, with little incentive to protect the long-term interests of the league. There are roughly 1,700 active players on NFL rosters, compared to 11,000 scholarship football players in FBS alone.

I think the concern most have with the “pay to play” idea is that it could cause irreparable harm to college athletics in the long term. As things stand now, only about 20% of FBS schools’ athletic departments are self-sustaining. What if lower tier schools start shutting down their football programs because they can’t compete? What if schools start ending various sports that don’t generate revenue as more money is diverted to football and basketball? What is the impact to those athletes who could potentially lose scholarship opportunities? Do they have a voice? Should they? What about Title IX?

These questions all really boil down to things that should be collectively bargained, but it gets really difficult when you have almost 500,000 student athletes affected, all in their late teens or early 20’s, and none of whom will be affected 3-4 years from now.

One last point re: free markets. There’s nothing stopping anyone from building a lower tier football league that can pay the 4- and 5-star players (that’s really who we are talking about). See my last post referencing the XFL. The fact that nobody has created an alternative league doesn’t mean that there’s not a free market. What it does mean (depending on how you look at it) is either a) that there is a huge opportunity out there for someone to capitalize on the NCAA’s failure, or b) that the market is actually fairly balanced and there’s not a ton of opportunity out there anyway.