NY Times: UM Regent Acker advocates paying players

I'll take our regents over MSU's BoT any day.

This seems to be the way, but I'm not sure what will happen with non-revenue sports.  I'm guessing a lot will be dropped to club status.

Agreed, yet half the board still swears that we have to listen to their misguided and outdated policies regarding the original harbaugh suspension.

As far as I'm concerned, the NCAA is no longer the legitimate governing body, the courts are, so let's stop listening to them.

If the big ten schools shared revenue with their players, where would msu get the money to overpay mediocre coaches huge contracts or pay their way out of massive scandals? They just can’t afford it!

Having the players get paid by the conference and not the schools would be a way to work around the school charter issues.  The players still couldn't be required to be students or attend classes (restraint of trade) but the bigger issue would be avoided.

Paying players for an OV, just like Pay for Play is prohibited - and clearly defined in the NCAA guidelines, policies, and procedures for NIL and compensation.

Do you actually believe what I wrote?  The NCAA is - and has been - asleep at the wheel for decades.

How much do they charge for actually submitting an application?  That stuff takes time and effort.  And there's huge opportunity costs.

Asking for money to visit is just another way that players are using to get some of the revenue that they are generating. There would be no need to prohibit this if the schools were actually sharing revenue in a defined way agreed upon by the players.

And don't forget Ohio. 

I'm probably older than you (Michigan class of '85) but regardless--I see your points and mostly agree. I don't claim to fully understand all of the issues but what's different now compared to the past is the astronomical TV $$$ that flows into the schools as a result of (mostly) football. When the schools made enough to improve their facilities every few years, overpay their coaches and cover the athletic department budget it was less of an obvious money grab.

But the Fab Five were onto something back in the early 90's when they saw their jerseys being sold on South U. for a lot of money when they couldn't afford a Domino's pizza on a random Saturday night. Now that the TV $$$ is in the billions it's simply an obvious bridge too far. The athletes are pawns in a huge economic system despite, as you point out, the fact that they knew what they were getting into and willingly signed on the dotted line.

I'd be much more sympathetic to this argument if the universities weren't obviously treating this as a for profit enterprise and sacrificing everything on the altar of greed.  In that context, the players have to be paid commensurate with the money they are bringing in and not just the scholarship.  Since the money coming in is growing even more exponentially than tuition, somehow.

I distinctly remember Lloyd (the ur stodgy old Michigan guy, even when he was young) becoming a playoff advocate once they added the 12th game.  His argument against the playoff was that the players were theoretically here to do school and a playoff would have to happen during final exams, which football players historically had off.  Then they added a game for more money and he's like, well if that's the framework, we should have a playoff and really figure out who's best because clearly we don't care about the academics.

"Regardless of whether we think that's a good deal for the players or not, that was the offer. Like someone offering a kid $5 to mow his lawn. The kid can always say, 'no, thanks, that's not enough' but ... in what way is the person offering the $5 exploiting them?"

It's more like the neighborhood has banded together and agreed that none of them will pay more than $5 to get their lawn mowed, and agreed that they'll block any effort to let the kid mow lawns elsewhere.  So if the kids wants any money, they have to take our offer(1), and we can do with the savings what we want; it doesn't have to go back into better lawn mowers.

In short, the NCAA has a captive labor market, and have artificially restricted their cost of labor. That's exploitation (very nearly textbook, in fact).

To the bigger picture, this might have been a fair deal before TV money dramatically warped college athletics.  The fact is the game is not an amateur endeavor any more (if it ever really was), and the rising flood of money has dramatically failed to lift all boats.  While we may not like change or be comfortable with the naked greed that is pervading the sport, there is simply too much money around for people to pretend any more

1.  Yes, the CFL/Arena League/XFL/semi-pro leagues exist, and none of them hold a candle to top-tier college football, especially for people looking to make NFL rosters.

one can be both a student and employed at the university

The irony here is that of all possible sports, football is the one with the shortest window to play professionally and therefore its athletes benefit the most from a college degree. We all have heard that NFL stands for "Not For Long" and it's to the university and athlete's benefit that the educational aspect isn't overlooked or decoupled from the "business model."

The majority of college football athletes play the game at a high level, yet still aren't elite enough to play in the NFL. The college product is good and fun and worth the money it generates, but I can't see the solution being to just turn it into a NFL minor league that isn't connected to any of the schools. The infrastructure that already exists at these universities is important and the education the athletes receive is absolutely necessary for the 99% of them that don't go on to NFL careers.

Scholarships are a form of compensation. I don't really understand why adding another form of compensation should impact scholarships at all. Calling them something else seems even more pointless. Waiving some or all tuition costs is called a scholarship. Why would calling it by a different name change anything?

Calling the scholarship something else will likely make it taxable compensation for the athlete.  I'd leave the scholarship as is.  I'm hoping that whatever the new system still at least requires them to be students.

Those aren't inherently contradictory terms.

I did federal work study and had two other jobs to get through school. If I could have gotten paid to focus on football, that would have been great. It's a huge time commitment for these young men. I'm happy and hopefully they are starting to get paid for their investment.

otherwise schools that just paid football and basketball players would have a significant advantage.
 

Yeah but the other schools would dominate cross country.