It needs to be pointed out that this law doesn't allow schools to pay players directly. There probably isn't enough money for that without totally restructuring athletic departments around the country (a football team like USC is wildly profitable, but most of that profit goes to pay for unprofitable teams like swimming, volleyball, etc). Paying players directly also has a number of Title IX repercussions that would likely need to be ironed out in court.
This law instead allows the players a way to make money for themselves based off their participation in sports. That simply frees athletes up in the same way that non-athletes are unrestricted from how they can earn money while in school. No actor is going to be kicked out of their school's theater program because they got $200 for acting in a local car commercial. Now the football player won't either.
1 - https://www.usna.edu/Admissions/Student-Life/General-Informa...
Students at the military academies are both on full scholarship (tuition and board paid by the taxpayers) and salaried. After required [non-academic] expenses (uniforms, laundry, etc) the "take home" is tiny. But, that doesn't negate the fact that they are salaried employees of the US government.
And, just to be clear, I'm in no way arguing students at the service academies are over-paid, or shouldn't be paid, or anything like that. I'm just curious if they have an explicit exemption from the NCAA, or if the NCAA isn't following it's own rules.
Hollywood movies often show a loss after the studio deducts all the expensive things they bought themselves. Everybody with points against net gets nothing, but the studio still does just fine.
I don't think Hollywood movies are a good comparison. The studios will play accounting tricks by setting up shell companies for the purposes of screwing over the people who actually made the movie [1]. That's just pushing paper around, though: if the movies makes more than the studio spent, they turned a profit. Universities aren't doing that; many of their football programs are actual money losers, and they get that money from student tuition or the state if it's a public university.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121018/01054720744/holly...
Non-profit doesn't mean “doesn’t earn profits” or “doesn’t prioritize profit”, but “doesn’t return profits to investors”.
I can't find the original HBO Real Sports link, but they go into depth about the Non-profit status and the way the funding is spent. It is a real eye opener and made me rethink how the argument that profit/revenue should be considered when dealing with the larger organizations.
Below are references, but not only highlights.
Why not? The economic value of work to the entity for which it is performed is a significant factor in the criteria under which the law now requires other formerly unpaid, often student, workers such as many interns to be paid, even when their employer is a nonprofit. Why should athletes be treated worse?
EDIT: To clarify, I mean a "practical" difference whether a booster gives money to a school to pay players or gives it to a company to do so. The payer matters to law, not to the paid nor to the practical result.
Personally, I also feel that boosters have too much direct involvement in athletic departments as is. Removing the school from the booster-player relationship and bringing booster payment to players out from under the table could potentially help clean up some of the corruption in college sports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigres_UANL
Alabama had 56 players on NFL rosters at the start of the season. https://www.al.com/sports/2019/09/alabama-leads-colleges-in-...
[0] https://www.al.com/alabamafootball/2018/01/alabama_athletics... [1] https://www.forbes.com/nfl-valuations/list/#tab:overall
According to a CNN Money article.
So I suspect the answer is a strong "no", but they're at least in the same zipcode if not the same ballpark.
The Cleveland Browns only had $32m in operating income, coming in as the 5th least valuable team. The Oakland Raiders were the 12th most valuable, with $28m in operating income (of course their value is high due to other factors).
Seems plausible that Alabama's program is worth over a billion dollars solidly. The value boost of being in the NFL is obviously what really separates the situations, regardless of comparable incomes.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/teams/buffalo-bills/?list=nfl-valuati...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2019/09/04/the-nfls...
When I was in school all the scholarship athletes had food, clothing, and housing stipends that were considerably more than they needed for any of those three things. Not to mention that the free education they receive.
I understand that the "education" most top tier football players receive isn't quite the same as the other students (football is a full time job). I just don't know how you can start paying players without causing some really sweeping side-effects that change the reason that so many people love college football.
With the proper regulation, I suppose you could probably give the players money that they deserve, while still keeping some of that amateur sports magic. Hopefully it doesn't evolve into the pre-NFL where only schools with money have football teams.
I'm also a little interested what could happen with Title IX. As far as I know, all athletes in a school have to get the same benefits and if you start paying college football players (the only ones that typically make any money for the school) what do you do about the girls on the gymnastics team or the guys on the lacrosse team?
IMHO, if you're accepted on a Sports scholarship, you should be allowed to complete at least 5 years of schooling regardless of injury or ability to continue playing, and if you fail to meet scholastic eligibility, you should be released for a year to "catch up" while continuing coursework.
That would more closely resemble a fair exchange. As it stands a significant number of student athletes don't get a real education and/or are dropped before able to complete because of injury.
This is significantly the argument between Bobby Dodd and Bear Bryant leading to Georgia Tech leaving the SEC.
And short term disability insurance, and long term disability insurance - along with the school paying for health insurance (currently students are required to have health insurance, but the school isn't required to pay.
Are top performing student-athletes being exploited? Maybe, but people seriously underestimate the value of benefits they receive on campus beyond scholarship amount. And there need to be substantial consequences for both students and universities if athletes fail to graduate.
[0] These dining halls might technically be open to all students, but non-athletes have to pay steakhouse prices for slightly better cafeteria food, while athletes eat for free. These are the ways universities get around NCAA rules today.
Most college students in STEM won't even work unpaid internships and yet these guys are expected to generate orders of magnitude more value while being unpaid or hilariously under compensated.
The biggest benefit is the free 4-5 year top-of-the-line professional training camp.
(I didn't mention it above because I don't think this dollar amount should be counted against scholarships, if you could even calculate it.)
They're getting (upto) 5 years of intense training in their field, by teams of professional-grade coaches. All of their required equipment is paid for, facilities are free, they're being marketed to the pro scouts, traveling across the country, and they're getting all of this with free room and board.
It's really hard to put a true dollar amount on that, but the closest comparison in the professional world is a college degree. Which they should be getting, and at no cost to them.
When this is included, I think it balances out enough to be fair.
Or to put it another way... How many of these players could go pro without the benefit of college training. I'd argue very few. And by definition, fewer than the number who declare early for the draft, which is already a small number.
And I don't feel any more sympathies for them than I do any other startup millionaire that probably could have skipped college but didn't.
Tangent: I've also argued that being an athlete should/could be a degree in and of itself, given a properly designed program. It should include classes in kinesiology, dieting, health, financial management, speaking to the media, marketing yourself, etc. I think that would also solve many of these issues.
https://www.nflregionalcombines.com/Docs/Eligibility%20Rules...
Which implies that players not only seem to value the training and experience of college athletics, but that they value all 4 years of it. Arguably red-shirting extends this to 5 years.
What will be fun is to figure out how California is going to implement this wild hared idea if the sport is not profitable: looking at you water polo. The athletes are playing and doing similar workout regimens as the football, yet no pay... what do you do with this. What about Title IX discrimination when the men’s football gets monies while the ladies do not.
The law does not require the sport to pay anything more, this removes the "you may not use your own likeness" rule as being bad for the players.
The new change does not apply to anything they do on-field and it only starts in 2023, so it will definitely change decisions for college admissions.
This does not add any significant burden to the sport organizers, except they lost their captive monopoly on the athletes appearing in a commercial.
Right to negotiate for yourself is a big one.
No one is forced to do anything here, as if children from low income families somehow have less agency than others.
You can complain about a system where children from low income families make a rational calculation to skirt the rules to better their position.
No one is talking about regulating endorsements. The law simply says you can’t keep a player off a team for being paid.
I once inadvertently enrolled in a "business calculus" class that was apparently hand selected by the football coaches. Almost the entire class was the football team. We barely got through the first 5 chapters of the book and that was the easiest A I ever got.
So while the free education and room and board have some value, they don't have nearly as much as people think. I have known student athletes that quit playing and got a full time job just so they could afford to pay their own way and have time for classes.
a good way to think about it, is that college athletics is sort of communist society in action where the future professionals athletes subsidize benefits for the athletes that won't be future professionals.
Relative to most minor league athletes or aspiring Olympians,
35K isn't a bad salary.
There are also plenty of examples of "classes" that athletes have taken in the news, i.e. University of North Carolina, and more
Universities' principal missions should be pedagogy and research. If college sports as they now exist require hampering students' ability to learn (or, I suppose, do research), having those sports teams and operating them the way they do is in conflict with what should be their mission, and they should stop having sports teams.
I believe the NCAA will go with option 4, then once more states pass the same laws, eventually go to option 3.*
D0 is not really on the table because it is dilutive to 'P5' school earnings vs today's system of pretending to include G5 while excluding them from the big payouts.
*The reason they will go with option 4 is that the only conference impacted by the law will be the Pac 12. While Larry Scott (Pac 12 commissioner) is probably not happy, he can't really move the needle for the NCAA like Big10/SEC could. If this law get enacted in Florida, that would be the tipping point to go to option 3. Going with option 4 today really only leaves the Rose Bowl as the only loose end.
Question is if both states, under regulatory capture, will allow any similar law to pass. I dare say that NCAA sports are bigger business in Texas and Florida by percent when compared to California, which has other very profitable industries. Thus the college boards have a far deeper connection to the legislature. So in a prisoners dilemma, either both of them can choose not to pass similar legislation, keeping the money out of the hands of athletes, or either state will pass similar legislation in order to complete with California for athletes. The other state would have to follow to compete for athletes, forcing the NCAA's hand to go with option 3.
Actually, currently, P5 schools lose money on the other schools in college football. The D0, in my mind, is not so much about California, as it is about evening out the chances of all the P5 schools. Right now you have to pay to play all these low level schools, which for a lot of P5 schools really does eat into profits. Additionally, in the current structure, the SEC for instance might play FCS teams and then fewer conference foes. This makes an uneven playing field for the BIG 12 or PAC 12 or what have you. So if you want a more even shot at one of the big 4 slots, you have to either pay out more money to play an extra low level school, or get the SEC to play an extra conference game. It's a bit more complex than that, because for instance OSU has plenty of money, but the conference won't let them play an additional cupcake. But you get the idea.
Now I'd bet a lot of the AD's would never actually admit it, but D0 is probably an attempt to tilt the scales in their direction by eliminating these, and other, structural impediments to their own success.
Currently P5 programs choose to play FCS opponents because they make so much revenue on home games that it is worth paying an FCS team a few million. The reason the math works is that the TV deals are already set, and the only incremental money they can make is through ticket sales to 100k fans.
Right now there are three divisions, and they are based on school size, which is why all the big schools are division 1 but there is a big difference in quality. The idea here is to take the top teams and split off regardless of school size.
P5 == Power 5. These are the five conferences that have almost all the top teams. Big ten, Big 12, the ACC, the Pac-12, and the SEC.
G5 == Group of 5. These are there conferences with the lesser know teams. American, Conference USA, Mid-American, Mountain West, and Sun Belt
The g5 and p5 are media constructs (not official) designations to help with ratings and assign teams to various invitational competitions like the college football playoffs.
P5 = Power 5 conference, ie ACC, SEC, Pac12, Big12, Big10
G5 = No idea.
It's a pretty big change - my guess is CA's stance will win, because the alternative is massive disruption of the NCAA.
The industry will loudly tell you it's about the athletes. That's bullshit.
"The industry will loudly tell you it's about the student-athletes."
If you want to see athletic accomplishments done at a high level...
Your typical D League basketball game, Arena League football game, or triple A baseball game features higher skilled athletic performance.
To me, this suggests that it's the tribal/communal aspect of college athletics which drive the interest and revenues.
A game called football was invented about 1870 to provide healthful physical exercise for the undergraduates on bright autumn afternoons. Seventy years later the undergraduates who needed exercise most were seated in the stands of a city baseball park on Friday night, with their flasks and their coeds, while on the grass (or mud) below, the undergraduates who needed exercise least pushed each other about under the floodlights.
Are you okay with paying higher tuition that would have otherwise been offset with TV, merchandising, ticket revenue and alumni donations?
About half of D1 football and men's basketball programs do make money, but even at those schools, the athletics program as a whole is still a money loser.
There might be an interstate-commerce-clause justification here on the side of the NCAA, but it seems pretty thin. IANAL, of course, so what do I know.
> Essentially, the Statute requires any national collegiate athletic association to provide a Nevada institution, employee, student-athlete, or booster who is accused of a rules infraction with certain procedural due process protections during an enforcement proceeding in which sanctions may be imposed. Many of the procedures required by the Statute are not included in the NCAA enforcement program. For example, the NCAA does not provide the accused with the right to confront all witnesses, the right to have all written statements signed under oath and notarized, the right to have an official record kept of all proceedings, or the right to judicial review of a Committee decision.
I'm not sure I really agree with the court's reasoning that it's a per se violation of the commerce clause but the rational is in Section B @ 638 if you're interesting.
Here's hoping this precedent gets overturned but I'm not terribly optimistic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormant_Commerce_Clause
[2] https://casetext.com/case/national-collegiate-athletic-assn-...
That said, I fully expect the NCAA to aggressively threaten Option 1, then back down when it becomes clear that they'll just lose out on all the revenue of that new league/competing governing body, which would have no trouble growing as schools that don't make a ton via the NCAA system looking for a recruiting edge race to join (a funny subplot for anyone who follows this sort of thing: how fast would SMU race to join a governing body that lets players sell their endorsement?). Then, they'll settle on Option 2, which allows them to do nothing and blame others for the fallout, despite it being the worst of the 3 options for all non-NCAA bureaucracy stakeholders.
EDIT: Answered in a jedberg reply elsewhere in this thread.
This move would have been more successful if had passed during a period when CA had competitive teams.
That is the end of the NCAA. If California can dictate the fundamental nature of a voluntary organization, there's really little sense for the organization to exist.
Which is what's probably gonna happen.
From the official digest of the bill at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... :
The bill also would prohibit an athletic association, conference, or other group or organization with authority over intercollegiate athletics from preventing a postsecondary educational institution other than a community college from participating in intercollegiate athletics as a result of the compensation of a student athlete for the use of the student’s name, image, or likeness.
AFAICT this law would make the current NCAA bylaws illegal in California. Any California player who accepted an endorsement and was subsequently prevented from playing would be able to sue.
The 4th option that they're suggesting only serves to open them up to lawsuits should they ever try to enforce the rule for CA players.
From Miller vs. NCAA, P 28:
'Under Brown-Forman, 476 U.S. at 579, 106 S.Ct. at 2084, when a state law directly regulates interstate commerce, it can generally be struck down without further inquiry. The Statute directly regulates interstate commerce and runs afoul of the Commerce Clause both because it regulates a product in interstate commerce beyond Nevada's state boundaries, and because it puts the NCAA, and whatever other national collegiate athletic associations may exist, in jeopardy of being subjected to inconsistent legislation arising from the injection of Nevada's regulatory scheme into the jurisdiction of other states. Because the Statute violates the Commerce Clause per se, we need not balance the burden on interstate commerce against the local benefit derived from the Statute.'
Replace Nevada with California and you've got the same issue. A state is not allowed to unilaterally make special statutory carve-out demands on a national organization.
They can say "hey universities, your student-athletes must be allowed to profit from their own likenesses." Totally within the state's power.
They can't say "hey, NCAA, screw your rules, we decided to make up our own for you and you have to deal with it."
https://openjurist.org/10/f3d/633/national-collegiate-athlet...
> By its terms, it regulates only interstate organizations, i.e., national collegiate athletic associations which have member institutions in 40 or more states.
Nevada made the mistake of specifically targeting interstate associations. California does not, so based on the reasoning in that decision the California law does not violate the Commerce Clause per se as the Nevada law did.
The NCAA engages in interstate commerce. California's bill requires that any organization that does business in California allow players in California to be paid. It is requiring the NCAA to provide a carve-out for California.
This is the exact same scenario, legally.
And given that the only choice is to remove the largest state from you organization. With that cali makes their own league and now the NCAA has a huge competition for the top talent. Why would you go to school anywhere else than Cali.
Sure, they can (well, that is, litigate against a state to neutralize the law), usually by claiming it violates federal law (including the Constitution). That's tough here, but I suppose you could throw a hail mary at either a contracts clause or a dormant commerce clause action.
If a college/university contracts to be included in a athletics association, there is nothing wrong with requiring the schools to comply with NCAA rules/regulations.
If a student athlete contracts with a college/university to play a sport for them, there is nothing wrong with the college/university requiring them to comply with both the college and NCAA rules/regulations.
Without the benefit of looking at all the various agreements and the actual CA Bill, it sounds like their approach to cure the issue may amount to an unconstitutional restriction on the athletes' Constitutional right to contract.
They can simply say "your student-athlete is ineligible to participate."
Can California create their own league?
Sure.
Will doing so decimate their schools' athletic budgets? Probably. There's not going to be much national demand for a state-only organization, and it's going to get particularly ugly when the feds discover schools colluding with rich boosters talent in order to attract them there because of Title IX.
Uh, this would be true of many states but not of states like CA/TX/FL.
There would absolutely be demand for a CA-only athletic organization.
There's a reason California did this and not, say, Alaska (no offense to Alaska of course).
One of the foundational reasons that the WWF / WWE became the dominant power in the wrestling market is that they were the first to ignore regional barriers.
Rinse, repeat.
Er, we're talking about them right now. College sports are extremely regional but still have significant national appeal. Many, many people tune into SEC conference games who have no connection to the SEC.
If you think people wouldn't watch an SEC-only league (I'm using the SEC here because it's the most obvious example), then I think that betrays your knowledge of college sports.
[0] admittedly, minor confused conferences like Conference USA and Big 12 stretch the definition a little bit, but they're still essentially regional.
A state-only organization the size of California can easily compete especially when any player in any sport with financial planning would move to California.
Why would anyone watch the NCAA in football, basketball or anything else when we'd know all the best player are in the California League.
Also, the point is that rich boosters colluding wouldn't be illegal. This wouldn't have anything to do Title IX. I do agree those rich donors will pull all the best talent to California though.
For another example, suppose there were some chemical company organization that had a bylaw like, "You cannot print information about carcinogenic ingredients in your products." But then California passes prop 65. The bylaws are now moot -- if you have to choose whether to comply with bylaws or state law, you either have to take your ball and go home, or the bylaws have to change.
Absent legislation with more teeth or a broad coalition of states and schools from across the country, I highly doubt California schools will drop out to create their own league. In fact, the money they're looking to give to athletes will soon dry up, absent the lucrative contracts the NCAA holds. Who would watch an independent league with so few teams in it and basically no national tournament circuit?
Far from forcing the NCAA's hand, I think Newsom just passed feel-good legislation which doesn't really change anything. Perhaps other states will jump on board, but there doesn't seem to be any sight of that at the moment.
A division with UCLA, Berkeley, USC, Stanford, UCSD, UC-Davis + plenty I'm forgetting would be instantly watchable in football and basketball. Really the only thing they'd be missing out on would be March Madness (a big deal) and the college football championship (a minor deal). There would be a very swift Rose bowl replacement, and I'm sure the invited BIG10 would be happy to attend, and if not for whatever reason a top 2 from that division would be a fun championship game too.
Really I see the only blocker here being participation in March Madness- but that feels like a short term roadblock and 'lets figure out when to pull the trigger' situation rather than an impossible hindrance.
The smaller sports will certainly suffer in the short term- but California is a massive market and having a California only college league is totally plausible.
The objective of the very best players is not to merely pay for college, but maximize their chance to join professional teams. Those odds are maximized by access to world class facilities, equipment, trainers, coaches, medical care, and more. Winning helps too.
If some schools have less money because sponsorships are going to specific players instead of the school/league, they will be able to provide fewer top-tier resources to players. Consequently, those schools will be less attractive in the areas of essential importance to the very best players.
If the very best athletes gravitate toward non-player-sponsorship schools, it will create a self-reinforcing cycle to get other top athletes, because they want the best teams to maximize their chances of winning.
I'll bet car dealerships will be the first place in CA that you will start seeing college athletes on the billboards.
And it won't just be the top guys in the state. It will be the top guys on the local team. Even for smaller schools.
Then ask the 4- and 5-stars.
That is to say if $shoeco wants to sponsor $bigplayer but does not want to increase their overall athletics funding beyond its present $100M level, they will not take away $1M from $bigplayer's school, they'll take it away in very small amounts from all schools they sponsor.
That's laughable.
The best high school basketball players are only gonna be in college one or two years in any case. It's legal formality currently that makes them go there.
The idea that draft picks and their families are going to forego free money in California for the purposes of supporting the NCAA is, again, just a bit fanciful. These guys are gonna get drafted no matter where they go. So I can pretty much guarantee you that their agents will swing them to Cali.
Option 1, they remove the California teams from the NCAA. The Power 5 have been talking about a "division 0" league for a long time. Chances are that would push them all to leave the NCAA and create their own organization.
Option 2, allow California to be the exception. This would be great for California, because if you're a top high school athlete, would you rather play in California where you could potentially make millions, or anywhere else? Presumably a bunch of other states would pass similar laws and demand the same exception, until the NCAA was forced to allow paid players everywhere.
Or Option 3, just change the NCAA rules to match California, and let players get paid.
If sounds like the only winning move here is for the NCAA to allow paying players. I think California just forced their hand.