This model works for hockey also. The only problem with this is the number of athletes that lose the ability to attend school for a degree. Yes they could go back after their playing days are over but few would.

Yeah, I don't have a perfect solution, but part of the amateur model would have to include a strict limit on how much time students on the team can be required to play, practice, attend meetings, etc as well as an actually enforced requirement that they attend for reals classes in pursuit of a legitimate degree. Sure, the school will still make money off the games and that's pretty unfair, but if the players aren't being wrung through a meat grinder like they are now and playing ball is more akin to being in a club sport or the university choir, I can live with that.

I don't really follow college baseball, but I would guess that the corruption problems they have are orders of magnitude less. Part of that is obv because the game is way less popular, but I do think it's a better business model for collegiate sports.

Isn't the easiest way around it to not have colleges paying them but to allow them to earn money in any way they can without it affecting their status.

If someone wants to pay all of the football team for no show jobs let them, if someone wants the point guard of the womens team to advertise coconut water let them.

Wait, so there would be less people graduating with bull**** useless degrees?

Sounds like a... bad thing?

Need more minors in fake Swahili.

yeah believe it or not a lot of college athletes get a lot out of their education. Not every school is North Carolina.

I'm hesitant to say anything, since I really don't know anything about the NCAA, but I agree with what you're saying here only I still don't understand the bolded. How hard could it possibly be to not make lots of money with sports? I mean, if the bat**** commercialization of an ancillary activity is actually detrimental to the University's mission, why not just stop commercializing it? Seems like that should be pretty easy to me.

Not every school sells out their 80k stadium for every home game man.

FWIW, OSU tore down my college dorm so they could put luxury boxes in the Horseshoe.

Still remember my last KU basketball home game. One half of the stadium was about 1/2 full, but sat in a very small area so it looked packed.

The other side of the court was almost completely empty.

Under the goals, the student areas, had loads of hardcore fans. Think their seats were free.

Of course, on TV you only saw the goal ends and the packed areas of the crowd. Very well done camera angles.

Haven't the courts already ruled in favor of NFL/NBA on this question?

My thinking is that there's always going to be a huge demand for the games even if they're true amateur affairs, so ESPN is going to want to film them and cut a check to the universities. Ideally, the players who are generating the content would get a cut, but idk how to fix that/

"**** you, and **** me, and **** everybody. That is ****ing bull****."

LEACH GOAT

Just spent 4 days in Vegas and boy oh boy do dem Muricans love their college sports.

Unwatchable.

Even the North Carolina's still get free room and board, access to state of the art weight rooms, top coaching and instruction in preparation to make it to the next level.

How much do the golf academies charge?

I think the NCAA was a lot better off when the NBA drafted kids right out of high school. The ones who were good enough to be drafted by the NBA and had no intention of going to school could by pass college all together.

I would like Kentucky's one and done program a lot better if they were straight forward that the purpose of the program was to prepare their players for making a living at playing basketball.

Shortly after arriving at Georgetown in 2011, Tyler Adams was diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat and was told that playing basketball would put his life in jeopardy. He hasn’t played since. But John Thompson III honored Adams’s scholarship for four years and allowed him to remain with the team.

JT3 is a class act. He let Tyler start on senior day. Seton Hall players showed a lot of class too.



Maybe if more people in the NCAA were like JT3, a lot of the issues wouldn't be around.

That is a cool story but the NCAA amends scholarship limits for medical hardships and doesn't count them against the school limit so 'honoring' the scholarship didn't really cost Georgetown competitively at all. Applying for a medical hardship for a kid like that for even the most unscrupulous, amoral coaches in the NCAA is basically a no-brainer.

Yup michigan did the same thing for a kid who survived two plane crashes.... but he's on the team now lol.

Actually, his story is even more complicated. We used a real scholarship on him this season IIRC. He dressed for all the games and played in 4. The rule is that if the kid is on the roster more than 3 contests or 30% (whichever number is larger) of scheduled contests that means they don't qualify for the medical waiver.

Hatch's situation is especially unique. The NCAA allowed us to reclassify him as a freshman this year despite the fact he's 21 or whatever and was part of the 2012 recruiting class. I think this season we used a real scholarship on him, because as you say, he dressed and played. I think Beilein is a nice guy and all but it didn't matter since we lost McGary and Morgan late in the process last year and didn't use all our scholarships and had one to give. Rubber hits the road next year since in the NCAA's eyes he's still a sophomore, it remains to be seen if and how we try to classify him the next 3 years, if he sticks around, etc. I don't know his academic situation but presumably he's closer to graduating than his athletic standing (a sophomore) and he probably wants to move onto the next thing in life.

But anyway, specifics aside, when a student has some kind of terrible injury or life-threatening condition or whatever, the NCAA will grant a medical waiver and then the team gets the scholarship back. At that point the only cost to the school is the cost of educating the kid, which is nothing to sneeze at, sure, but for a school like Michigan or Georgetown it's a veritable drop in the bucket. I'm not saying JT III isn't a great guy, but medical hardships are hardly some sign of the great piety of the NCAA or his unique righteousness in the fight against the system.

That's the thing I was always impressed with Joe Pa at Penn State, the number of student athletes that earned a degree there.

He certainly stood by his players and coaching personnel.

you must be joking

But that probably didn't cause you to watch more games --and I'm not at all trying to pick on you because 99.9% of college sports viewers are the same way: what goes on off the field doesn't change how much we watch. Nothing is going to change in the system until the demand becomes more elastic.

Paterno actually did have a pretty solid record on educating players and such....

You are correct. I just had a relative play for him so having not gone to college myself (other than a semester) that was the program I followed.

Maurice Clarett of all people had a pretty good rant on twitter about how the degrees athletes earn can be pretty useless and not actually give them any useful post-football skills.

So bigging up the sack of **** who enabled a pedarast just because people got degrees is a bit much.

http://thebiglead.com/2015/03/17/mau...ds-retirement/