Meh, I'm pretty sure Rara was talking about the time before all the kiddy diddling was publicly known.

The same could be said about lots of people that earn a degree that has very little use post graduation couldn't it?

They named a library after him!

Use your ****ing brain for once

Also lol at using clarett as someone who knows dick about getting a degree. Most players aren't like his dumbass

No. No it couldn't.

There's a difference between a pointless liberal arts degree and leaving college without any meaningful education or skills that don't involve running into stuff.

NFL just needs a minor league system. If a baseball or hockey player out of high school wants to be paid to play they have the option of playing for tuition or money. A football player doesn't have that option.

You should read what Clarett wrote. I'm not saying this is super articulate or anything but his core point is pretty solid and anyone who is outraged at the NCAA is making more or less the exact same arguments:

He's actually making some like incisive observations about contemporary American higher education standards and the schemes some schools are running. And the way some schools are preying on their athletes (pushing them to non-rigorous classes, insisting on their investment in athletics, leaving them unprepared for life after sports).

I think this is putting the cart before the horse. See thread earlier. NFL isn't going to bother with any of that when college football is doing this all for free for them. NFL gets commodities who are almost house-hold names (see Marcus Mariotta, Jameis Winston, Johnny Manziel) and don't have less risk paying to develop head-cases and dudes with failing limbs or whatever (Brien Taylor, Todd Van Poppel, etc.).

NFL won't magically disrupt the status quo on their own.

Doesn't seem like the numbers/money would ever be there to sustain an NFL minor league.

Nor am I really sure what problem that solution is solving. The issue here isn't like basketball where you have players attempting to bypass college because they're NBA ready. College is a necessity for football players because they're not physically ready to play in the NFL.

Clarett's point is kind of meh imo. How many of these "student athletes" are actually able to successfully complete a STEM degree program even without the distractions from football iyo?

More would get meaningful educations and life skills if the schools took some of the millions they make off of the knees and skulls of athletes and gave them meaningful academic assistance and an education instead of steering them to sham classes, and didn't insist (tacitly or implicitly) they spend all their free time trying to run through walls and jump out of the gym. Particularly anyone at these schools demanding they not pay these players actual money under the auspice that the kids are receiving very valuable scholarships and educations as compensation instead. That argument is tenuous if the schools aren't holding up their end of the bargain or worse, actively trying to avoid the kids spending time on academics because it distracts from weightlifting.

If you have some more cynical point like these are knuckleheads whose only potential in life is to run through walls and crack each others' skulls up and dunk or whatever, well OK, but then the entire pretense of anything the NCAA is arguing falls apart completely, and they are lecherously using labor and profiting from it in exchange for a resource/service they acknowledge is valueless to the recipient and they don't intend to sincerely provide.

Also I just realized I made no sense:

Edit to strike out word.

Where is the value being generated though? If it is from the kids and they are just bad at bargaining then it's a more straightforward fix imo similar to the minimum wage where low income employees are bad at bargaining so can't capture the extra value they create without a large organisation doing the bargaining for them. But if the school could field 11 tin buckets with faces painted on them and still get 100k "respect the school brah" types to pay to watch then it's the school that's really generating the value rather than the particular players.

It's also one of those cases that's a fallacy of the false alternative. It's clear some people feel better about college baseball and hockey because kids can go play in the OHL or the Cape Cod League for money instead of playing at college, but the core calculus hasn't really changed. I used the College World Series as an example, which is a reasonably high profile event people are making money off of. Are the unpaid athletes who play in the CWS any less unfairly leveraged by their universities than the kids playing in the CFP? Of the dozens of arguments I've heard that are compelling and claim the NCAA is engaged in what are essentially unfair labor practices, I don't think the existence of alternatives where the kids could get paid satisfies many of them.

My take is that the reality is somewhere in between "college football fans are paying to see Johnny Manziel" and "college football fans are paying to sing the fight song." We can joke about tin buckets and it goes without question some of what the fans are paying to cheer for is nothing but the laundry, but I think it also goes without question the players are mixing some of their labor into the thing and providing value too (the tackles, the passes, the dunks, etc.). Maybe some people would pay to watch tin buckets, but probably less, and the ratings would be as high, etc. I think most (?) people would argue then that justifies paying the people doing the labor. They're providing some value. Seems unquestionable.

Put differently, would anyone feel OK not paying the door charge for the concert of some faceless Beatles cover band because John Lennon is dead and Paul McCartney is thousands of miles away and they're providing all the real value? That cover band could be any clowns with guitars, why pay them? Should Disney not pay the guy in the Mickey Mouse suit meeting kids at Disneyland? Etc.

But the biggest complaint is not that they aren't receiving some compensation, it's that a lot of the players are not or can not take advantage of that compensation. What is room board, free tuition worth at a major University? $40,000.00

That compensation vastly dwarfs what the guy in the Micky Mouse costume gets.

And I don't want to get on my liberal preachy high horse here but some of this is just like absolutely basic labor fairness. I think most of us live in the west which is cool and fun and has ~100 years of labor law built up to protect workers, so this is so implicit and ingrained we never question it much when it doesn't happen.

But take the CFP. In like every case I can think of, if I'm asked to do more work, I have the right to do it unquestionably, or ask for more wages to match the incremental revenue generated, or quit under whatever the terms of my contract or employment are.

Last year college football added a playoff game without any negotiation with their labor -- the student athletes. The kids have to work and play an extra week. People made untold millions off that extra game. Did the value of an Alabama and OSU scholarship go up last year because they were all made to play an extra game? Can they go negotiate for a better scholarship now that they're being asked to do more? Can the kids quit the team after being asked to play more and keep their scholarship?

There might be some varied answers to these questions (I'm sure someone clever will be by to say the value of an OSU degree goes up incrementally when they are good at football) but get to the basic core of equitable labor treatment that literally every modern, western country has tons of laws to regulate but which the NCAA is gleefully circumventing. In all non-****hole countries considered decent, labor is allowed to bargain collectively and apply for workers compensation and negotiate for better wages, etc. Why are Cardale Jones and Jahlil Okafor not afforded that too?

Well, for one, the school's tuition rate might be that but the value of the service is at least partly predicated for almost everyone on the better job prospects and life skills you receive in exchange for that money. To Clarett's point, if all your university teaches you is how to do deadlift squats and run a fast 40 and steers you away from actually learning anything valuable, they completely ****ed you. What if you bought a book that purported to be a book on poker training and inside was instead a diet plan and some pictorials about the proper form to do bench presses. Wouldn't you feel like you got screwed?

Two, and again, it's unquestionable and just math that at some schools, the collective revenue made from the sport (e.g., football at Ohio State) vastly dwarfs the collective total of tuition granted to the team, and no one has the right to negotiate for more. I agree with you that in principle, the conversation isn't really quite "should college athletes be compensated" but should they be compensated fairly. Just pointing out that they get tuition is like maybe like Step 1 into an argument that needs to be way broader to be compelling.

Still peanuts compared to the billions the college sports industry makes. There's also the issue of whether it's fair to regard the tuition at sticker value when it's clear these athletes are not going to be able to pursue a normal degree.

Edit: slowponied by DV

Forgive my ignorance but do college athletes have a union? I know the NFL players do and that's gone some way to getting them fair compensation. This sounds to me like a spot where a union would provide enormous value. Get Rjoe on the case.

edit : or is the NCAA supposed to be that union? Because if so they're ****ing up royally it seems.

Heh. Timely question. Last year Northwestern's football team sued and initially won the right to collectively bargain. Of course the college sports industrial complex freaked the **** out, and appealed. I don't remember or know what the status of that. I think it's still being decided somewhere by the NLRB. Vox gets the basics covered pretty well.

They're working on it:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/unionizing-...ry?id=23469250

Doesn't the money generated though the high profile sport support many other school programs? If this money is lost because of reduced revenue from a watered down talent pool with these other programs still get funding? How many other programs from major universities would be lost?

Depends how it is done. If your no longer worried about amateur status, the easiest way is to turn the boosters loose. Win win for everyone. (at least programs with deep pocket boosters)

But yeah I think if the schools had to pay out of their current budgets, I would also believe that they would also have to compensate the female athlete not to mention tax, work comp, and some other stuff. So yeah some of the sports programs go under, guys track will be hard to keep. The girls programs are safe for those schools with football programs, it takes a lot of programs to off set those 90 or so scholarships.