re: Last Week Tonight With John Oliver hammered the NCAA

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So when Cal-Berkley or Rutgers decides to offer more than LSU for a kid from NOLA that was a LSU lock and he flips you will be happy?

Or when a kid who decides to transfer because Alabama offers him more profit than LSU has you will be happy?

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Oh, cool, so you've made this kids life about your happiness on being entertained. I'm not happy when the Chargers pay more money to take away a Saints player but I would never suggest that we need to band together and prevent the free market from offering the guy money so that he could entertain us.

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As Oliver mentions, only 14 schools reported a profit last year on athletics. But that's just because schools make 10 million from athletics but spend 10.5 on new facilities and report a net loss. Nobody loses money unless they're inept.

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Exactly. Their spending is incredibly lavish because they are trying to compete with each other in the only way they know how. Facility spending and artificially inflated coaching contracts. Thats budget would just be reworked to include a salary expense. Coaches are being paid millions. Budget isn't strapped for cash with only uncuttable necessities.

You don't have to pay everybody and you don't have to pay them all the same amount. I'm not sure about where you work but at my job some people make more than others based on skill.

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$500/mo is $6K per year. If you have 1000 student athletes you are looking at $6MM you suddenly have to find each season. Good luck. Some schools will be able to do it, a ton won't.

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That's peanuts. It's about 5$ an hour (average college sport has 20 official practice hours per week, in actuality its far more) for the employees of the most lucrative revenue generating operation on campus. I don't think any schools have 1000 student athletes. Plus, you wouldn't have to pay basketball athletes in the summer necessarily. So it wouldn't be 12 months a year.

The university finds plenty of money to spend on student workers answering phones in the Bursars Office and all other sorts of bullshite jobs that add little value. But players so valuable that they pack 100,000 seats at 50$ a pop to be seen.... That enterprise couldn't possibly be viable without slave labor. That's literally what you are implying. That having to pay minimum wage for labor would bankrupt those operations.

And I'm not even in support of forcing athletic apartments to pay ALL athletes. But the notion that they can't do it is absolutely ridiculous. They just might not be able to pay their coach millions and spend money on a bunch of bullshite like luxurious facilities that the athletes don't want(or at least not as much as just receiving money) in order to entice the kids.

If we're paying football, do we play basketball? If we pay basketball players to we pay both men & women players? If we're paying both, then would another sport that is perhaps more profitable than women's basketball have a claim to get paid?

Basically, are we looking at some schools paying athletes in some sports, but not others? Could a gymnist get paid at one school and not another?

That's a lot of questions but this whole issue is a can of worms.

for every former player that whines, you have former ones who come out on twitter and claim they have plenty of money to eat very well, and are taken care of.

TJ Moe, has posted on twitter, that if you weren't eating, you were doing other things with your cash. they get taken care of very well.

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They get a free education, which should be the ultimate goal

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Except a ton of them dont b/c they are purposely put into classes that are useless free passing grades.

Do you think UNC is the exception with the shite they were doing?

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Here are my concerns:

Paying players for autographs, jerseys, etc
- Does that open up a way for boosters to pay players?
- If one player is getting paid royalties from merchandise/likeness while another player isn't, how does that affect team chemistry? The All-American Senior Left Tackle isn't going to have a lot of jerseys sold while the 5 star freshman QB who hasn't had a snap probably could. Does a player have any recourse if they feel like the school isn't doing what they can to maximize that player's profitability.
- If we are going to give players $ from jerseys sales in retail stores, who determines what jerseys are going to be sold?
- If we're talking about compensation for playing, does every player on every team make the same? Does the Heisman candidate at USC make the same as the back-up long snapper at La Tech?
- Could every program afford to pay players or would some be forced to shut down their program?

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All really good questions, but this one:

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Does a player have any recourse if they feel like the school isn't doing what they can to maximize that player's profitability.

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is a pretty big key as to why this gets complicated. As soon as the team itself, rather than an organization, becomes a business then you're looking at a lot of questions about how you structure these things to maximize profits, contractual issues, etc.

Bookmarked to watch later.

Was there mention of what allowing athletes to profit from their own likeness would mean with respect to Title 9? Even assuming this is legal it would still be difficult to enforce since it seems to me boosters could then essentially give a star athlete any amount of money they pleased in return for a relatively meaningless appearance etc. If that were against the rules and they still profited from the jersey sales the booster would just buy the jerseys to funnel money to the player of interest.

This immediately becomes complicated doesn't it?