re: It’s going to seem ridiculous this year with granting players a 5th but..

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The NCAA knew they were operating what people call a plantation system that was being propped up by some really shaky legal arguments. They’ve known this since at least 1984. This was inevitable unless they got out ahead of it, and they chose not to do anything but rule like a tyrant. The NCAA failed to save themselves from themselves and in the process they destroyed college athletics.

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We talk about “the NCAA” like it’s some shadow, faceless, monolithic entity. But I actually looked it up a year or 2 ago when some of this stuff was happening. I’m going to get these numbers wrong, but I was shocked to find out who actually makes up “the NCAA.” There are very few people who only work for “the NCAA.” Something crazy like 10-20%. The other 80-90% are people whose full time jobs are working in different positions at universities.

So most of “the NCAA”’s allegiances are to their individual university and the university system of sports as a whole. The ones who’ve been profiting off of all these players the whole time. They’ve never had an incentive to do anything but maintain the status quo. As well meaning as the individuals that make it up may try to be, they are not this benevolent entity whose sole goal is to protect the sanctity of college sports and to do what’s in its and its athletes’ best interests.

At the end of the day, they are beholden to either the universities where they are employed full time (the 80-90%) or the university Presidents/Chancellors who hired/appointed them (the 10-20% who work for the NCAA full time). And the universities are the ones who have been reaping the rewards of all this “free labor” for over 100 years.

(I won’t go so far as to call it a plantation system, though. The players have always benefited from the infrastructure built by the universities and the platforms they’ve created to showcase the players. Nobody cares about the players until they put on the universities’ uniforms. I did this thought experiment once, over a decade ago when having this discussion. I probably have a few posts on it somewhere. But I was in Tiger Stadium for a huge LSU Bama game, maybe 2012 or 2014. HUGE game, full of All Americans and future NFL players all over the field, stadium packed to the brim, millions of people across the country tuned in on tv, etc…If you took those exact teams, exact same players, only took off their LSU and Bama unis and put them in generic ones with no history attached, if they had never played for LSU, Bama, or any other college team.

If you took those exact same players and had a game at Southern’s stadium just across town and charged a measly $10 entry fee, could you even fill THAT stadium? Half of it? A quarter? And if you put it on prime time ESPN, how many people would watch besides their family and friends? My guess is very few if any at all. So let’s not act like players haven’t benefitted greatly by the platforms and opportunities they’ve been given when they put on the uniforms of the universities that millions of people have developed significant emotional attachments to over the past 100 years).

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granting players a 5th

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Granting players “more than a 4th”.