re: Save College Sports Act - why should D1 Football, Basketball players take a NIL paycut

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You said “if every team in the country had 2 and 3 star talent” then proceeded to name Les Miles LSU

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I guess you can't see the forrest through the trees.

I never said Les didn't have talent. I mentioned we sold 100,000 seats to watch the toss dive (a non-exciting brand of football) to win football games because they were COMPETITIVE.

My point is in a hypothetical scenario if all of the top talent coming out of high school went to a hypothetical NFL minor league and bypassed college football then LSU and the other top brands in college football would still sellout 100,000 seat stadiums to watch competitive college football while the top talent played in empty minor league stadiums across the country.

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while the top talent played in empty minor league stadiums across the country.

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You’re underestimating how much of the TikTok generation would watch the minor league

The govt can’t solve this problem. Once you pay players it’s a free enterprise business.

Here’s what should all happen:

All the major schools should lease their teams to 3rd parties. The 3rd parties would then pay the schools a fee, and cover all expenses. They would then be entitled to all revenue like an NFL owner would be.

For instance, Indiana Universiry could sell their football team to Mark Cuban. Cuban would then pay Indiana a yearly fee, and pay all players/coaches etc. But he would also have the right to make money by being entitled to the ticket and TV rights revenue that come from football. Every school that can, should do this arrangement. It would get the schools off the hook, free no risk money for them from leasing their teams to business people.

Let the college amateur non revenue sports sink or swim on their own. I’m sure the colleges could negotiate the fees that they’d lease their football/basketball teams out for to help cover those other sports expenses

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All the major schools should lease their teams to 3rd parties. The 3rd parties would then pay the schools a fee, and cover all expenses. They would then be entitled to all revenue like an NFL owner would be.

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In the end it will probably be something close to this. It will be the only way to institute multi year contracts and some kind of control somewhere.

I agree with part of the premise. College football’s value is overwhelmingly tied to the schools, rivalries, traditions and fan bases. LSU fans are going to watch LSU regardless of whether Leonard Fournette is the running back. Nobody is arguing that 100,000 people would show up to watch Fournette play for the Baton Rouge Rivermen.

But “the school creates most of the value” and “the players have no market value” are two completely different arguments. Clearly the players have market value because schools, boosters, collectives and sponsors have shown they’re willing to spend a ton of money competing for their services.

And this didn’t happen in a vacuum. The money in college football exploded. TV contracts became worth billions. Head coaches started making $8-10+ million a year. Coordinators started making millions. Facilities became ridiculous, staffs got bigger and bigger, and basically everyone involved in the sport found a way to get a bigger piece of the pie except the guys actually playing the games.

At some point you can’t keep calling the players “amateurs” when literally everything around them looks and operates like a professional sports organization. You’re playing in billion-dollar TV deals, paying the head coach $10 million, building NFL-level facilities, hiring armies of analysts and support staff, and selling out 100,000-seat stadiums — but the guy everyone is there to watch is supposed to maintain some sacred amateur status. That was never going to hold up forever.

That’s why I’ve never had a problem with NIL in theory. If a local business wants to pay LSU’s quarterback to be in a commercial or sign autographs, why shouldn’t he be allowed to take the money?

Where the NCAA completely screwed this up was putting its head in the sand for years and fighting something that was obviously coming instead of getting ahead of it. Had they allowed NIL earlier and put actual rules and guardrails around it, we might have ended up with something that actually looked like NIL.

Instead they fought it until they basically lost control of the entire thing. Then we went almost overnight from players not being able to make money signing an autograph to boosters openly bidding on recruits and transfers. What was supposed to be NIL basically became pay-for-play and free agency.

And I don’t buy the argument that because the LSU brand is more valuable than any individual player, the player therefore has no value. Nick Saban wasn’t making millions because people would have bought tickets to watch him coach the Birmingham Steelworkers either. Alabama paid him that because they believed what he brought to Alabama football was incredibly valuable. Same thing with an elite QB, WR or pass rusher.

You can absolutely hate what NIL has turned into. I don’t particularly like it either. But that doesn’t mean the old system was sustainable.

The NCAA and university presidents had years to see where this was going and come up with a reasonable system. Instead they kept cashing bigger TV checks, paying coaches more and more money and fighting any attempt to let the players participate in it.

They waited until the whole thing blew up in their faces, and now we’re living with the Wild West version of it.

Why are we making the players the bad guys in all of this anyway? They weren’t pounding on the table demanding millions. Nobody forced schools, boosters and collectives to start throwing ridiculous money around. The NCAA spent years fighting the inevitable instead of creating a system with actual oversight, and once the gates opened, schools with money to burn started bidding against each other and drove the market through the roof. Hard to blame an 18-year-old for taking whatever someone is willing to pay him.

This mess as usual is on the NCAA and the presidents but they don’t want to take accountability

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But “the school creates most of the value” and “the players have no market value” are two completely different arguments. Clearly the players have market value because schools, boosters, collectives and sponsors have shown they’re willing to spend a ton of money competing for their services.

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Sure but lets say hypothetically 4 and 5 star recruits were off the table for everyone, because they entered their own minor league system, the boosters and donors would still spend millions on 2 and 3 star recruits because those would be the best available players they can get for college football. Its not about the specific players or how talented they are, the only real NIL value these kids have is when they put on an LSU or Ohio State or Miami jersey and get to piggyback off all the tradition/history/fanbases that jersey represents.

So then we’re basically in agreement. Remove the 4- and 5-stars and the big programs with money to burn just start throwing that money at the best 2- and 3-stars instead. The names change, but the competition for the best available talent doesn’t.

That’s kind of my whole point. As long as schools are competing to win and there’s this much money involved, the big dogs are always going to push the envelope to get the best players available. You didn’t eliminate the market, you just changed who sits at the top of it. The players themselves are not the issue.