NCAA may begin paying players ... a little bit

Former DBR computer guru James Armstrong just sent this link to me under the heading, "News Flash! Hell Has Frozen Over!"

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NCAA President Mark Emmert says he supports a proposal to allow conferences to increase grants to student athletes by $2,000, "to more closely approach" the full cost of attending college, beyond the athletic scholarships athletes receive for tuition, fees, room, board and books.

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$2000 hardly comes close to paying these kids what they are worth, but it is something and will at least make it easier for scholarship athletes to do stuff like go to the movies or take a trip home.

The article also quotes Emmert as saying he will ask the NCAA board of directors to allow colleges to grant multi-year scholarships, instead of the current model where scholarships are renewed year-to-year. That proposal has me very excited because I have always hated coaches that pull scholarships from underperforming kids in favor of new stars... sorta like what that jerk Jim Calhoun did this year to make room for his latest Okafor clone.

-Jason "nice to see the NCAA moving in the right direction" Evans

Yeah, nobody at Duke would ever pull a stunt like that. Right, Coach P.?

I'm guessing that title IX will not allow only mens football and basketball to receive the money so probably every scholarship recipient will need to receive$2000. On one level...$2000 isn't much money. On the other hand Duke already doesn't fully cover scholarships for all teams and players (235 scholarships according to website). At $2000 a pop that would be almost $500,000 which would result in us having to cut 10 scholarships to cover it (unless we find the money elsewhere). How many schools give out a full allotment of scholarships and therefore would in theory not need to cut scholarships? Not sure if we had an extra $500K if it would be better to expand the scholarship base or give out spending money.

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Originally Posted by kexman

I'm guessing that title IX will not allow only mens football and basketball to receive the money so probably every scholarship recipient will need to receive$2000. On one level...$2000 isn't much money. On the other hand Duke already doesn't fully cover scholarships for all teams and players (235 scholarships according to website). At $2000 a pop that would be almost $500,000 which would result in us having to cut 10 scholarships to cover it (unless we find the money elsewhere). How many schools give out a full allotment of scholarships and therefore would in theory not need to cut scholarships? Not sure if we had an extra $500K if it would be better to expand the scholarship base or give out spending money.

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I am not the Title IX expert, but one can guess only a few sports will be covered, esp. since a number of sports are dominated by partial scholarships. E.g., baseball at 11.7; men's tennis and golf at 4.5 each.

In an athletic budget well north of $50 million, I believe that $500K (less than 1%) is in Kevin White's contingency budget and will not have any effect on the number of scholarships or the sports programs offered. Although the Iron Duke members will doubtless get asked to contribute.

sagegrouse

For the sports that we participate the ncaa allows approximately 310 full scholarships (some of those can be broken into multiple scholarships so the number of actual students could be higher). From the duke website we offer 235 (not sure if that is full or partial). I was thinking if we had extra money laying around the athletic department we would be upping the number of scholarships not handing out $2000.

From memory of a few years ago I thought we offered the fewest scholarships in the ACC, but a quick google search failed finding a link of scholarships by school.

Dan Wetzel at Yahoo says the $2000 stipend is a step in the right direction but he wants players to put more pressure on the NCAA. He says the time has come for a boycott of a low-level bowl game.

He says the bowls are the best example of folks getting absurdly rich off NCAA player efforts.

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Was it really a fair deal for generations of football players to make, using one example among many, former Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker a multimillionaire? Was it their job to provide him nearly $700,000 in annual salary, four complimentary county club memberships, a $2,250 a month car allowance (you know where a guy might get a reliable ride for that?) and an AMEX Black card on which he wrung up $4,856,680 over the last decade, an average of $1,330 a day, every single day, for 10 years?

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-Jason "good article" Evans

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Originally Posted by JasonEvans

Dan Wetzel at Yahoo says the $2000 stipend is a step in the right direction but he wants players to put more pressure on the NCAA. He says the time has come for a boycott of a low-level bowl game.

He says the bowls are the best example of folks getting absurdly rich off NCAA player efforts.



-Jason "good article" Evans

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I think a bowl would be misplaced, though, as the NCAA doesn't ever see the the bowl money. I believe the contracts are between the leagues and the bowls.

While I think it makes sense to give players a reasonable stipend based on the number of hours they dedicate to the sport and the amount of revenue they bring in, I personally don't understand the argument that schools athletics departments are run essentially like companies that bring in billions of dollars and don't pay anything back to the athletes. (I'm not saying anybody in this thread has said that, but I've seen that argument many times before.) If that's the case, schools would make terrible businesspeople as very few actually turn a profit. While Duke's athletic budget would be able to handle a $500k increase, there are other institutions where a $500k-$1M increase would cause strain.

Those that argue that schools' athletic departments are run like companies and athletes should get paid based on their free market value should also argue that schools should "promote" and give increases to the highest performers and eliminate or reduce benefits to the "lower performers." In other words, football and men's basketball should be the only sports in NCAA sports as they're the only ones that typically turn a profit. If you are the CEO of a company, you would eliminate a group in your company if it had no chance to ever make a profit. There's no point in continually throwing money at a losing enterprise. But that's not the case since a school's athletic department's main objective is clearly NOT to turn the largest profit possible. If additional increases are approved, I'd expect some more cuts to sports like men's tennis (which only has 4.5 scholarships as it is now), wrestling, swimming and diving, etc at smaller schools. I don't think that's a good thing personally. Maybe it's different at other schools, but athletes at Duke are treated very well and not hurting for lunch money. If they are, they can apply for federal Pell grants on top of their full ride. And maybe I'm misunderstanding certain individuals' arguments and I'd be happy to be corrected.

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Originally Posted by Bluedog

While I think it makes sense to give players a reasonable stipend based on the number of hours they dedicate to the sport and the amount of revenue they bring in, I personally don't understand the argument that schools athletics departments are run essentially like companies that bring in billions of dollars and don't pay anything back to the athletes. (I'm not saying anybody in this thread has said that, but I've seen that argument many times before.) If that's the case, schools would make terrible businesspeople as very few actually turn a profit. While Duke's athletic budget would be able to handle a $500k increase, there are other institutions where a $500k-$1M increase would cause strain.

Those that argue that schools' athletic departments are run like companies and athletes should get paid based on their free market value should also argue that schools should "promote" and give increases to the highest performers and eliminate or reduce benefits to the "lower performers." In other words, football and men's basketball should be the only sports in NCAA sports as they're the only ones that typically turn a profit. If you are the CEO of a company, you would eliminate a group in your company if it had no chance to ever make a profit. There's no point in continually throwing money at a losing enterprise. But that's not the case since a school's athletic department's main objective is clearly NOT to turn the largest profit possible. If additional increases are approved, I'd expect some more cuts to sports like men's tennis (which only has 4.5 scholarships as it is now), wrestling, swimming and diving, etc at smaller schools. I don't think that's a good thing personally. Maybe it's different at other schools, but athletes at Duke are treated very well and not hurting for lunch money. If they are, they can apply for federal Pell grants on top of their full ride. And maybe I'm misunderstanding certain individuals' arguments and I'd be happy to be corrected.

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Your argument is based on the claim that athletic budgets won't generate additional revenue per school. But schools are generating more and more revenue in every contract, often doubling the value of their previous contract. Bowl revenues continue to go up as you add more sponsors to the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl Sponsored By Capital One Presented By Sony.

Also, the 2k stipend (like most proposals to increase player benefit) wouldn't be mandatory just like fulfilling every scholarship possible isn't mandatory, so this decision doesn't make life financially tougher on smaller schools.

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Originally Posted by kexman

I'm guessing that title IX will not allow only mens football and basketball to receive the money so probably every scholarship recipient will need to receive$2000. On one level...$2000 isn't much money. On the other hand Duke already doesn't fully cover scholarships for all teams and players (235 scholarships according to website). At $2000 a pop that would be almost $500,000 which would result in us having to cut 10 scholarships to cover it (unless we find the money elsewhere). How many schools give out a full allotment of scholarships and therefore would in theory not need to cut scholarships? Not sure if we had an extra $500K if it would be better to expand the scholarship base or give out spending money.

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My guess is that it would either only cover headcount sports (i.e. those in which scholarships can't be split) or the $2000 will have to be separate from the scholarship. Otherwise, you end up in a situation where the $2000 isn't used to help cover extra costs, but is used to offer more scholarships. For example, if a school costs 40,000 and a sport is allowed 10 equivalency scholarships, the amount goes up from 400K to 420K which is essentially another half scholarship to work with. It could also work where the school is only allowed to split schollies the same way, and then pro rate the 2K per scholly among them. Both actually have their benefits (giving out more schollies vs. cash for those who already have them). Given the costs of the extra cash and the process of figuring out equivalency sports, I'd guess that it would be for headcount only as a first step, but that's just a gut. It could go either way. As far as Title IX goes, it shouldn't be a problem if headcount only was considered since the split between the two has already passed Title IX muster and schools already have an acceptable balance within the headcount subset.

Charles Pierce at Grantland predicts that paying players will be the eventual demise of the NCAA, which he argues is a good thing. He compares their stance to the reserve clause in baseball, and asking, "Do you want to be on the opposite side of any position taken by Bill Russell?" It's a very good read.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/...nning-end-ncaa

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Originally Posted by Turk

Charles Pierce ... very good read.

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You lost me.