ESPN 30 for 30: Sole Man

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Did anyone catch the Sonny Vaccaro 30 for 30 last night? Once again, another outstanding documentary from this series. It details his career including the story of trying to land Jordan, Kobe, TMac and Lebron. There's also a good section that features the O'Bannon situation that broke up a lifelong friendship of Vaccaro's and ultimately ended with the lawsuit against the NCAA. Interesting stuff. It painted Vaccaro as a sympathetic figure. Maybe I'm a sucker, but I bought it.

[MarkD83]

I watched it online.

I have mixed feelings about Vaccaro as a sympathetic figure. He is/was a great marketer. He created an entire new marketing paradigm to sell basketball sneakers. The really interesting part to me, which makes him a friend to all coaches, is that he took coaches from having to pay for basketball shoes and clothing to being paid to use a companies shoes and clothing. He also made lots of money based on this new paradigm.

On the other hand, this created the culture where everyone was making money but the players He also found out that some of his "friends" along the way were really just business associates. When he moved from one shoe company to another and he lost the competition for LeBron it appears he became a bit bitter. I am not sure that makes him someone that I would feel sorry for.

I do applaud what he did for Ed O'Bannon once he realized the players were/are being exploited in the new market he created.

[Billy Dat]

I thought this was really good. I thought I knew a lot about Vacarro, but I didn't know that he was literally the guy who invented not only the connection between shoe companies and college basketball but also nearly every high school showcase the we know of (his Dapper Dan was the blueprint for the McDonalds game, etc.) I knew he was a key figure in all of that, but I didn't realize he is basically 100% responsible for it.

I don't know enough about Vaccaro to know where the bodies are buried, but the doc certainly portrayed him sympathetically, like a guy who made a lot of people a lot of money by doing their dirty work and then they marginalized him because he was considered unseemly. I am sure the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Vacarro basically put Nike on the map as a basketball company by helping land MJ and launching Air Jordans. He also basically invented paying college coaches to use Nike products and the summer AAU sneaker circuit. Nike seemed happy to let Sonny run wild building this world, including "soft" money moving through coaches to players and the like, as it had an extraordinarily positive impact on their bottom line.

One thing really stuck with me though. Through its relationship with K and USA Basketball, Nike has really been working hard to launder their image in this world. Even though they invented the environment in which many pay-for-play(er) abuses took place, the USA Basketball effort to get these kids playing on USA Teams and in USA camps and showcases - efforts which emphasize fundamental basketball taught by the finest coaches - is positioning itself as the antidote to the same summer scene in which they still play a huge roll. I have bought a few Team USA shirts since K took over as coach and they all bear the distinctive swoosh. The sound it makes is not "swoosh", it's "ch-ching!"

[Billy Dat]

As this 30 for 30 ultimately lands on Sonny Vacarro championing a the Ed O'Bannon NCAA lawsuit, and Sonny's current feelings that the NCAA exploits young athletes, I thought it would be interesting to post a series of tweets DBR favorite Doug Gottlieb just sent out using Duke to help defend the value of college athletics:

Doug Gottlieb @GottliebShow · 3h 3 hours ago
School tuition/fees is $70k (Duke) in some schools, I just fail to grasp how some don't see a scholarship as a fair trade

"Athletes don't get anything"- except millions worth of promotion,lifetime scholarship... Other than that...

Keep in mind #Duke $70k x 4 years, is actually post tax. Roughly $500k in value - real talk

There is no "exploitation" - college use the successes of their students to sell their brand across the board - then ask alums to donate

Kansas is building a dorm which will house #kubball, will have 3/4 court,plush rooms,chef. Perception is facilities don't help players

When you do well in college, you use that to earn a great first job, correct? No different than athletes. The rest is up to you

If you don't value a degree, you can enter the D league immediately - right from high school, good luck with that

Overseas team don't want kids,they want to win @Ironfried55: @GottliebShow I would go over seas. Learn the game the right way and get paid

Name me the player who is being “exploited”?

Okafor got shameless promotion for 6 months,played for greatest modern day coach,now cashes in,can comeback for degree anytime. Next

#Duke guys do pretty well after hoops is over. Unless you think TV gigs are bad.

I love Eddie O, marveled watching him at Artesia/UCLA, but there isn’t a person alive who bought a video game cause he was in it

Most revenue generating athletes get into a better school than their grades should allow,use their sport for future outside of sports

Ask someone with student loans if they would trade playing a sport for their current situation…lol. Real Talk

Do some research on athletes in medical sales. Some companies love hiring ex jocks

Same society that hates when a kid acts entitled thinks kids are entitled to $$$ earned by players that proceeded them

Every kid should aspire to go to #Duke - great school/coach/degree/post hoops opportunity

[Richard Berg]

If Doug thinks the "no endorsements allowed" contract is so favorable, he should sign one himself. Bonus: nobody could hire him to run his mouth.

[MarkD83]

So two weeks after Duke's 5th National Championship I am still trying to resist being fully engaged in an offseason discussion. However, the tweets shown by Billy Dat are not a bad place to start a long discussion about what is fair compensation.

On one side there is the free tuition, room and board. However, there are a lot of costs not covered by these broad categories. Scholarship athletes can make money to cover extra expenses in areas not related to their area of "expertise". Shane Battier had several interships (not sure if he was paid) and Trajan Langdon was a professional baseball player during the summer. The restriction is that a scholarship athlete is not allowed to make money based on their "expertise" but other students are allowed to make money using their expertise. That does not seem inherently fair.

On the other side, there is so much money being made based on the entertainment value of college basketball. In any other entertainment market the key people contributing to the market (actors, musicians, athletes,...) are compensated for their contribution. However, the fear is that players will be enticed to go to certain schools because of how well a school can compensate a player for his skills. I already believe that players are doing this. The compensation may not be as overt as a paycheck, but players clearly pick schools based on TV exposure and what the college's basketball program can do to maxmize the player's chance of making money at the next level. Even when a player says they want to play for a national championship, the thinking has to be that playing well in the NCAA tournament improves a player's draft status. In some ways this selection of a college based on improving future earnings is no different than how all students pick a college. If I want to be an engineer I pick a school with a good engineering program. If I want to go to medical school or law school I will pick a college with a good record of getting students into top notch medical and law schools.

So somewhere in the middle seems to be the right place for compensation and here are some thoughts to bounce around.

1) Drop the restriction that a player can't use their expertise to make money in the off-season. For example, if you want to play basketball and evantually be a coach, allow the players to be paid to be counselers at summer basketball camps. Some cap on the extra money earned would have to be set to make sure that the payment is fair and not seen as a way to unfairly attract kids to different schools. In fact if a player can find a way to make money based on signing autographs then they are free to do so as long as the amount of money does not exceed the cap.

2) Colleges and the NCAA should save a part of the money made in escrow for any scholarship athlete to use to further their education or to pay for medical expenses. This can be to finish school anywhere they choose or to attend graduate / professional school. The pool would be not be controlled by any given school but would be one pool equally accessible regardless of what school an athlete attended. This would avoid the issue that different schools could attract athletes based upon the size of a school's escrow account.

3) Give each scholarship athlete a perdiem to cover incidentals. This would go hand in hand with dropping all of the silly NCAA rules that cover what is undue compensation (cream cheese on bagels etc.). Instead of all of the silly rules just list a cap on the per diem. If an athlete wants to spend the per diem on cream cheese, laundry, an airline ticket home for the holidays...it is their per diem let them do what they want with it.

I know that the powers that be would never go for this, but it is interesting to have the off-season conversation. (I will still watch the NCAA Championship for a few weeks more so maybe the season isn't quite finished.)

[Richard Berg]

Pretty simple: fair compensation is what players could make if they weren't bullied into signing a NLOI by the governing monopoly. Kyrie could've made millions. McClure could've made enough for pizza & beer. Both seem like fine outcomes. No need for nosy administrators to micromanage it from afar.


However, the fear is that players will be enticed to go to certain schools because of how well a school can compensate a player for his skills.
So? That's how the education market works for everyone else: professors, admins, coaches, grad students, undergrads on non-athletic scholarships...everyone. Only in NCAA fantasy land is competition considered a bad thing.

To be clear, I'm not a huge fan of privatizing higher education in the first place, nor of the unholy alliance between universities and minor-league sports, but that's the world we live in. I mean, it's fine to imagine a separate thread (not here) discussing the many pitfalls of capitalism [vs public goods], but determining fair prices isn't one of them -- frankly it's the one thing free markets are really good at. It's beyond hypocritical for TPTB to first convert colleges into a giant money machine, then turn around and say "sorry, figuring out how to price athlete labor sounds hard, so we're just not gonna bother".

I would have just two rules:

(1) All 3rd party funding must be declared. Hiding money under-the-table would be an Honor Code violation (with punishments akin to plagiarism), and would be reported directly to IRS auditors.

(2) 3rd party funding attributable to "basketball expertise" would be subject to a 50% levy, paid into the university's general scholarship fund. The remainder could be paid out as "salary" (more precisely, 1099 income), used for travel & training expenses, hire agents/PR/lawyers, etc, at the player's discretion.

In short, it would look a lot like the system universities already have in place for professors to apply for & disburse grant money.