Oh sorry, I read this as "laid" </badamboomshish>
Oh sorry, I read this as "laid" </badamboomshish>
The NBA does mot limit endorsements. So would players have to stop selling autographs, jerseys, shoes, sweat bands, etc when they reach a certain level of earnings? Seems difficult to enforce. If there is going to be a cap, why not just let boosters pay up to a max salary instead?
I wonder if some Duke fans will change their minds about the new format if they' start bringing in freshman classes ranked outside the top 25 due to being outbid by the bigger universities or having players transfer out for better endorsements.
It should be interesting to watch it play out for awhile anyway.
What about the Duke basketball program is remotely unprofessional other than the fact that, by rule, the players are not paid in cash? A $21 million annual budget isn't even minor league (a G League team runs on about $5 million), much less amateur.
Only if you cherry-pick the definition you like and ignore the others. Also (per Cambridge): relating to work that needs special training or education; having the qualities that you connect with trained and skilled people, such as effectiveness, skill, organization, and seriousness of manner; used to describe someone who does a job that people usually do as a hobby; having the type of job that is respected because it involves a high level of education and training. And only if you ignore obvious: a budget *one hundred times* more than that of D3 colleges is hardly indicative of an "amateur" operation.
I'll see myself out.
For what it is worth, the players receive up to $6000 cash in "cost of attendance" stipends. I have no idea if this makes them professionals, but there seems to be a bit of a gray area, even now.
On a related note, I didn't notice a drop in interest in college sports when players started receiving cost of attendance money. Is it because most fans don't consider $6K is enough to make the player "professionals" or it is because most fans aren't so concerned about whether their team is made up of true amateurs? If it is mostly the former, I wonder where the line is. Would it make a difference if the players could receive $10K, $25K, $50K, $100K, $500K, or $1M?
Last edited by House P; 05-05-2020 at 10:24 AM.
We heard identical arguments in the late 80's / early 90's when the discussion was about using professional Olympic athletes. Interest in the Olympics did not decrease when the pros joined the competition.
...on a side bar I think that there is a very important social justice reason for football players to get paid. Right now these players - mostly poor minorities - are sacrificing their future health (and brain function) playing for free for their schools so that the schools can use the revenue that they generate to give scholarships to rich kids to play tennis. The revenue from football should go to the players to compensate them for the hardships that they are taking on. If the alumni value the non-revenue sports they can donate to support them instead instead of placing that cost on the backs of the football team.
(I realize that this is not really the case at Duke and that the argument makes less sense wrt basketball, but Duke is one of just a handful of programs where basketball generates more revenue than football so to the extent that this is an NCAA issue it is a football issue for most member institutions.)
Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013
Kind of a tangent but it will be interesting to see how many of these young men end up with tax problems. They won't be employees, so no withholding for taxes.
They'll get that big 1099 at the end of the year and I suspect many of them will be shocked either to learn that they have to pay taxes or at the amount of the tax bill.
From NIL Valuation: How much are Duke MBB players’ Name, Image, Likeness worth? by Time Stephens:
While the impact of pending NCAA rules changes or new state laws cannot yet be calculated, a valuable marketplace already exists for student-athletes to monetize their Name, Image & Likeness (NIL) in the near future.
Social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter or YouTube are likely to be the first place athletes can go to create new value for themselves.
INFLCR’s NIL team, led by former ESPN and Dallas Cowboys content leader and INFLCR COO Neeta Sreekanth, created a multi-dimensional formula to assess athletes’ per-post value for branded content on social media. Sreekanth and her team have also had the benefit of data from more than 20,000 current student-athlete users who rely on INFLCR to grow their social brand organically.
INFLCR’s formula takes into account a variety of factors beyond followers on social media, such as team performance, sport played, and size of the conference, and has been established to help INFLCR clients and other collegiate athletic programs understand the impact and opportunities that NIL may provide for their athletes. ...
2019-2020 Duke Men’s Basketball Roster: NIL Valuation
At the top, a star athlete such as freshman All-American Cassius Stanley, with a following of more than 513,000 on Instagram, had an estimated annual value on the platform of $410,720. This represents an audience that could command more than $15,000 per post, according to INFLCR’s formula, and would rank among the top 5 athletes in the NCAA, according to ADU.
ACC Player of the Year Tre Jones, with more than 385,000 combined followers across Instagram and Twitter, has an audience valued at more than $308,000.
At the bottom, a player having as few as 14,000 followers (but playing at a very high level in a big conference) could potentially command a rate of more than $400 per post on Instagram. ...
The 14 players on the Duke roster had a combined Instagram following of 1,545,400 (tops in college basketball), an audience estimated at more than $1.2 million in annual advertising value.
The same players had a combined audience of 175,000 on Twitter, representing a cumulative audience value of more than $139,000.
Collectively this represents more than $1.3 million in value that could have been available to student-athletes on the Duke basketball team. ...