A moment of truth indeed. If your in for a penny, your in for $23 million, If this take is credible. So, if I understand this correctly, Duke would need commit to paying a minimum $23 million/yr in player salaries for the next 10years? And it doesn’t sound like the point is to fund non-revenue sports.
That's not the floor. It's the ceiling. Duke will have the OPTION of directly spending up to 22% of its athletic revenue on player "salaries".
As college sports spin, at an accelerating rate, away from the University mission, it’s Duke University’s responsibility to lead.
It's usually about this part of the conversation where I mention that if Duke went the Ivy route, I would still watch just as faithfully as I do now. And then almost immediately someone else tells me that I'm wrong.
Yup. That's neat it won't happen. It's much easier to decide not to pursue a revenue stream than it is to stop pursuing that same stream.
yeah not shocking. convincing enough schools was always the mountain, even if the commish believes it a strategic investment.
It's also very interesting (to me) and surprising that the email acknowledged that the conference hit the brakes, rather than some sort of vague language about being "unable to come to an agreement" or something.
when the word came out that they were targeting something along 2031 to begin, you had to know it was a long shot.
We are not many years away from a “system” where the revenue producing athletic team players don’t even attend the universities they represent. There is some kind of royalty or payment to the university for the right to wear their colors, logo and brand.
It's been moving that direction for a long time. The term "student athlete' is fast-becoming a misnomer.
yeah, we're pretty much halfway there, hirelings for many if not most schools.
Exactly. The more estranged "athlete becomes from "student" the less interested I am. At some point I'll just watch the pros. At least they have a system designed to allow all members to be competitive.
College football has been creating joke-easy academic pathways for football players since the beginning of college football. It's well documented in the book "The Opening Kickoff," which covers the first few decades of college football, which was in the 1800s. For example, in the early years, sometimes itinerant, non-academically-serious players would appear on two different colleges' teams in the same season.
I’m already there. I was always a college first, pro 2nd fan for football and basketball but I now am more interested in the NFL than college football. Another thing that has changed is I find myself having far less allegiance to the ACC, I’m more just a Duke fan and don’t care much about how the ACC does. Duke basketball still remains at the top of my fan interests, though.
What? The death of The Western Canon!
I hear you and am in the same place but for the fact that my passion for Duke basketball has admittedly waned. I still care of course, but not like I did before the advent of Duke one and dones. To be clear, I don’t at all blame the players for following the money. It’s just that the phenomenon has diminished the concept of student-athlete and my passion is tied to that concept.