AZ_
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By what current law, specifically, are players entitled to money they are not receiving? You'd figure if there was some current law already on the books that mandated what you claim, there would have been all sorts of lawsuits filed in which players would have cashed in on that legal entitlement. I'm not aware of any. There was one non-binding opinion by the National Labor Relations Board holding that student athletes were employees entitled to minimum wage, but that was tossed almost immediately by the Court of Appeals.
You're advocating for a change to current law -- it's not what current law actually is. If you want to make it so that college scholarship athletes are legally considered "employees" under the Fair Labor Standards Act, you need to change that law.
I agree -it isn't their fault. I'm just saying that's the reality of the financial situation. If you force schools to take that football income over expenses and pay it out to football players as cash, that same money cannot be used to fund other sports. And that makes it very likely some of those sports disappear. That will be the reality, regardless of fault. It's already happening now because those schools are not willing to go further into the red to fund non-revenue producing sports when revenues are down because of the pandemic.
It's also relevant to look at that in terms of the argument that colleges are making huge "profits" off of athletes. Well, not exactly. They're using a huge chunk of that money to fund the athletic activities of other college students. That's not quite as greedy/nefarious as you're making it out to be.
Title IX will ensure that some small number of women's sports exist to offset the number of guys playing football. But if guys want to play a sport other than football or basketball, they may be out of luck. As will be a lot of women's sports not necessary to meet Title IX requirements.
On this, we absolutely agree.
So you have to ask the question -- if big-time college athletes are the true revenue drivers for college football, why hasn't a "minor league" for football that can take advantage of their economic value while paying them at the same time been able to survive? If colleges are simply exploiting them, then the most logical thing for them to do is leave ,and just become professionals elsewhere. That's why I'm a big fan of something like the XFL giving these guys an alternative to college football. It'd be an interesting market experiment as to who is more likely to survive and thrive -- college football without those players who demand to be paid, or the individual players without the support of the college system.
Maybe the best thing would be a player-owned league, like a co-op. That way, there are no team owners or administrators profiting off the labor of the players. Just the players running their own league, and keeping all the money for themselves. Maybe instead of paying expensive coaches salaries, the teams are all player-coached. Why not?
Let the market decide!
I'm not going to gourimoko a response here, because I don't have enough time.
A few things:
1. The US laws on the books don't support athletes being paid, because they were written to specifically strip them of the freedom to do so.
That's the core issue which needs solving, years of legislation that has stripped free people of their economic rights in order to play a game that makes other people money.
2. Not only are colleges making huge money off athletics, corporations and the other major stakeholders are as well. I don't need to repeat this, but we don't need to discuss the fact that collegiate athletics in multiple sports are extremely profitable for nearly everyone but the students who play them.
3. With regards to "why hasn't another league developed," its because the NCAA and NFL work in coordination with one another and have the power to head off any competitors to their business model.
They have an immense amount of power over the barriers to entry in this marketplace.
4. All for the co-op. The way things are heading, we can reasonably expect the Power 5 conferences to break away from the NCAA entirely to form their own thing.