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Topic: Start Paying The Players

Topic: Start Paying The Players

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giacomo
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Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/21/2017 11:03:19 AM

Article in the WSJ by Jason Gay. Talks about the ridiculousness of the spending on facilities to compensate the players. Just pay them. This a cut and paste job, so there are breaks between the lines.

Stop Giving College Athletes Million-Dollar Locker Rooms. Start Paying Them

Big-time college sports programs pour money into absurdly luxurious amenities because compensating players is off the table

Jason Gay

The video weirded me out.

I saw it in early August, via the Players Tribune, Derek Jeter’s slick, for-athletes, by-athletes digital clubhouse: a video of the University of Texas football team’s inaugural visit to its brand-new, gut-renovated, super-duper, state-of-the-art…locker room.

First-year Longhorns head coach Tom Herman —charged with reviving a proud but underperforming program that went 5-7 last season—assembles his players outside the doors.

The University of Texas’ new football locker room
.
“I told you, on the very first day…I said we would take care of you, that we would be a players-first program,” Herman says. “And this is one step along the way. So boys: enjoy.”

With that, Herman dramatically opens the doors, like Bob Barker pulling back the curtain on a free Buick.

The kids immediately go bonkers. They’re so thrilled and appreciative. It’s like a combination of Christmas morning and that “Saturday Night Live” skit in which Oprah Winfrey bombards her audience with Ralph Lauren cashmere sweaters, turkeys and Ugg boots.

The locker room is indeed fantastic. There are flat-screen displays, stainless-steel fixtures, sleek lighting and plenty of Longhorn burnt orange. The lockers themselves are nicer than my first apartment. As a package, the place has more in common with the deck of the Starship Enterprise than any wooden-bench stink-cave of locker rooms past.

When I was a teenager, I would have lost my mind to inhabit a locker room like that (not that anyone was asking). And this is precisely the idea. All over the country, big-time college-athletics programs are putting on their glam boots and investing in luxury amenities—fancy locker rooms, performance centers, living quarters, even sleeping pods for a midday nap.

This luxe-ification is done, of course, in the name of competitiveness: specifically, attracting recruits and satisfying players so that a college can keep up in the multibillion-dollar universe of football and men’s basketball. Austerity has long since left the building. If you aren’t offering this stuff to kids, the theory goes, your opponent will. (Texas reportedly showed off its locker room to potential high-school recruits before its actual roster got an unveiling, which kind of tells you all you need to know.)

The University of Texas’ football locker room.
The University of Texas’ football locker room. Photo: University of Texas Athletics
.
To be fair, Texas isn’t the first college team to bedazzle a locker room—Texas Tech just opened its own upgrade at a reported cost of $1.6 million—and a bedazzled locker room isn’t so crazy anymore. A few years back, the University of Oregon unveiled a football complex (largely bankrolled by Nike honcho Phil Knight ) that looks like a Bond villain’s lair and includes a barber shop, farm-to-table dining and a coaches’ hydrotherapy pool. (The cost has been reported to be $68 million, but in fairness, it does have Brazilian wood floors and foosball tables from Barcelona.)

More recently, the University of Central Florida, which finished 6-7 in football last season (a bright uptick from a 0-12 campaign in 2015), unveiled a plan for an athletes’ village that would include, among other flourishes, a “lazy river”—one of those winding amusements you might find at a water park.

Yup: a lazy river.

‘It’s fun to imagine coaching legends like Bear Bryant or Bo Schembechler introducing their football teams to a lazy river.’
.
Look: You and I could spend the whole day laughing at the absurdity of this stuff, because a lot of it is absurd, especially if, like me, you spent your college days sleeping on a secondhand futon and microwaving ramen noodles. It’s fun to imagine late coaching legends such as Bear Bryant or Bo Schembechler doing a locker-room unveiling for the Players Tribune or introducing their football teams to a lazy river. They would likely have ordered the lazy river drained on the spot. (Then again, Bo and Bear would probably be making $9 million in 2017, so who knows?)

Times have changed, aggressively.

“The question the public ought to be asking is: What does the spending have to do with higher education?” says Gerald Gurney, an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma who spent nearly two decades in the athletic department there and now serves as president of the Drake Group, an organization devoted to defending “academic integrity in higher education from the corrosive aspects of commercialized college sports.”

“When you look at the centers with laser tag and beach volleyball and barber shops and fancy locker rooms,” Gurney says, “there seems to be no semblance to being a student at a university.”

As with billion-dollar TV deals and megabucks coaching contracts, these luxury athletic facilities signal something fundamentally askew about the economy of big-time college athletics. Professionalization has almost totally arrived: The perks for college teams can be more sumptuous than the ones for pro clubs, and salaries for top college coaches rival those found in the NFL and NBA. But schools remain resistant to writing a check for the one group actually doing the work out on the field: the players.

‘It’s obvious hypocrisy.’

—Nigel Hayes, New York Knicks
.
“It’s obvious hypocrisy,” says the former college basketball star Nigel Hayes, a University of Wisconsin graduate who just signed on with the New York Knicks. “People say there’s not enough money to pay players. Yet there’s enough for all the lavish amenities so they can get players to commit to their schools and make even more money.”

Before anyone dismisses Hayes—and yowza, does the college-sports establishment do a sadly robust job of dismissing the viewpoints of college athletes—know that the economists agree with him. The system is cracked.

Colleges “spend money on everything but what a normal market would have to spend money on, which is the players,” says Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College and the author, along with Gurney and Donna Lopiano, of “Unwinding Madness: What Went Wrong With College Sports and How to Fix It.” “It just seems like a no-brainer that [this is] what’s going on.”

Let me beat you to it: College athletes can get scholarships, and that isn’t a small thing when a full ride at a four-year school can be worth well over $200,000.

But in an era in which networks pay close to $1 billion a year to televise March Madness, college football is expanding into lucrative playoffs, and coaches with shoe deals scoot through the clouds in private jets, the notion of scholarships as fair trade starts to feel quaint. It’s comical to watch the NCAA and its membership try to justify this arrangement in the legal system and the court of public opinion. Schools that tout their futuristic performance complexes and celebrity coaches suddenly sound like they’re back on a crab grass field in the late 19th century, rhapsodizing about gentlemen amateurs and the flying wedge.

The Oregon Ducks players’ lounge includes flat-screen TV monitors and videogame consoles, overlooking a pair of full-size practice fields on the University of Oregon’s campus, Eugene, Ore., Aug. 5, 2013.
The Oregon Ducks players’ lounge includes flat-screen TV monitors and videogame consoles, overlooking a pair of full-size practice fields on the University of Oregon’s campus, Eugene, Ore., Aug. 5, 2013. Photo: Brian Davies/Associated Press
.
Because make no mistake: These luxe locker rooms and performance centers are a form of compensation, directly correlated to the nonpayment of athletes. With no obligation to share revenue with talented players but eager to attract them to campus, schools simply channel money into other forms of seduction.

Rodney Fort, a professor of sports management at the University of Michigan, calls the current environment a “wonderful example of what happens when a market is restricted from doing its job and people still need to move things economically to their highest-valued use.”

‘You can’t pay the players directly, at least not aboveboard.’

—Allen Sanderson, University of Chicago economist
.
“You can’t pay the players directly, at least not aboveboard,” says Allen Sanderson, an economist at the University of Chicago. “So you overdose in complementary recruiting devices, and that includes building the biggest, most luxurious facilities.”

This is why the Texas locker-room video weirded me out. I don’t doubt for a second that the Longhorns love the new digs or that Coach Herman adores his players and was psyched to show it off. But the manner in which it was unveiled—like a gift, rather than as an indirect payment for actual money to which these players, their predecessors and their replacements may very well be entitled—makes it feel like a shiny diversion from the warped economy behind the curtain.

“I’ve seen lots of people label [such spending] as ‘gold plating’—they do it because they can,” says Fort. “That really distracts attention from actual physical workings of a nonmarket process trying to do what a market process does.”

(It isn’t a perfect comparison, but the college-sports perks-o-rama reminds me of the rapturous coverage a few years ago for tech companies offering workers free cereal and ping-pong tables because they wanted to keep them happy as they worked grueling hours. It took a while for people to come around to the idea that maybe free cereal masked some serious work-life issues. And at least those techies were getting paid.)

A lot of college sports fans don’t want to hear any of this. Despite some terrific reporting on the inequities (the Washington Post’s Will Hobson has been sublime, as has my Journal colleague Matthew Futterman), we’re still caught between eras—between our current hyper-professionalized age and a romanticized vision of college sports. Oklahoma’s Gurney, whose career has straddled both eras, says that the life of a college athlete in 2017 has little in common with the life of one in, say, 1985.

Reporters tour the 25,000-square-foot weight room of the Oregon Football Performance Center, Aug. 5, 2013.
Reporters tour the 25,000-square-foot weight room of the Oregon Football Performance Center, Aug. 5, 2013. Photo: Brian Davies/Associated Press
.
But this doesn’t stop the blowback when players raise the topic of compensation—or any other disagreement with college athlete life. Here the fancy facilities actually get used as a cudgel: Quit whining, you pampered babies!

Consider the reaction earlier this summer when Josh Rosen, a quarterback at UCLA and an economics major, deigned to suggest in an interview that playing a major college sport today isn’t wildly compatible with a well-rounded academic life.

“Football and school don’t go together,” Rosen told Bleacher Report’s Matt Hayes. “They just don’t. Trying to do both is like doing two full-time jobs. There are guys who have no business being in school, but they’re here because this is the path to the NFL.”

‘At some point, universities have to do more to prepare players for university life and help them succeed beyond football.’

—UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen
.
“Any time [a] player puts into school will take away from the time they could put into football,” Rosen continued. “They don’t realize that they’re getting screwed until it’s too late. You have a bunch of people at the universities who are supposed to help you out, and they’re more interested in helping you stay eligible. At some point, universities have to do more to prepare players for university life and help them succeed beyond football.”

Rosen’s comments provoked a thoughtful and nuanced debate about what it means to be modern-day student-athlete.

I’m just kidding. He got clobbered.

Rosen was pilloried by the college sports establishment—as lazy, as an ingrate, as a spoiled brat unable to balance his academics and the carefree life of a major college quarterback. Never mind that, as CNBC’s Jake Novak pointed out, the National Labor Relations Board has found that current college players are spending between 40 and 50 hours a week on football in season—a full-time job by any standard. Never mind that college athletic departments have been criticized for steering student-athletes to easy course loads—or, terrifyingly, nonexistent, fabricated ones. Never mind the invisible hand of the NFL and NBA in perpetuating the system—fat and happy pro leagues, waiting to cherry pick what is effectively an unpaid minor league.

Never mind that Josh Rosen is in college, and that questioning the system is supposed to be part of, you know, college.

“Shut up and play” remains the uninspired diktat for a college athlete in 2017. Embrace the trade-off, get your education and keep your objections to yourself. (Pro athletes are somewhat liberated, but “Shut up and play” is a strong force in pro sports as well, as the current debate over the national anthem in the NFL suggests.)

More Saturday Essays

The Liberal Crackup August 11, 2017
The Grown-Up Joys of Reading Children’s Books August 9, 2017
The Meditation Cure: When the Buddha Meets Darwin July 28, 2017
What Truman Can Teach Trump July 21, 2017
Can the Tech Giants Be Stopped? July 14, 2017
.
I know what you’re thinking: OK, Journal clown, you’re good at pointing out the flaws with the system, but what’s the fix? Any compensation solution would be complicated and entail side effects, and the courts would probably need to be involved. But the University of Chicago’s Sanderson says it may be simpler than I think: “The right solution is to simply pay the kids. Let the market work. If it results in ‘only’ 50 Division I football schools, because the other schools can’t afford a quarterback, that’s fine; the rest can be programs where the ‘student-athlete’ is actually a student.”

If that free-market approach isn’t palatable to the public, Sanderson suggests a solution in which schools with big-time programs contribute (perhaps via a tax on revenues) to a general fund that would allocate an equal amount of money per player. That money could be drawn from by players (the vast majority of whom never make the pros) to finish college, enroll in an M.B.A. program, start a small business or pay medical bills.

Meanwhile, the luxury spending will undoubtedly continue. I doubt that college athletes will stay silent, however. They see what’s going on; the imbalances are too obvious. The fact that the Texas locker-room video appeared on the Players Tribune was pretty rich, given that it’s designed to be a means for athletes to tell the unvarnished truth. Earlier this year, the site published an essay from Nigel Hayes entitled “Don’t Just Shut Up and Play” in which Hayes rejected the idea of athletes keeping quiet and quoted James Baldwin : “The paradox of education is precisely this: that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”

In 2017, you don’t even have to go to class—or the stadium—to re-examine where college sports are going. You just have to go to the locker room. It’s amazing in there.

Write to Jason Gay at mailto:Jason.Gay@wsj.com

More by Jason Gay

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Last Edited: 8/21/2017 11:07:08 AM by giacomo

OUVan
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/21/2017 11:12:25 AM

If you further want to separate the haves from the have-nots this is the way to do it. The players are paid. The fact that some of them don't appreciate the currency is on them.

Last Edited: 8/21/2017 11:14:48 AM by OUVan

BillyTheCat
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/21/2017 11:44:59 AM

Interesting there was no mention of the two most lavish places (Alabama and OSU), of which OSU is about to redo theirs to match Alabama.

I agree with the poster that the athletes are compensated, and will add further paying the athletes would make the MAC schools DIII

bigtillyoopsupsideurhead
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/21/2017 11:55:36 AM

Just because Texas and Oregon can afford new locker rooms doesn't mean MAC schools can afford to pay their Women's swimming teams. That means that not everyone gets paid. There is no way that would work without causing major differences between the haves and have-nots.

giacomo
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/21/2017 11:58:52 AM

The haves and have nots are already separated. The division one moniker is an illusion. Take a peek at us vs OSU: compare the stadiums, revenue, coaches salaries,TV and media exposure. Several of their assistants in football likely make more than our head coach. If we were really in the same league we could get home and home series with Big Ten teams. It's a bit closer in basketball, but not much.

OUVan
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/21/2017 12:37:17 PM

giacomo wrote:

Yes but good players might still pick Ohio over a Big Ten team right now for a number of reasons. Very little chance of that if you start allowing teams that can afford it to pay their recruits. Think DJ Cooper still picks us if money is thrown into the mix?

OU_Country
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/21/2017 3:17:30 PM

OUVan wrote:

If you further want to separate the haves from the have-nots this is the way to do it. The players are paid. The fact that some of them don't appreciate the currency is on them.

This is exactly my opinion as well. They are paid. They don't graduate with a penny of debt from college, and many get the advantage of getting to be pro athletes AND use their name in marketing when they're 21, and have a educational background to fall back on when their playing days are over.

Don't get me wrong, the angle giacomo is coming from with regard to the stupid money spent makes perfect sense. But we can't have a scenario where football players get paid, and ladies soccer does not. Lawsuit city, waiting to happen.

Instead, these big money schools should be re-investing that money into things besides flat panel TVs at lockers. Things like, I don't know, education? Or research at a university hospital?

Last Edited: 8/21/2017 3:18:42 PM by OU_Country

OUVan
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/21/2017 3:33:43 PM

OU_Country wrote:

Instead, these big money schools should be re-investing that money into things besides flat panel TVs at lockers. Things like, I don't know, education? Or research at a university hospital?

Maybe but who's to say those items don't actually make the school money in the end?

giacomo
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/21/2017 5:37:52 PM

You make a good point about paying women's soccer. You wouldn't. The reason the NCAA is the way it is today is because Walter Byers coined the term "student athlete" to lift the schools from the burden of having to pay workers compensation and give them the protection from a variety of things a regular employer must do.

I still come back to coaches making absurd amounts of money. Harbaugh at Michigan makes 8M. Bo Schembechler made 100k in 1981. With 3.5% inflation that would be worth 345k today. Players are still just getting scholarships. That's why all the non monetary compensation via chefs, kicked up locker rooms, etc. One day in the future the players will refuse to play for just a scholarship at places like Michigan, OSU and Alabama.

Andrew Ruck
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/21/2017 6:51:48 PM

Let's forget the argument and imagine a world where it is going to happen...how does it work? As an Accounting dweeb, this is the part of the discussion that fascinates me.

Do schools get to pay whatever they want to whoever they want? I doubt it.

Would the NCAA set maximums? Different maximums for each sport? Each conference? Maximum by team, or maximum by player, or both?

Are teammates paid the same, or does each athlete agree to their own "contract?" Is it set each year, or for 4 years when you sign on?

Would the figures for payment be based on revenues, or profits? If revenues, does this mean even the swimmer gets a little bit of the cut? If profits, boy get ready for some serious bickering over the accounting involved.

If the major revenue sports are forced to be competitive with salaries, does that obliterate the athletic budget for the 90% of NCAA athletes who don't turn a profit?

Depending on how big the numbers got, the idea of these 18-20 year olds sitting on millions of dollars, many times immediately following a childhood of having nothing to speak of, yet they're expected to carry on attending school and taking tests, etc. is really funny to me.

Andrew Ruck
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OU_Country
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/22/2017 11:12:17 AM

giacomo wrote:

I disagree - for every 5 players that "refuse to play for just a scholarship", there will be 15 willing to do so. I fully understand the financial point of view you have though with regard to the coaches salaries.

With Women's Soccer, you'd have to pay them if you're paying football players, for example. I think Title XI basically requires that unless I'm mistaken, even in your example.

Alan Swank
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/22/2017 11:44:56 AM

OU_Country wrote:

giacomo wrote:

Even if Title IX did not require it, it would be the right thing to do.

OUVan
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/22/2017 11:47:15 AM

OU_Country wrote:

Some of the players at those schools might be forced to take a pay cut under any new pay-for-play scenario.

OU_Country
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/22/2017 12:50:08 PM

Alan Swank wrote:

With Women's Soccer, you'd have to pay them if you're paying football players, for example. I think Title XI basically requires that unless I'm mistaken, even in your example.

Even if Title IX did not require it, it would be the right thing to do.
[/QUOTE]

Totally agree Alan.

Ohio69
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/22/2017 3:19:02 PM

It is interesting that the one line in there about the value of a scholarship (as high as $200,000) is basically a throwaway line.

So if you are "working" 20 hours per week on your sport for 9 months, that's 720 hours. $50K per year value divided by 720 hours per year is $69.44 per hour. And you can often get a useful college degree at the end of those 4 years.

Not a bad gig. No?

Are the athletes worth more? Some are probably worth more. Some not at all.

Anyway, just a quick thought I had in reading that.

Last Edited: 8/22/2017 3:22:23 PM by Ohio69

Can somebody hit a pull up jumper for me?.....

giacomo
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/22/2017 3:47:59 PM

Andrew, I agree that pulling it off carries a lot of baggage and would be difficult. I don 't agree that the swim team and volleyball should be paid, or should all the non revenue sports. For those student athletes the scholarship is fair compensation. It is also fair compensation at most schools, including ours. Revenue sports at the upper half of the P5 are the ones where it's out of whack. Check this out: http://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/salaries /

Alan Swank
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/22/2017 5:50:42 PM

giacomo wrote:

Revenue generating sports and sports that pay for themselves are two different things. Not one sport at OU pays for itself. Also imagine the uproar if players got paid at the same time female students were being charged a fee to subsidize that payment.

OUVan
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/22/2017 8:03:36 PM

giacomo wrote:

85 football scholarships x $31,388* = $2,667,980
13 basketball scholarships x $31,388* = $408,044

Frank Solich = $488,000
Saul Phillips = $550,000

* = averaged cost of tuition, room and board for in-state and out-of-state students at Ohio.

rpbobcat
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/23/2017 6:48:51 AM

The concept of playing players raises a number of issues.

Legally,especially with Title IX,I think if you want to pay athletes in one sport,would have to pay them in all D1 sports that have any scholarships.

Some questions:

1.Do you pay all players on a roster or only "scholarship" players ?

2.Can you "split" payments to non-revenue sports like they do with scholarships ?

3.If an athlete is being paid,isn't he/she now an employee ?

Not that it may not happen,but it does seem like a Pandora's Box.

colobobcat66
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/23/2017 9:06:15 AM

rpbobcat wrote:

If Title IX is a problem and they're employees, just drop the scholarships and treat them like employees tied somehow to income for each sport. Make them pros all the way. I'm just kidding. I'm tired of the creeping professionalism in college sports.

OUVan
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/23/2017 11:04:55 AM

Personally, I'd be happy if the NBA could create a good minor league system and get rid of all the kids that have no interest in a college education. I don't care if the quality of play takes a hit. As long as the games are competitive I'd be happy.

OU_Country
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/23/2017 11:25:11 AM

OUVan wrote:

If they could get more people interested in watching the D-League, you might get your wish. Also, if they would change the rules on the "one and done" to be more like baseball, this would solve quite a bit of it.

And I don't think the quality of play would take much of a hit. You're really only talking about the elite 25-30 players a year out of 400+. We'd still be entertained.

Pataskala
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/23/2017 2:23:45 PM

I've only scanned the comments in this thread, so somebody might have already brought this up. I think paying players would cause squabbling like you see in pro sports. Won't someone who contributes more to the team's success want to make more than someone who doesn't? As narcissistic as most of the prima donnas on "P" teams are these days, I can't see a "star" player (or his dad) being happy with a one-size-fits-all pay system. So if they pay based on some ranking or formula, what happens if they pay one five-star recruit more than another? Should a player get a raise if he produces more than anticipated? Oh, this would really promote locker room harmony. (sarcasm alert)

We will get by.
We will get by.
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UpSan Bobcat
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Location: Upper Sandusky, OH
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RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/23/2017 3:12:08 PM

OU_Country wrote:

OUVan wrote:

I agree. Even if the top players weren't as good, I'd enjoy college basketball more if teams weren't completely different every year because the best ones were gone after a year. I would love if the D-League became more of a true minor league.

mcconnelsville
General User

Member Since: 12/23/2010
Post Count: 24

Status: Offline

RE: Start Paying The Players

Posted: 8/23/2017 6:16:15 PM

Take in a John Carroll vs Marietta College basketball game this year. The kids play their butts off,its great fun and they do not receive athletic scholarships.

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