Current Events > Rip NCAA: California just passed a law that allows college athletes to get paid

(+) Yeah! (+)

Finally freedom of academic slavery.

fuck the corrupt ncaa

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/30/sport/california-sb-206-ncaa-trnd/index.html

alifornia Gov. Gavin Newsom passed SB 206, also known as the Fair Pay to Play Act, into law Monday. The law allows college athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness.

The bill will go into effect in 2023, and if the bill survives the expected court challenges, it could reshape the NCAA's business model.
---

This doesnt effect schools outside of California.

The NCAA will just disqualify any California college that has athletes who profit from competing in meaningful games.

But I'm sure this will all change.

---

chrono625 posted...

This doesnt effect schools outside of California.

The NCAA will just disqualify any California college that pays its athletes from competing in meaningful games.

But I'm sure this will all change.

California has some big name colleges so that's not gonna work too well
---

chrono625 posted...

The NCAA will just disqualify any California college that pays its athletes from competing in meaningful games.

California probably has enough schools to just not care, then competition will increase as more states (and individual schools) tell the NCAA to fuck off.

The school isn't paying them right? What's happening is that they can now collect money from sponsorships
---

Blue_Inigo posted...

chrono625 posted...

This doesnt effect schools outside of California.

The NCAA will just disqualify any California college that pays its athletes from competing in meaningful games.

But I'm sure this will all change.

California has some big name colleges so that's not gonna work too well

---

emblem boy posted...

The school isn't paying them right? What's happening is that they can now collect money from sponsorships

exactly. the corrupt,racist ncaa currently wont allow you to make money off your likeness in any way.

its disgusting.
---

How will this affect college cost with schools presumably giving less $ in athletic scholarships?
---

Damn_Underscore posted...

How will this affect college cost with schools presumably giving less $ in athletic scholarships?

You can probably kiss athletic scholarships goodbye and it will definitely effect tuition to an already bloated cost.

---

chrono625 posted...

Damn_Underscore posted...

How will this affect college cost with schools presumably giving less $ in athletic scholarships?

You can probably kiss athletic scholarships goodbye and it will definitely effect tuition to an already bloated cost.

I don't really see too much changing with athletic scholarships. Schools are unlikely to end up paying players directly, beyond the usual free basketweaving classes.

lol

I imagine there are some really pissed off former college athletes demanding compensation from back in the day over those NCAA games from EA.
---

I'd wager most of them can't really make money off of their likeness to begin with.

This will just benefit the top tier, who were going on to great things anyway, while hurting the general field.

It's one of those "I'm gonna be rich some day" backfiring policies.
---

Are schools paying them directly or are they just allowed to sell their image and likeness for money on their own?

---

Febrel posted...

This will just benefit the top tier, who were going on to great things anyway, while hurting the general field.

Nah. This also benefits small schools, where suddenly booster clubs can exist again.

This isn't close to the end of the NCAA. All Cali schools will be barred from the NCAA and then the legal battles begin.
---

This is gonna get real interesting the first time an athlete gets a pepsi sponsorship to play for a school with a coke sponsorship.

---

When enough top recruits choose to go play for USC/Cal/UCLA over the top schools in the country (like Alabama and Clemson for football or Duke and Kentucky for basketball) because they can make money while playing college ball until they're allowed into the NFL/NBA draft, then the NCAA and those big schools will realize how much money they're losing and that something has to change.
---

This is all purely anecdotal, but I think the "Don't pay college athletes!" is mostly a subconscious racist thing. People are worried that if Good 'Ol U is allowed to pay their athletes, that you won't get hometown walk-ons, etc. anymore. It ruins the illusion that anyone can try hard and be a college athlete. Which isn't inherently racist, but the locations of these schools lend themselves to "hometown walk-on" meaning white, rural kid, and the "all-star athletes" being paid to go there instead are pictured as urban, black kids.

s0nicfan posted...

This is gonna get real interesting the first time an athlete gets a pepsi sponsorship to play for a school with a coke sponsorship.

The worst thing about where I went to school was that it was a Pepsi campus and all the nearby downtown was as well, so you couldn't get any good pop anywhere.
---

Hanky_Bannister posted...

The bill will go into effect in 2023

The fuck?
---

NCAA is a mafia fuck them get rid of them from all college sports
---

DeadBankerDream posted...

The fuck?

Presumably so it does double duty of becoming a topic of controversy right in the middle of the 2024 election cycle.

---

DeadBankerDream posted...

Hanky_Bannister posted...

The bill will go into effect in 2023

The fuck?

I'm guessing some sort of open invitation for other states to do the same, so that there's a decent amount of "fuck you NCAA" schools in three years or so.

This is all purely anecdotal, but I think the "Don't pay college athletes!" is mostly a subconscious racist thing

nothing anecdotal about it. Studies have shown the divide to pay college athletes falls largely on racial lines and when you look at the dynamic (mostly rich white schools and administrations making billions off of unpaid labor, which is mostly black at the D1 level), it's hard to see the racism element

---

I was reading about this earlier. The NCAA is afraid of different schools playing under different rules depending on the state. I don't know if they ever had any intention of trying to implement something like this themselves, but it will be interesting if only like half of the country creates a similar law or if they are all slightly different.

s0nicfan posted...

This is gonna get real interesting the first time an athlete gets a pepsi sponsorship to play for a school with a coke sponsorship.

I believe there was a note about how a kid with a Nike sponsorship can't play for an Adidas school for example, so probably the same thing applies.

---

Questionmarktarius posted...

DeadBankerDream posted...

Hanky_Bannister posted...

The bill will go into effect in 2023

The fuck?

I'm guessing some sort of open invitation for other states to do the same, so that there's a decent amount of "fuck you NCAA" schools in three years or so.

Lets hope
---

s0nicfan posted...

This is gonna get real interesting the first time an athlete gets a pepsi sponsorship to play for a school with a coke sponsorship.

I don't see why this would be an issue moreso than when that happens in pro sports. Messi is sponsored by Adidas, Barcelona wears Nike uniforms.
---

KainWind posted...

I believe there was a note about how a kid with a Nike sponsorship can't play for an Adidas school for example, so probably the same thing applies.

This is partially why I think it's going to be interesting. You can imagine a scenario where a kid gets a much better offer from one sponsor versus another, but due to non-compete clauses they have to either go to another school or turn down the money and you know someone would complain about that. Then there's the basic fact that if they can't compete with existing School sponsors, there is much less motivation for a company like Coke to sponsor an individual student player if they're already sponsoring the school. Then there's the issues like a student getting a sponsorship that conflicts with the "core values" of the school and how they handle that, and it's a giant question as to whether schools are going to allow all these sponsorships to appear on players attire, and the NCAA is just going to turn into Nascar, or whether the sponsorships will only exist as commercials and you won't be able to see them in the game themselves.

And this doesn't even get into issues with things like predatory sponsorship deals where they catch a young star with a too good to turn down contract that goes 20 years, and then when they graduate they find themselves locked out of NBA deals and they are legally unable to get out of the contract they signed before. You see this kind of thing with pop stars every now and again where they want to go independent but they still owe they're publisher like 5 more albums.

I'm not saying this is a bad move, by the way. It will be good for the students to potentially make money off of their image. I just think that is a lot more complicated than most people probably think and it will be a long time before all of these issues are hashed out, if they ever are.

---

San jose state to become the powerhouse it was destined to be
---

s0nicfan posted...

KainWind posted...

I believe there was a note about how a kid with a Nike sponsorship can't play for an Adidas school for example, so probably the same thing applies.

This is partially why I think it's going to be interesting. You can imagine a scenario where a kid gets a much better offer from one sponsor versus another, but due to non-compete clauses they have to either go to another school or turn down the money and you know someone would complain about that. Then there's the basic fact that if they can't compete with existing School sponsors, there is much less motivation for a company like Coke to sponsor an individual student player if they're already sponsoring the school. Then there's the issues like a student getting a sponsorship that conflicts with the "core values" of the school and how they handle that, and it's a giant question as to whether schools are going to allow all these sponsorships to appear on players attire, and the NCAA is just going to turn into Nascar, or whether the sponsorships will only exist as commercials and you won't be able to see them in the game themselves.

And this doesn't even get into issues with things like predatory sponsorship deals where they catch a young star with a too good to turn down contract that goes 20 years, and then when they graduate they find themselves locked out of NBA deals and they are legally unable to get out of the contract they signed before. You see this kind of thing with pop stars every now and again where they want to go independent but they still owe they're publisher like 5 more albums.

I'm not saying this is a bad move, by the way. It will be good for the students to potentially make money off of their image. I just think that is a lot more complicated than most people probably think and it will be a long time before all of these issues are hashed out, if they ever are.

Yep. I have a feeling this is going to come with a ton of issues.
---

The NCAA obviously is against this, but they made an interesting point IMO. They said that allowing athletes to get sponsorships would give schools an unfair advantage. I'm not 100% sure if they meant in this case alone or if assuming that this policy became a nationwide thing. But the latter is exactly why professional leagues have drafts and salary caps. If players could sign wherever they wanted from the start, the biggest cities would get all of the best players and smaller cities would be at a huge disadvantage. And that wouldn't be good for the health of those leagues.

In college, some already-big programs like Michigan, Ohio State, and Notre Dame football, Duke basketball, etc. would gain an even bigger advantage than they have now because they would have amazing sponsorship opportunities. But you might also see schools that are in large cities/metro areas, such as UCLA, rise to the top in every sport.

College sports are already a handful of teams having a serious chance at winning a national championship in any given season, and athletes being able to seek sponsorships could make things even worse.
---

Alabama and Clemson have played in the playoffs four years in a row, I think the cat is out of the bag on competitive balance.
---

I dont care if the school pays them but I feel like % of jersey sales should go back to the player. And the players should be able to make like a YT page or sell t shirts get a brand deal etc.

---

Schools should never pay athletes. Athletes should be able to seek sponsorships, get money for jersey sales, etc. but if schools paid athletes directly, costs would go up for everyone else.

I think a lot of people (at least actual college students) would rather have no sports at all if that happened.
---

Damn_Underscore posted...

Schools should never pay athletes. Athletes should be able to seek sponsorships, get money for jersey sales, etc. but if schools paid athletes directly, costs would go up for everyone else.

Schools are already spending that money on athletics. They pay coaches, and buy expensive new facilities. Athletic departments are incentivized to spend all the money they get, but a lot of that would be better if it could go directly to athletes.
---

Athletes getting paid is fine as long as the schools aren't involved and they're not paid by "neutral" third parties to go to certain schools

Damn_Underscore posted...

Schools should never pay athletes. Athletes should be able to seek sponsorships, get money for jersey sales, etc. but if schools paid athletes directly, costs would go up for everyone else.

I think a lot of people (at least actual college students) would rather have no sports at all if that happened.

How many other workers should colleges refuse to pay to keep tuition costs down?
---

That doesn't change the fact that if schools directly paid athletes, costs would go up for everyone else.

And I thought that most schools made a profit from their athletic department, but apparently that isn't true: https://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2014/dec/22/jim-moran/moran-says-only-20-colleges-make-profit-sports/
---

Intro2Logic posted...

Damn_Underscore posted...

Schools should never pay athletes. Athletes should be able to seek sponsorships, get money for jersey sales, etc. but if schools paid athletes directly, costs would go up for everyone else.

I think a lot of people (at least actual college students) would rather have no sports at all if that happened.

How many other workers should colleges refuse to pay to keep tuition costs down?

Athletes are paid with scholarships.

Is that fair compensation for the revenue they provide? Often the answer is no, but a scholarship (especially a full ride scholarship) is an amazing thing to have for any person. Allowing athletes to seek outside sponsorships would make their compensation more fair without affecting anyone else.
---

Damn_Underscore posted...

Athletes are paid with scholarships.

Is that fair compensation for the revenue they provide? No, but a scholarship (especially a full ride scholarship) is an amazing thing to have for any person. Allowing athletes to seek outside sponsorships would make their compenation more fair without affecting anyone else.

I mean... if they're going to a major university and they graduate in 4 years, that's still like $50K a year with no student debt. If schools eliminated sports scholarships entirely but offered high school kids $50K/year to play I don't know who would call that inherently unfair.

---

Well

This is going to be interesting
---

Damn_Underscore posted...

And I thought that most schools made a profit from their athletic department, but apparently that isn't true:

Some very fuzzy accounting gets used to make athletics departments look less profitable than they are.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ez33bj/heres-how-the-ncaas-black-magic-accounting-turns-profit-into-loss

However, as Schwarz has argued for this site and the report emphasizes in further detail, the NCAA-mandated accounting practices turn a $500,000 profit into a $3.8 million loss. They do this, in part, by arguing that raising prices decreases revenue.

You read that correctly. UAB and the NCAA reports that the more money they make, the less money they make.

How does this happen? Take athletic scholarships. The UAB athletic department considers the player's tuition, room, board, and other expenses as losses, since the university bills the athletic department for those expenses. If tuition goes up, the UAB athletic department is billed for more money.

But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a cost is; the university is simply paying itself. Assuming the scholarship athletes aren't taking a non-athlete's place (which they aren't at UAB, since it's trying to grow the student body), then the marginal cost of each additional athlete is close to zero. The school will always come out even since it's paying itself. But the athletic department is only half of the equation, so when the athletic department shows its books, it looks like the scholarship cost money.

Here's the really crazy part: the more money the university makes, the greater the loss the athletic department reports.

Here's an example, based on the one provided in the report. Take two athletes on half-scholarships, who are identical in every way except one is from Alabama and the other from Tennessee. The Alabama resident pays in-state tuition of $7,000 a year, the Tennessee resident pays out-of-state tuition of $15,000 a year. With 50 percent scholarships, the in-state athlete will pay $3,500, while the out-of-state athlete pays $7,500. Meanwhile, the athletic department is billed for the same amounts, due to the 50 percent scholarships.

The thing is, the athletic department writes these as loses. So the out-of-state student is paying the university $7,500 yet is being reported by the athletic department as a loss of $7,500. Compared to the in-state student, the out-of-state student is earning the university more than twice as much money. Yet, because the athletic department is essentially reporting the complete inverse, they're saying the out-of-state student is losing them more money.

Remember, the student's actual cost to the university is almost nothing. That $7,500 is almost all profit, yet the athletic department has managed to make it sound like it is losing $7,500. Just like that, profit becomes loss. It's like if you suddenly decided to pay yourself $100 for brushing your teeth, but only counted the part where the $100 left one hand, not when it reached the other.

---

s0nicfan posted...

I mean... if they're going to a major university and they graduate in 4 years, that's still like $50K a year with no student debt. If schools eliminated sports scholarships entirely but offered high school kids $50K/year to play I don't know who would call that inherently unfair

Setting aside the fact that public universities (which most high-profile sports teams are) aren't $50k a year, that's price fixing on the part of the NCAA to unilaterally set a cap on wages.
---

Antifar posted...

Setting aside the fact that public universities (which most high-profile sports teams are) aren't $50k a hear, that's price fixing on the part of the NCAA to unilaterally set a cap on wages.

Nearly every major sports league has a either a flat salary cap or a "luxury tax" for schools that exceed a soft cap, but that's beside the point. I was simply stating that the question of whether student athletes are "underpaid" rarely treats their yearly tuition as salary.

---

s0nicfan posted...

Nearly every major sports league has a either a flat salary cap or a "luxury tax" for schools that exceed a soft cap, but that's beside the point.

These are collectively bargained upon! Those thresholds would be significantly lower if owners were deciding it amongst themselves, which is how the NCAA operates.
---

Well your article uses speculation rather than actual data, so it really isn't that helpful to begin with. But using the example of the $500k profit in the article, if schools pay every athlete - say all the starters on the football team get $50k, then that profit instantly turns into a loss.

You know how there are bad contracts in pro sports? In the end those don't actually matter because all owners are billionaires and they usually end up making a profit anyway.

Well imagine if some middling school offered Trevor Lawrence millions of dollars to transfer to their school, but Trevor Lawrence disappointed and the contract was a failure. It's not a matter of a billionaire getting less potential money than he hoped, it's a matter of every student at that school being negatively affected, whether they care about the football team or not.

Also there's an issue of who gets paid what and who doesn't get paid. Should the water polo team get salaries even if they are a financial loss to the school?

Schools directly paying athletes leads to so many problems, it's crazy. Whereas I think everyone can agree that student athletes getting sponsorship money from companies is good for all parties involved.
---

Damn_Underscore posted...

Well imagine if some middling school offered Trevor Lawrence millions of dollars to transfer to their school, but Trevor Lawrence disappointed and the contract was a failure.

This already happens with coaches and athletics directors. Do you have an issue with that?
---

Damn_Underscore posted...

Also there's an issue of who gets paid what and who doesn't get paid. Should the water polo team get salaries even if they are a financial loss to the school?

So this brings up an interesting point. Schools are legally required to offer male and female teams for any sports they offer, and often the unprofitable teams are funded entirely from the profits of the popular ones. If schools now had to pay a salary to their athletes, should they still be legally required to host teams for sports that are already a financial loss?

---