Winston and JSA

[itjclarke]

Originally Posted by swarmee

One, the high school player has no effective value. He is just a college recruit. It isn't until he gets to college and proves himself that he becomes an NFL prospect, where there is a shot to get paid.
The NCAA does not just cover CFB and MBB; it covers over 40 amateur sports. The money the schools take in on football cover the expenses (mostly) of the other 15-39 sports that a college plays. Remove the income stream from football, and 10 sports at some schools would be immediately shuttered, leading many with scholarships to have no team to play for. You saw this 10 years ago when colleges were *finally* becoming compliant with the Title IX regs that were published in the 1970s.
As well, allowing any college player to sign autographs for money now becomes a Boone Pickens/Nike/Under Armour situation. Oklahoma State, Oregon, and Maryland have the most powerful boosters with deep pockets, and promising a high school player that he'll be able to sign $100K autographs while in college at any of these schools makes it impossible to even attempt a leveled playing field for recruiting.

I think the NCAA will fail/be replaced for many of these reasons, but IMO the goals of the student-athlete and amateur athletics is sound. If the NFL had the balls to start up their own minor leagues and pay HS players $20-30K to play in front of empty stadiums, then we wouldn't be having this discussion. There would be a place for non-college students to play in the US without having to pretend to be a student, but then, they wouldn't be "getting what they deserve" either. There's no demand for a minor league NFL, but that's the only real way to fix college football. I just think that you take these kids out of the college they're playing for, and their football playing ability below the NFL has very little value. We know that's true for minor league baseball players, where many have to live on $20K for a season.

Those are really valid counter points. Sadly seems most any system, including current allows for the Nikes, Boone Pickens of the sports world to game the system. I think maybe the best they can do is cap any sort of compensation, and again hold in trust to be paid/slotted based on years at school/time played/etc.. Maybe allow revenues from good performing conferences to be allocated amongst teams and bump cap up, giving a perceived "reward" for success. Maybe you also offer rewards/incentives for highest academically performing teams. Seems you'd want to do everything you could to aid those programs. These guys (agents, some coaches, boosters) and most schools do it and get away with. Some schools are involved, and some just turn a blind eye to powerful boosters.

I heard from a friend, who's dad was a successful head coach in the ACC, about one of the ways Cam Newton's dad Cecil was paid. Apparently Auburn had a booster that owned or had ties to a river boat casino. Cecil was instructed to go into the casino and play X game at X time (slots, whatever) and everything was rigged for him to win and walk out the door with thousands, tens of thousands. If busted, unless they're dumb and left an email or phone trail, seems the university will always have a plausible deniability for this sort of behavior.

I love Stanford's success, but even if the coach and program are clean, Stanford has about as powerful an alumni group as there is. Who's to say big time alumns don't take the Capitol Hill route and just make hand shake promises and lucrative "ins" via internships or jobs after school. Lots of motivated, top student athletes might be lured by that kind of stuff and again, school doesn't necessarily even know.