[1] - https://www.syracuse.com/orangefootball/2017/08/which_school...
https://businessofcollegesports.com/tracker-college-sports-p...
You can see from that list that the vast majority of sports that were cut were non-revenue, men's sports. $1.05M lost to paying the football team could just as likely be covered by cutting one or two non-revenue sports as it is by raising ticket prices. The reality is attendance of college football games was already down before Covid, even for powerhouse schools like the University of Georgia:
https://ugawire.usatoday.com/2019/03/27/college-football-gam...
It is extremely unlikely that even the biggest football schools will be able to cover the cost of paying their players through increase ticket prices when they are already concerned about filling seats.
Why's that?
EDIT: to clarify, I personally think it's ridiculous that star college athletes don't get paid given how much time those athletes put in and how much money they bring in for schools, but I also think that at least at the schools with huge athletic programs it'll have some effect on other sports.
Of course, it's also possible that colleges will find other ways to pay for the "lesser" sports, and there would be no cuts.
NCAA covers a massive number of sports. The vast majority of those who go pro in any US sport, first go through an NCAA team.
Think about a scenario in the current world: You're a pretty good golf player in high school. You commit to Stanford for golf and a degree in some STEM field. The school already has a system in place to make sure both are possible. You give high level competitive college golf a shot and realize you can actually go pro. After college, you do. And even if it doesn't work out, you've got a degree from Stanford.
And then there's your world: You're a pretty good golf player in high school. You go to college instead of the separate LPGA feeder leagues because it's the safer bet and your school doesn't have a system in place to make sure you can compete in both. Why would they? You never get to experience and thrive in the high level competitions and end up not going pro.
So many professional sports would get maimed with your model. After a decade the US would heavily drop on the world stage when it comes to sports.
Baseball does an adequate job with its system of minor league teams. Pretty much every other country in the world manages to have professional sports leagues without having universities be their feeder teams.
Even in your scenario, there's nothing stopping the aspiring golfer from attending Stanford part-time while they try to make it in pro-golf. Or applying and deferring admission for a couple of years. Frankly, they'd do better academically if they didn't have golf distracting them.
Stanford on its own is one of the top golf programs in the country. Its practice facility is absurdly good (my team was able to use it once when we were out there. The reason we were in the bay area? Because we took our spring breaks to go play fancy courses with rich alumni to get them to donate to the athletic department, which is another part of money you don't see but athletics gets.) You need to be really, really good to play at Stanford.
Second, college golf is a case where, because of the niceties like practice facilities, tournaments, where you don't pay for any of that, it's a feeder to the main tour. In fact, PGA Tour University[0] came out to help get guys who were good in college to the Tour quicker. The quality of guys in lower level tours is crazy, and this is a deserved bumper for the good guys. Guys play in college first because that's where you grow.
I'm very anti-NCAA. Each sport is different in terms of growing to the professional level though, and how engrained the NCAA is in most cases though makes it tough to have an overall solution.
[0] https://www.pgatour.com/university/what-you-need-to-know-faq...
I went to a large state school (SUNY Buffalo) where the administration wanted to go division 1 when I was there in the early 90s. Transitioning to division 1 came along with a large (to us) mandatory athletic fee. The student body voted against this multiple times, and then the administration simply stopped asking and went division 1 anyway (and imposed the fee).
[1]:https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/do-college-sports-make-mon...
> Essentially, this is a classic violation of antitrust law. What the NCAA is arguing, however, is that it should be allowed an exemption to that law. The Court wasn’t willing to play ball on that one.
> Justice Gorsuch made short work of the argument that the NCAA is entitled to an exemption on the grounds that it is a “joint venture.” Reasoning that “student-athletes have nowhere else to sell their labor,” the justice wrote, “[e]ven if the NCAA is a joint venture, then, it is hardly of the sort that would warrant quick-look approval for all its myriad rules and restrictions.”
[1] https://lawandcrime.com/supreme-court/unanimous-supreme-cour...
Note that this is a narrow ruling about the NCAA limiting educational compensation and what scholarships can encompass-- but some justices gave indications that they disagree with the NCAA compensation restrictions at large.
As someone who detests the Plantation League, this is long, long, long overdue.
> In my view, that argument is circular and unpersuasive. The NCAA couches its arguments for not paying student athletes in innocuous labels. But the labels cannot disguise the reality: The NCAA’s business model would be flatly il- legal in almost any other industry in America. All of the restaurants in a region cannot come together to cut cooks’ wages on the theory that “customers prefer” to eat food from low-paid cooks. Law firms cannot conspire to cabin lawyers’ salaries in the name of providing legal services out of a “love of the law.” Hospitals cannot agree to cap nurses’ income in order to create a “purer” form of helping the sick. News organizations cannot join forces to curtail pay to reporters to preserve a “tradition” of public-minded journalism. Movie studios cannot collude to slash benefits to camera crews to kindle a “spirit of amateurism” in Hollywood. Price-fixing labor is price-fixing labor. And price-fixing labor is ordinarily a textbook antitrust problem because it extinguishes the free market in which individuals can oth- erwise obtain fair compensation for their work.
You then have the value of the different degrees to the market (which is separate from the cost) so it is very possible that certain student athletes are obtaining a degree worth hundreds of thousands of future dollars in the market versus some who get 4 years of room and board to play sports, make the university money, and then maybe they do not even end up with a degree by the time their eligibility expires (see data on student athlete graduation rates).
The problem with the analogy is that restaurants aren't primarily functioning as educational institutions with a restaurant business on the side. Hospital nurses aren't providing nursing care as a side activity. Camera crews are not secondary to the mission of a movie studio. With universities, the sports teams are at least ostensibly in theory, student extracurricular activities secondary to the primary mission of the university.
Let's say a university had a student dining center, and agreed to let people work in the center in exchange for free tuition. Would that be a violation of antitrust? I think not.
I admit universities are currently full of practices where nonprofit endeavors are hijacked for for-profit engorgement in a tail-wagging-the-dog sort of phenomenon. Sports are another example of many. But I don't think antitrust is really the appropriate concept to introduce -- or if it is, it has far greater implications than people realize.
What's maybe slipping under the radar is that by this argument, any nonprofit organization that tries to establish rules pertaining to scope of professional activities is operating as an inappropriate monopoly. Where does the argument end? Isn't the American Medical Association an illegal monopoly under this argument, as it conspires to control how people practice professionally? I doubt the Supreme Court would follow its reasoning to its logical conclusion, which raises the question about what's different with college sports. Why single it out?
I like to do these every once in a while because there is so much incorrect information and bad assumptions about high level college athletes that I feel the need to combat this when the opportunity presents itself. I haven't read the posted SC opinion yet because I'm at work and currently eating a burrito. Don't be afraid to ask probing questions, the worst that will happen is I will choose not to answer.
This is how baseball works, and all the baseball players I met actively wanted to be in college. Some of them even turned down $100k-$500k draft signing bonuses to play college ball.
Honestly the focus (or lack thereof) on education starts at home.
source: also played college sports.
my experience was waking up before the crack of dawn to pre-train, going to school in the morning, and then spending the rest of any free time I had after training (be it weights, cardio, practice etc). and then you watch film. all for the love (scholarships were nice) - so anyone that suggests there is more time to spend on athletics at these levels, and that paying athletes will somehow encourage them to do so vs academia, deserves a flan in the face.
Should anyone actually care that West Nowhere State can't afford to compete against Alabama in football or KSU in basketball, since they never could have in the first place?
How much under the table money will these just be getting above board/visible to laymen (and isn't this a good thing when it comes to large state schools being accountable to taxpayers?)
The problem right now with college athletics (at least football and basketball) is that the schools found a cash cow and the pro leagues found a free farm league that produces top talent. Its a symbiotic relationship and neither one wants to rock the boat. There's a reason the NFL players have their own union after all.
Regarding your second question, West Nowhere State is an ant in an elephants world. There are plenty of D3 programs (that give no aid or preferred admission) that have football programs that lose hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. They'll keep doing it even if Alabama is able to pay their players above the table.
As far as under the table money, I'm not sure. I never saw nor heard about those things, and with the way athletes like to boast it would surprise me if they were all able to keep their mouths shut. I think its less money going to less athletes than people would like to think.
Does this mean players can just do the straightforward thing and negotiate lucrative contracts with schools and we can forego all the backdoor, indirect compensation and self-inflicted corruption that goes on now? If so then these institutions can just be what they are in a straightforward way; football teams that also happen to fund a legacy educational branch.
There were very strong hints that the NCAA needs to change its rules around compensation completely, so it seems likely that they eventually will be able to do that. But it isn't the case now.
> The NCAA does not contest that its re-straints affect interstate trade and commerce and are thus subject to the Sherman Act.
> With this much agreed it is unclear exactly what the NCAA seeks. To the extent it means to propose a sort of judicially ordained immunity from the terms of the Sherman Act for its restraints of trade—that we should overlook its restrictions because they happen to fall at the intersection of higher education, sports, and money—we cannot agree.
