On whether "Coaches can bounce from college to pro and play the two off against each other", I remain from Missouri; on whether college players have the same rights as their coaches, this week's NCAA news shows that not only the college coaching profession, but also the universities' administrations and athletic departments, shut student-athletes out on both sides of that hyphen:
From economics professor Andrew Zimbalist, author of "The Bottom Line: Observations and Arguments on the Sports Business" [a redundancy, to be sure], in today's New York Times:
So, what’s going on? It’s the market. If universities want to get the best coaches, they have to pay the going rate.
Never mind that the presidents of large public universities generally have compensation packages of $200,000 to $700,000. Never mind that paying the football coach 5 to 15 times more than the college president (and many times more than the professors) sends a strange message to the student body about the institution’s priorities. Never mind that Article I of the N.C.A.A. Constitution affirms that academics have primacy over athletics. The market demands it.
What kind of a skewed market makes these demands? First, the players are not allowed to be compensated. Instead, the coaches walk off with the value produced by the “student-athletes.”
Although it can be argued that Mario Williams, Reggie Bush, and Vince Young walked off to the pros with at least their value in the NCAA, they of course left behind hundreds if not thousands of fellow players who won't.
Whether
Gators All-SEC cornerback Ryan Smith will be among those players remains to be seen. He enters tomorrow's BCS National Championship Game as a top five pass-picker in '06, but Smith is the exception to an NCAA rule reinstated yesterday that prevents college athletes who have graduated--Smith's a former Ute with a sociology degree--from continuing their college careers immediately at another university.
Smith can go pro this coming season based on his breakout season as a Gator and the 21 hours of summer classes he passed to get off the bench at Utah and make it to Florida in time to play.
Sounds like a fair trade. Smith sits one season and plays two for Utah, helping the athletic department rake in far more than the scholarship money it gave Smith, and then moves to a better school with a better football program. He earned the degree faster than most of his fellow students, and he deserved a reward.
College coaches, including Florida’s Urban Meyer [at least before his former cornerback at Utah arrived in Gainesville], said the rule would usher in an era of free agency and would force coaches to begin recruiting players enrolled at other institutions. Guess what? They already do that. When a highly recruited player doesn’t get much playing time or clashes with a coach, word spreads. One way or another, coaches at other schools pass word along to that player that he would fare better at their school.
In most cases, that player isn’t in a position to graduate. I talk to these guys all the time, and many don’t belong in college in the first place. They aren’t a threat to graduate with eligibility remaining anyway.
So why not reward the players who can do the job on the field and in the classroom? According to the NCAA, only 25 players took advantage of the rule last year. Sounds like a real epidemic, doesn’t it. Sure, that number would have risen this year, but by how much? A hundred more players? Two hundred?
The presidents — including Florida’s Bernie Machen — caved on this one. To make life easier for their millionaire coaches, they chose to punish the true student-athletes.
On whether "Coaches can bounce from college to pro and play the two off against each other", I remain from Missouri; on whether college players have the same rights as their coaches, this week's NCAA news shows that not only the college coaching profession, but also the universities' administrations and athletic departments, shut student-athletes out on both sides of that hyphen:
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11 comments:
May be wrong? I've found that when people think I'm wrong its because either I didn't state my point well enough, or that they didn't understand it. But, wrong? Nope, not ever.
As a "half full" type of guy I thought I'd point out that with state college tuition up 35% from five years ago, student athletes received huge raises too. Yes, yes, not at all on par with their worth to the school, or what they would command if they could shop their wares, and not as much as coaches, or in line with revenue growth, but I'm all about accentuating the positives.
Just pay them. But since that's a long way out, at least let them transfer at will. The benefit to the school is on a yearly basis and is paid out with scholarship. The benefit to the student is also on a yearly basis, so why the "lock-up?"
You said it: power.
Oh, and tomorrow night? Gators 38, Buckeyes 23
Anyone with a scholarship is paid. The coaches are subsidized by tax dollars that flow into college coffers. Big time sports may provide some inflows but they pale in comparison to the free money from all of us hard working tax payers. You can't link the pay of coaches to the labor of athletes. There is no straight line there. As with all regulated, non-free markets it is next to impossible to link cause and effect in the supply and demand curves.
The givens in this argument are: the system is inefficient (no profit motive so this MUST be true), future value is the main consideration in the educational product, i.e. a degree (this can only be calculated years after the transaction) while for coaches almost all value is present value, Muscles is biased which led him to a poor prognostiction of game result (actual result Ohio 31 Florida 17)
Whatever.
"The scholarship is payment" is perhaps my favorite argument for keeping the current system for college athletes.
The beauty of it is that its so easy to prove correct or false. Just open up the system and allow the market to determine value. If a scholarship is fair value for an athlete then that should be the market price. If its too high, then the athlete should receive less, and if its too low then the price (payment) should be higher. Piece of cake. Eliminate the guessing.
As it stands you have one price for all cars. If you have a Rolls, and someone pays you $1000, then you got paid. Using Stalin's argument you should not feel cheated.
As far as the profit motive, there's a huge one. Schools receive money from tickets, bowl games, concessions, shirt and other souvenirs/fan sales, advertising, television revenue, etc. Its a several billion dollar industry. College sports is not college teaching. Two separate ideas. The value for our education comes later, and we judge the cost on that. Furthermore, the value we provide to the school is about zero. However with sports, the value the athlete provides is immediate to the school, while the value of the education is decreased (a very high percentage, in some cases most, of the athletes on a team don't even receive a diploma).
For you, a student with meager athletic skills, and nothing to offer a school, a full scholarship has extreme value. For a top tier athlete who will generate wins, bowl games, advertising, sales, etc they have much to offer the school right now. For them, a scholarship may not fairly compensate them for the value they bring immediately.
By the way, having been born and raised in FL, I feel that I'm highly qualified to judge relative abilities of the Gators. While my projection may ruffle some fellow Floridian's feathers, I'm somewhat pessimistic about FL tonight. So, I'm going with FL 75 OSU 3.
The holder of a gold medal in SPJC Picnic Day Kickball event responds thusly:
Its funny that this demand never comes from the players. I've never seen a strike by college athletes demanding fair treatment and yet many argue the current situation is unfair treatment. That is evidence of a free contractual arrangement in which both sides are satisfied with the value they are getting.
Is it similarly problematic when young doctors commit to a "low" paid internship in return for help with their college costs? I hear the supervisors of the hospitals benefiting from this cheap labor make big bucks.
I don't understand your point. Your saying because it is your opinion that things seem to be OK (wrong by the way, lots and lots of lawsuits over the years on this issue, as well as comments from athletes), it is better to keep the system and guess, than to open it up for proof?
Again, if you're right, then things won't change, if you're wrong they will. Why the opposition? Are you saying the free market is bad, or that you're smarter than the market?
I'm honestly perplexed. I know you to be a free market guy. Why do you abandon it here?
The value of an athletic scholarship--and, while we're at it, the accompanying under-the-table perks--relative to either the average men's football/basketball player's potential earnings, or to the millions their universities and their coaches earn through players' labor (Gators 41, University of Florida $17 million) is chump change paid in service to a lie agreed upon: College athletics is about learning, not earning.
By popular demand I give you:
I've never been a free market guy in sports. You can't have a competitive league if you don't impose competitive balance from the outside. I don't like free agency and never have. (Although I have gotten used to it) I don't see athleticism as a scarce resource that needs proper allocation to maintain an efficient society. I also don't care that the market for Hollywood stars is not free. I really don't care if the best actors are free to make it big or if it is controlled by a talent cartel. This does not affect society and people know the rules going in.
The free market is not the altar upon which I sacrifice all else. I don't think people should have absolute freedom either. I'm not an anarchist.
The fights are always about WHICH freedoms you want to restrict not IF we want to restrict freedoms. I'm all for restricting the freedoms of a segment of a sports league to make the league a better product in general (to me anyway).
Before I get too far into this, I have one clarifying question: are you saying that the current scholarship program does a better of of allocating and maximizing benefit for all involved than something closer to a free-market plan? In other words, are you saying, in sports, a command economy creates more benefit than a free market economy?
No. I'm just saying that for ME the value of sports is improved when efficiencies are sacrificed for an increased OPPORTUNTIY for parity. This is how Democrats view business - no one should get too good and no one should get too bad. So they control wages and labor movements. I'm opposed to this in the free market because it hurts us all by dragging down our best and therefore reduces economic growth for all(see Harrison Bergeron).
When this same idea is applied to professional sports leagues it keeps competition closer and therefore enhances the interest in each game. This improves the league as a whole since it is then more compelling. Now, I'm not an extremist on that point. If a team like New England can still maintain a dominant position for many years more power to them. The OPPORTUNITY for parity does not have to become ACTUAL parity. But it will tend the system towards parity which is good for a sports league. The extremely high pay of athletes shows that even though this clearly is not the most efficient system (the best athletes are making less now than if the system were opened up) it is a more stable system. Without the controls not only would you have more player movement and agreat disparity of pay, you would have more teams folding and more being founded. It would be very dynamic and very chaotic. I think the constancy and tradition of sports and sports teams make for a better product then the chaos of a completely free system. And the cost (which exists) is pretty minor to acheive this. Of course I'm not the athlete making millions less to subsidize the system so that's easy for me to say.
Your comments about the doom of the league are reminiscent of those same claims made at each point in the free marketization of the leagues. But the facts are that at each stage parity has actually improved. Free agency didn't doom the NFL, in fact, revenues are higher than ever, team values (where you would expect the most damage from player movement) continue to rise well above inflation (and by some accounts better than the stock market), more teams than ever are eligible for the playoffs, and and the league is more dynamic (meaning more teams rise to competitiveness and drop from elite status on a yearly basis) bringing in more fans.
When you allow owners to be lazy and inefficient you get Hugh Culverhouses and the league suffers.
Leagues are economic vehicles. Free market theory is, in my humble opinion, the best economic tool. Given the evidence that as the leagues move more towards economic liberty they increase value across the board, then why not let colleges (the original topic here) move towards a similar situation. Is it better for the NCAA that certain teams hoard talent to the detriment of other teams? If player movement were allowed, wouldn't more teams become better? I can understand your fear that bad professional owners would crater teams, but do you really think colleges would fold?
Finally, I'm glad you acknowledge that your argument for not allowing college players to get paid is emotional rather than logical. I understand this whole discussion much better, thank you.
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