2013 NCAA Football Thread

[MacAttack]

That is completely obscene. Capping head coach salaries to $150K or so, and assistant coach salaries to $120K, would go a long way towards solving collegiate football problems.

You can't cap what the market demands. Putting a restriction on a market for a no good subjective reason like "I think that is too much money for that" is criminal. The only time you should would be for consumer safety. Paying coaches $5M does not endanger the public. Especially since their salaries are paid for by the athletic programs and not tax payers.

 

[ummmm........]

Well, I suppose they could cap it by limiting the amount of money conferences were allowed to receive from their broadcast partners. Of course that wouldn't change the amount of money the broadcast partners received from advertisers, so the effect would be that the broadcast partners would be receiving a larger slice of the pie. But that doesn't sound very legal to me.

Either way, I'm not sure why the broadcast partners would be more deserving of the money than the coaches . . .

 

[Azale]

You can't cap what the market demands.

It's pretty easily actually.

Putting a restriction on a market for a no good subjective reason like "I think that is too much money for that" is criminal.

Nah.

 

[ummmm........]

But what good does it do? The money is there because the demand is there. You can tell the broadcasters they can only accept so much for airtime during NCAA games, but that would just reduce the number of games aired, hurting fans. You can tell the conferences they can only accept so much money from the broadcasters, hurting the member institutions. You can tell the institutions they can only spend so much on athletics, which would reduce the quality of the product, which would reduce demand, hurting everyone. You can tell the coaches they can only accept so much, but that just puts the coaches in the same boat the players are in now. The only solution is to give the players more, since they are the only party being damaged under the current arrangement. But Title IX -- an artificial restriction on the market -- prevents this . . .

 

[downtown]

If your university pays for athletics using a student fee subsidy, or out of the general education budget, which 75% of FBS does, I think you could have a convincing argument that Joe Student is also harmed under the arrangement.

 

[ummmm........]

Yes, and there you have a compelling argument that the schools with profitable athletic departments should be governed differently than those without . . .

 

[MacAttack]

Title IX in my humble nonsexist (I promise!) opinion is right there with the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

 

[bhsup]

How about capping coaching salaries indirectly by making the NCAA and the schools give the people that actually, you know, earn the money for them some of it? Coaches won't get paid nearly as much if the athletes get the lion's share of the pie.

I don't actually think this should happen, btw. But the amount of money in college sports is really just beyond insane. College is supposed to be about learning and life experience I would imagine. It shouldn't be about marketing departments figuring out how best to rake in the dough via the blood and sweat of the student body.

 

[madviking]

It shouldn't be about marketing departments figuring out how best to rake in the dough via the blood and sweat of the student body.

this statement applies to more than athletics

 

[bhsup]

Oh, I'm sure. But given that the thread has NCAA in the title...

 

[mrt144]

Title IX in my humble nonsexist (I promise!) opinion is right there with the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

LOL, at least we know what kinda funny you are now.

 

[downtown]

I am legitimately confused as to how one could call Title IX an abject failure. There is NO WAY we have collegiate, or even high school, athletic opportunities for women like we do now without it.

 

[ummmm........]

To be clear, I wasn't complaining about Title IX -- I'm actually a big fan. I was just pointing out that it does stand in the way of equitable distribution of profits in college football and men's basketball. And I do think it is antiquated to insist on governing profitable, revenue-producing and non-revenue producing sports all by the same rules . . .

EDIT: One of the guys kicked off Alabama's football team following those robberies in February is back on the team . . .

 

[MacAttack]

To be clear, I wasn't complaining about Title IX -- I'm actually a big fan. I was just pointing out that it does stand in the way of equitable distribution of profits in college football and men's basketball. And I do think it is antiquated to insist on governing profitable, revenue-producing and non-revenue producing sports all by the same rules . . .

Right off my keyboard! Just because I don't like it now, doesn't mean it wasn't necessary in the past. It may have been necessary in the past, but things have changed. Just like laws in Texas prohibiting people from tying up their horses in front of churches is illegal. You never see folks on horses in the streets of major cities here. Unless they're the mounted police or parade is going on.

Title IX may have helped propel women in collegiate athletics forward last century before the age of the internet. Now, it is holding all of college athletics back. Because it is, I think it is about as useful as the 18th amendment. Or cup holders on rollercoasters.

 

[downtown]

What do you think changed to make it no longer necessary?

There are probably less than 10 woman's programs in the entire country, across all sports, that are profitable. Even Women's basketball teams at large, historically fairly successful programs, like Penn State and Ohio State, lose money. I imagine the population of students in the general population who make a college decision based on the availability of woman's sports (if they aren't athletes themselves) is virtually nil.

Suppose the federal requirement to offer equal spending on the sports vanishes. Whats the incentive for Alabama or Auburn to not take the 4 million or so they invest in Woman's tennis or track or whatever, and put that towards their football team? From a business perspective, that's exactly what they should do, and any immediate bad publicity would be easily shouted out if their football team was successful, and alumni donations kept rolling in. At even smaller schools, I think this would be even more pronounced.

The economics haven't changed from the 70s, it's only become more stark. The only people who can potential claim injury from Title IX are the tiny segment of football players (maybe the top 10%) whose production towards an AD greatly exceed that of the worth of their scholarship...and a few wrestlers and baseball players, who are missing out on a few D1 opportunities because the schools are reluctant to add their programs. That pales in comparison to the entire population of collegiate woman's athletes, who benefit from federal legislation mandating that they share their money.

 

[ummmm........]

I still think it's valid to insist all sports be governed equally without regard to gender, but I do not think all sports should be governed equally without regard to profit or revenue. Football and men's basketball make a lot of money at a lot of schools. At others, they don't. Some other sports, like baseball, hockey, women's basketball, gymnastics, etc., may produce some revenue, but can't support themselves. Still other sports, like wrestling, equestrian, crew, etc., may not produce any meaningful revenue at all. To insist on treating them all the same makes no more sense than insisting that all academic disciplines be treated the same at every university . . .

 

[Wrymouth3]

Is anybody even able to decipher this Voynich Manuscript type thing? Azale tells me that the Dark Brotherhood from the Elder Scrolls series may actually exist after all:http://deadspin.com/uvas-recruiting-letters-arent-even-trying-anymore-1486678766

 

[downtown]

I still think it's valid to insist all sports be governed equally without regard to gender, but I do not think all sports should be governed equally without regard to profit or revenue. Football and men's basketball make a lot of money at a lot of schools. At others, they don't. Some other sports, like baseball, hockey, women's basketball, gymnastics, etc., may produce some revenue, but can't support themselves. Still other sports, like wrestling, equestrian, crew, etc., may not produce any meaningful revenue at all. To insist on treating them all the same makes no more sense than insisting that all academic disciplines be treated the same at every university . . .

Well...I'm not really sure what you mean by that.

Title IX has very little to say about sports governance. It really only concerns itself with financing sports (and a few other things).

The NCAA DOES allow a lot of differences in sport governance by sport, and by institution size. There are differences in what you can spend money on, how much money you can spend, how you contact people, etc, both by sport, and by division level.

Now, you could probably argue (and I, and most sportswriters, would probably agree), that the current D1 model includes institutions that are too different from each other, and holding South Carolina and South Carolina Upstate to the same institutional rules may not make sense. But that doesn't have anything to do with Title IX.

 

[ummmm........]

Recapping the flow of the conversation:

Me: Wow, the SEC West is paying their coaches more than the AFC West. But then, the SEC doesn't have to pay their players . . .

Form: That's ridiculous.

Me: Well, the money's there, you have to give it to somebody and you can't give it to the players because Title IX prevents you from giving it only to the players who generate it . . .

That's pretty much where we are . . .

 

[bhsup]

Easy fix at State level. State law dictating no educational institution staff in any athletics related field may receive a salary higher than any professor in any non-athletic related field at any educational institution in the state that receives any state funding.