Fixing the System

I know, I know. I’ve left you hanging for roughly three weeks, like a jilted lover on Prom night when the quarterback steals his now inexplicably hot date. I promise it wasn’t on purpose. While Chase and I have dreams and aspirations to someday do this full time as a job, currently dealing with other full-time jobs and school/family sometime take precedence, not to mention that my laptop is currently running because of a few well-placed pieces of duct tape, and the cable company decided to cancel our internet for reasons unknown to me (I guess when you move your internet service twice in two months, they get suspicious…weird), I’ve fallen behind. My humble apologies to any and all who were left without their weekly doses of pop culture, sports, and deft wit and intelligent humor. Okay, stop laughing. Seriously. Now it’s just rude. Fine, on with the show then.

I have two hot button topics on my mind currently, and I knew that the timing was just right to hit them on the blog. The first is the recent Sports Illustrated report from so and so regarding his paying college football players while working as an agent. Honestly, I’m not surprised by the story, nor do I discredit it. The issue has been hot-button for too long now, and I think this was the kind of thing that needed to happen in order for the NCAA to finally stop and take an honest look at what is really happening in college athletics, mainly football and basketball. I’ll save the barrage of statistics that would prove how much money college athletics is really worth and simply say this; The time to fix the system is now, and the path to do it by is simple. Why simple? Because even an idiot wannabe like me has come up with a half decent plan to help solve this problem.

-Graduation Gifts. The NCAA loves to promote those commercials where some random gymnast is in a chemistry lab or a skier is in the desert with the message that there are over 21,000 division one athletes and almost all of them will be moving on in something other than sports. I’m fine with that, but fact is fact, the NCAA is capitalizing on Student Athletes way, way more than just the simple scholarship and stipend that they get every month. Call it socialistic, call it communistic, but the NCAA is refusing to share or allow the athletes earning the most money to reap what they sow. My simple solution to this is as follows; allot a certain amount of money to every player that GRADUATES within the amount of time that the NCAA allots a student athlete. Call it unfair to the non revenue athletes if you want, but the simple fact is this is a business, and no business pays the custodians more money than the sales staff. Simple economics. If the athlete does not graduate on time, or leaves early for a professional league, the money is forfeited back to the NCAA and put back into the system.

-On-track benefits- If we really want to see how concerned the NCAA is about the student side of its athletes, why not institute a semester-length increase in stipend money based upon in-class performance? It would be easy to set the amount of increase based upon the GPA of last semester. No need to dock players for falling behind, but if you were receiving the 3.5 GPA stipend and dropped in spring to a 2.98, you’d simply receive that in the fall. With all the benefits athletes receive as far as classes go, there really is no reason for even the academically challenged players to be able to achieve a higher stipend. If that isn’t enough, you could also enact a payback to the community system where players log time both in-season and off-season in approved charities and community organizations, and by reaching a certain number, are given a higher stipend.

-Buy Now, Pay Later- Call this the Reggie Bush rule. Some players will have more lucrative careers as college athletes than as pro athletes, and in my mind a clear-cut example of this is Reggie Bush. Bush will never dominate the NFL the way that he dominated in college, for a multitude of reasons, the least of which is, no Coordinator in their right mind will game plan to “Let Reggie beat us”. Bush could have signed plenty of endorsements during his time at USC, and why should he have to forfeit that money? The buzz his play generated was generally due to the hard work and effort he put into becoming better, so he should be able to somehow reap what is his to be sowed. Again, the goal here is to keep the athletes in school and graduate them, so why not let Bush add to his grad gift by signing endorsement deals? Each school could cut a percentage off the top acting like an agent, and the NCAA could institute a player tax based on Athletic Department revenue, giving schools like Utah or Boise State a more level playing field against schools like Texas or Alabama, where their athletic budgets are sometimes larger than those of a standard Fortune 500 company. This is by far the stickiest situation of all, and the hard part is the NCAA nor and Division I school has the people to keep this stuff in line, but aren't we in the same spot now anyways? At least it would be going on publicly, and not behind doors.

The tricky part to all of this is that the rich simply get richer in terms of schools being able to afford to pay their students. I think the solution to this problem is two-fold, the first part is putting a cap on spending by athletic departments, and the second being a reevaluation of where the NCAA spends its money. I know I’ll catch heat for this, but there are some programs that can simply be dissolved or even better, left to fend for their own funding. Non-revenue sports can allow coaches to seek outside sponsorships of their programs, like soccer teams looking to MLS or even European teams for support in order to manufacture better players, and would also lead a lot of teams to get more creative and inventive in how they market their events or meets, much like minor league baseball teams have had to do in the past. Certain exemptions could be placed in the rules for money that will be ear-marked for stadium expansion or other athletic department facility upgrades. One time gifts, like the one T. Boone Pickens gave to Oklahoma State a few years back, will be allowed but with restrictions on how much can be spent in certain areas and how much money can be spent in one year. The new rules would change the jobs of compliance officers and probably increase the number of staff members in athletic departments, but with more of the NCAA-claimed revenue being shared and not hoarded or lined in the pockets of the current administrators and NCAA officials, I don’t forsee this being a hard thing. They want to turn CFB into a business, I want a way to make the model more profitable and yet still keep what integrity the game still has intact. Have I thrown out the specifics? Not even close, but my job is to stir up controversy and provoke discussion to the point that a problem is solved, and I think most of what I've said tonight makes a lot more sense than just trying to keep the problem buried.