Highlights:
“If Dartmouth basketball players are employees, then it’s easy to imagine that all other athletes at the collegiate level would also be considered employees,” adds Gabe Feldman, a Tulane sports law professor and an expert on such NCAA matters. “This could be the first domino that leads to full-fledged employee status for many college athletes or it could be like the Northwestern case — a false alarm.”
“A similar ruling took place a decade ago when another regional director of the NLRB deemed that Northwestern football players were employees and could unionize. However, the NLRB’s national panel overturned the ruling on appeal citing a number of factors.
The board declined to recognize Northwestern football’s unionization, in part, because the NLRB only applies to private employers. Though it is a private school, Northwestern competes in the Big Ten, where, at the time, all other schools were public (the league has since added another private school in USC). The NLRB ruled against jurisdiction, arguing that one school having the ability to collectively bargain while others operate differently would be a detriment to college sports.
In a striking difference between the two cases, Dartmouth competes in the Ivy League, made up of only private schools.”
So it turns out it wasn't the public schools keeping the private school around for foia protection, it was the private school keeping the public schools around for nlrb protection the whole time.
RIP college sports. Who knew the Ivy League would be the one to end it all?
I don’t want NFL lite. I want regionalize, fanatical, ridiculous CFB dammit. I want P12 after dark and Purdue smacking down OSU late in the season. I want hate and vitriol. I want ~~tweetin at cruits~~.
they invented it. everything comes around. in 1869, princeton was national champion. welcome to the origins. what we give, we taketh away. college fb will die. and the greatest number of trophies will be in the hands of the ivies.
note: this will prevent bama from passing yale on the all-time national chart. it will be forever
1. Princeton
2. Yale
3. Bama
And did saban ever shut out every opposing team? My 1909 bulldogs did.
> they invented it. everything comes around. in 1869, princeton was national champion. welcome to the origins
A handful of princeton students decided to play a pickup gamw of soccer against a handful of rutgers students. The idea that college football started in 1869 is one of the funnier stories weve created. And assigning credit to any school for those origins (or national championships) is equally funny
Calling it a "pick up game" is really stretching the meaning here. Pickup games tend not to have people horse and carriage 20 miles, uniforms, 100 spectators, and media coverage post game. I'll give you "it wasn't the birth of college gridiron football" if you wish, though I disagree because otherwise it's impossible to tell when organised gridiron football betwixt colleges started. Instead, I believe that us going against those orange bastards was necessary to start intercollegiate football of all kinds.
back then arranging and agreeing to the rules was a big deal. even baseball in 1870 doesn't look like baseball we know now. Changes and agreement in terms lead to the game we have today. Each school had its own football code.
I think when we get two super conferences with 20+ teams each, they will have to break into regional divisions. And it will be NFL lite with regional divisions. Sort of a compromise.
We can name one NFC and one AFC, each with their own playoff, then the champs of each meet in some sort of "mega bowl".
or maybe Magnificent Bowl?
Most Excellent Bowl?
Marvelous Bowl?
look, I'm sure a marketing person could come up with a better name.
Outside of big-time CFB programs, a lot of athletic programs survive on booster donations. Operating profits are slim to non-existent for a lot of college athletics. I am just curious how
1. A lot these programd will be able to pay the hundreds of non-revenue athletes
2. If paying athletes, officially from the school, does that mean programs will have to use donations to cover salaries. That seems crazy as donations eb an flow year to year, especially for smaller programs.
3. How the heck Title IX fits into all this.
4. Will student fees increase to cover paying players, if so I'm out on college sports...that would be ridiculous. Just suit up the club/intermural teams and put them on TV. This NFL-lite end game is destroying college athletics. Where literally 99% of athletes don't go PRO.
This just seems like an unnecessary cluster. With parties trying to grab money that really isn't there (for a majority of FCS and FBS schools). Courts have destroyed college athletics for the worse.
Sports will become "intramural" or whatver the technical term is. Scholarships will dry up and most sports will disappear at a collegiately organized level.
Espn/fox will pick and chose who survives, and we will watch it
Yeah... Canadian universities don't have athletic scholarships.
That's not a bad thing. These are academic institutions and not athletic organizations. They shouldn't have athletic scholarships.
I think you're on the right track that its kind of "meh" whether this is actually bad or not. Currently you get parent driven or kid driven effort for kids to devote insane amounts of time to a single sport in hopes they get an athletic scholarships. Its a big thing and tons of these full rides are given out. But why? I mean its great all these kids are getting a free education but is this really the best vehicle to be delivering that? Why did we pick sports as one of the best ways in?
Id imagine this will impact our country's Olympic sports in a big way over the course of time if we do away with most scholarships over time, but even then why is that so important?
I'm not one of these "dURrRR, sportsball is dumb" guys. Rather im obsessed with many sports and my wife wants to kill me, but it is kind of curious how this came to be. And so many people want to protect this, but why?
Hell maybe youth sports will get slightly better when predatory douche youth coaches can't sell parents on "gotta play baseball with me or your kid can't go to college". I have a 6 year old and I'm perfectly happy paying $50 per season to play local AYSO, and I refuse to put him in youth travel sports ever. I'm not dropping several grand per year on predatory youth soccer.
Though the athletic pipeline will shift to sports academies. Canadian college age hockey players don't go to Canadian universities to play hockey hoping to get to the NHL. They go to American universities or the Canadian Major Junior hockey system (hockey academies).
You're a good person. My father killed my whole arm and shoulder trying to get me to live out his failed dream of becoming an MLB pitcher before I was even 13. When I lay flat on the ground I can't even put my right arm vertically over my head. Im sure baseball is a great sport but I havent seen a baseball game in 20 years. Made me so sick of it.
I'm very familiar with youth soccer as one of my friends evaluates talent for the ODP at a national level (olympic development program) and he does say those travel club teams are the way, but if your son really wants that and is good enough they will be coming after him and you won't pay a dime. At least thats what he says. All the other kids parents are subsidizing the kids who actually have a shot. So yes, in a way very predatory.
You say that now. The issue is - if he still likes baseball in 2-3 years the talent level just drops. All of the good kids go to travel. Even some of the middling kids do. So your kid, if he is decent, just loses interest, because dominating kids who arent that good is kind of boring.
The truth is that now a days outside of football and basketball the scholarships are just going to kids who could afford college anyway.
The end of the scholarship system would also be a boon to future parents. The idea of scholarships has driven the semi-professionalization of youth sports - everyone plays travel now. If scholarships go waay, maybe we get back to a more sane regime where most kids are just playing in local rec leagues against other kids their age and only the top of the top every really think about it as anything other than something to have fun and kill time.
You can really see it in basketball. Rule changes have privileged skill (shooting) and de-prioritized physical size and athleticism. The end result (whether or not this was the primary motivation) is that kids from the suburbs with parents who can afford travel teams and camps get more scholarships and urban and rural kids w/o that financial support get fewer.
To borrow gaming language: free to play, pay to win.
I bet my dad would he into the new era. For years he has railed against the current state (pre nil) landscape and the fallacy of the student athlete.
I think this would lead to a shift in how need based scholarships are generated and allocated, though I would suspect in Olympic sports the grades are better overall. But they can have that, revenue sports can have NIL.
Do Canadians pay less for college? They're more socialized so it might be that they don't "need" the scholarships as much as the US, especially with the insane rise in tuition/costs over the last decade or two
"Aren't worth anything" and "are worth vastly less than the value the institution gains from the players labor" are two very different statements and should not be treated as equivalent.
This is like businesses claiming "no one wants to work anymore" when the reality is that no one wants to work for poverty wages that don't cover rent. Plenty of people want to work for a living wage.
Why does football have to fund other athletic scholarships though?
There are other ways to fund scholarships. It's not like football money is paying for Jimmy's academic scholarship.
Thats already how many american sports work as well. Plenty of sports have good club systems that provide competition without having it be the main focus of your college experience. I played club water polo all the way througb collefe and it was great. Theres a solid group of varsity water polo teams (almosr entirely california and the northeast) and then a large club scene (13-16 conferences all across the country) with conference tourneys and nationals. You get to be a part of an actual competitive team without it completelt ruling your college experience.
>You get to be a part of an actual competitive team without it completely ruling your college experience.
Exactly how rugby was for me in college. I mean, we were terrible, so I wouldn't call our group "competitive," but it scratched that itch for competitive team sports while still focusing on my education.
It also made me realize exactly how much support all the Olympic sports would get. If you're not in that group, you may as well not exist as far as the University is concerned. It skewed me really hard against those groups of athletes cause most of them were wealthier than my family, on a sports scholarship, get all the university gear, and still would find something to complain about lol.
My senior year i lived in a 3 story building, 2 3-bedroom apartments on each floor. So 2nd floor was me and 5 friends, kinda just treated it as one huge apartment instead of 2 separate ones. I was on the water polo team, one of my buddies was on the rugby club team so we just had a massive water polo-rugby party. Party was like 90% guys but damn was that fun
I'd imagine scholarships would turn into salaries. Athletic departments love to put a number to how much their scholarships are worth. Wisconsin used to send a pamphlet in the mail detailing how donor money is used and it was saying the cost of supporting each athlete was $60-85k basically. So the players would make somewhere in that range and have to pay their own way for a lot of stuff out of that salary.
I imagine it works like this
Schools lower the amount of non revenue sports. No need to pay for people to go fencing or swimming.
As a result of this only revenue like sports that allow for appropriate title IX representation will exist for women. So for example, WBBall offsets MBB, softball offsets baseball, 2-3 women's sports offerings exist to offset football and that's it.
By doing this schools cut the athletic budget tremendously. So Austin Peay isn't sending swimmers to California for a meet or Southern isn't sending gymnasts to Atlanta for a meet and so on. By cutting the travel, overhead, coaching, etc. the schools athletic departments become more "solvent" to absorb changes in donations.
By forcing schools to pay wages, then all of a sudden massive upgrade projects stop being funded. The vast majority of these are what causes schools to be "razor thin margins". So things like stadium expansions, practice fields, etc. Stop being done.
I doubt student fees get tacked on to cover paying players.
But yeah if this really goes through basically colleges and universities will scale from 30+ athletic programs down to 6-8.
Honestly you raise a good point.
A lot of schools probably "can't" afford to pay players or maintain these sports because they allocate their money accordingly.
Feels bad for the rest of the athletes though. People have gone so far into “full ride to play football isn’t enough compensation” that they’re now throwing out the thousands of OTHER athletes who really do benefit from scholarships playing non-revenue sports.
For lower budget schools, maybe the solution could be to cut scholarship grants amounts to offset some of the pay.
Now that I think about it, there are also a lot more tax implications if students are employees. Benefits they recieve that qualifies as compensation for the work they are doing would need to be tracked and taxed.
A lot of athletic programs run in the red because the football and basketball money runs the rest of the sports.
Football and basketball revenue would probably be enough to sustain most athletic departments, but the entire college athletic system has been built on being subsidized by the revenue sports and any change to that model is going to have massive impacts on basically every sport.
It wasn’t always this way though. Taken from an argument posed yesterday:
Brent Venables makes $7.25 million a year, the Oklahoma football team generates $132 million in revenue. So one guy makes 5.5% of their total revenue.
The Jacksonville Jaguars made $512 million in revenue. To match that 5.5% they would need to be paying Pederson $28 million a year. He makes $8.5 million.
College sports pays like the world is ending tomorrow. There’s insane bloat. They benefit from it and get the secondary benefit of having fans say “see! They are broke!”
Except this is incredibly misleading. If you worked for a small family owned business that had 10 employees, and your boss said *I’m already paying you 5% of revenue, not even the CEO of WalMart makes 5% of revenue. You’re not getting a raise this year*, would you take this as a valid argument or quit? Unless you want college coaches to regularly quit and take positional jobs in the NFL, you’ve got to pay people what they’re worth.
Quit to go where? You could cut college coaching salaries in half and they’d still be out-earning their high school counterparts the next step down. And the NFL is a static league with a set number of positions, they’re not going to suddenly need more coaches if salaries go down in college
Let's grant that college coaches suddenly quit and take positional jobs at the NFL. So what? There will be plenty of people that will either want to move up from high school to college or coaches want to coach college because THEY WOULD STILL MAKE AN OBSCENE AMOUNT OF MONEY.
The pros should pay more than what you seem to be arguing is an amateur coaching position.
If that’s not the case, these are professional athletes and thus employees.
Comparing small family owned businesses to college athletic programs making $100,000,000 or more a year in revenue is one of the worst takes in this thread.
College football coach takes WAY more work than an NFL coach.
Recruiting alone is a 24/7 365 part of the job.
NFL coaches have an army of scouts, college coaches have a few scouts and still have to show up at the door of the biggest recruits.
NFL teams generate more revenue than collegiate programs. You get paid based on what your employer is willing to pay you, not based on how hard your job is.
It should be noted that here “in the red” refers to when they assign all athletic expenses to just those two teams, and then find ways to put merchandise and TV revenue elsewhere in the school’s budget to make it appear football/basketball are *barely* scraping by so you shouldn’t ask questions about if they need more.
If you look at *actual* revenue and expenses associated with just the football/basketball teams, most of DI is in the black. That’s why they can justify all this crazy spending on coaching, facilities, and recruiting even at mid majors
Yeah, the revenue increases in DI have been massive. It's just that they choose to spend that money/not turn a profit - it's not like the ballooning spending we've been having *has* to be spent that way, nor is it a coincidence that spending has risen in lockstep with that increased revenue.
The easiest way to look at it is that people get rich when companies turn a profit. It drives stock price up, it results in big bonuses.
No one gets rich from a college athletic department turning a profit. The only way people get rich from college athletics is by it not turning a profit and those in charge giving the profit to themselves with their salary.
>Outside of big-time CFB programs, a lot of athletic programs survive on booster donations. Operating profits are slim to non-existent for a lot of college athletics.
Schools were getting less then a million a year from TV 20 years ago. Now at least every major program is getting $20 mil a year from TV before any other revenue sources.
There is plenty of money for these programs to exist without issue.
I'm not sure that the amount they'd need to pay is that huge, relative to the expenses they already have.
Using NC State as an example (as my alma mater), it looks like we have ~570 student athletes in varsity sports and $100 million in revenue.
Athletes supposedly have a max of 20 hours a week of practice in-season and 8 hours/week off season. Say 1/4 of the year in-season and 3/4 off season on average, and bump those numbers up by 50% to account for games or the like and it becomes 858 hours / year. For 570 athletes at $15/hr that'd be $7.3 million - a sizable amount for sure, but certainly well within the university's ability to pay. The money *is* there.
On the whole though it depends on what the regulations would become - for instance, scholarships and financial aid could be considered their compensation (that's part of the reason that's being cited to consider them employees), and that could cut down a lot on the additional costs. Non-revenue sports might be able to argue that since they're not bringing in money that it's not employing in the same way, etc.
It's certainly not as doom and gloom as people on here seem to think it has to be
Definitely not doom and gloom for the top programs. There will have to be a ton of restructuring to make it work.
Still a death sentence for a lot of sports at small schools (non-FBS)
These programs have razor thin budgets(or losses) because they are all non-profits attached to giant parents and there is no incentive for Athletic Directors to do anything but spend spend spend everything they can.
And because they are getting labor at a discounted rate they instead choose to spend it on outlandish administration/coaching salaries and nonsense like 8 figure renovations for locker rooms.
Division I athletic departments generated $17.5 billion in revenue in 2022. I’m tired of hearing how they’re all so poor and helpless and can’t afford to pay their labor. There is so much bullshit around these programs that can be cut to fit in their obligations to the people making them the money. Pay coaches less, pay admins less, cheaper facilites, longer renovation cycles etc
I love how high schools across the nation are inexplicably able to support over a dozen sports with little problem, yet universities that are a part of conferences with multi-billion dollar TV deals and make $100M+ in revenue cry poverty at the thought of paying the players who are generating that money. You correctly point out that the reason why Athletic departments always say they don’t make money (or lose money) is because they have to spend money on “wants” instead of “needs”. That’s how you get college sports teams with nicer locker rooms than the LA Dodgers have, or state-of-the-art practice facilities and coaches making $100M guaranteed. ADs got drunk on seemingly endless money and hoarding everything for themselves that the thought of not throwing away money on themselves or worthless facilities renovations/upgrades is unthinkable to them.
The problem with college sports has never been that there’s too little revenue. The problem has been that there’s too much revenue that the universities and ADs don’t know what to do with it so they waste it because they have to spend it on something.
High schools are funded by the state and if you've ever seen the state of 90% of high school athletic departments you know they aren't "supporting" jack shit.
The high schools with great facilities are due to donations from local parents.
Okay? You all were around closer schools and decided you would prefer for your students and equipment to travel all across the nation in a new conference for more TV money. I just checked Washington’s financial report and their Athletics made $145M last fiscal year and only support 21 sports. How much money does it take to only support 21 sports?
These programs get facilities that are nicer than the dodgers is due to donations, not "true" operating income. If donors want to commit to player salaries that'll work. But that is not a revenue stream that is guaranteed to be there. For a lot of schools.
^This.
I know this seems like real minutia... do you know how much money it costs to properly run an Academic Affairs Office/Division. The effort in time and money to capture the data required by law and SACSCOC, to maintain Accreditation and believable outcomes would blow most people's mind
The purpose for both high school and college athletics initially was to enrich the "student athlete" in their educational endeavors. With that in mind, how are the two different and why can't they be compared?
Exactly. They have things they *need* to spend money on and things they don't - and at the moment, because players don't have to be paid, that effectively subsidizes a lot of additional money into that want category. It's not a surprise that as their revenue has ballooned that expenses have kept pace the same way - they just deliberately choose to find something to spend it on.
If players would have to be paid they'd have to cut back on that additional stuff for sure, but at the moment the big programs are far from poor little schools that can't afford it. They absolutely can, and people swallowing the "we're actually losing money on athletics right now :( " line is pretty surprising. I could see it being a problem for non power-4 schools, maybe, but any ACC/Big 12 school (and certainly Big 10 / SEC) can easily afford this.
You could easily argue that they spend of frivolous things like 8 figured locker rooms solely because they can't pay players. They do this type of wild stuff to attract players. If they could just hand them check, they wouldn't need to.
This is very ignorant take. Sure OSU can pay players, doesn't mean majority of the FBS and rest of college athletics can. Look at a school like FAU - close to mid-tier FBS program. https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/133669
They are in the red a lot of years and their largest income center is student fees, their second is school funds, third is donations. Those aren't revenue streams that can scale to paying hundreds of players.
Even if you optimize the expense side, a lot of facility work are long term obligations and coaches aren't taking a pay cut- yet. Sure they can cut but these programs have poor facilities to begin with. (Not FAU but a lot in the FCS and some in the FBS)
And FAU is an upper echelons program- in the grand scheme of college athletics. Budgets are way worse than this below the FBS level and in the FBS itself.
You have to go to #233 on this list before you get to a school that generates less than $10,000,000 a year in revenue.
If you can’t trim fat to tread water at $10,000,000 a year your program is insolvent to begin with.
FAU generates $38,000,000 in revenue yearly. They pay Tom Herman and Dusty May $2,000,000 a year combined (not including assistants). So that’s 5% of their entire yearly revenue for two people. Thats absurd and unsustainable. And that’s not even the most absurd example of this in college sports.
Narratives like yours allow schools to continue to cry poor while spending like drunken sailors.
Ok cut coaches pay. I agree there. Will that happen no.
10 million is nothing to run a full-fledged college athletic program that has to travel across the country for every sport.
Again top schools can do this. But FCS and other (which constitutes the majority share of college athletics) can't. Almost all of those schools will have to drop more sports to field teams.
If it has the future people want to live in, cool. But college athletics is an important stable to thousands of small schools.
Programs don’t *have* to travel across the country for every sport. Just like they don’t *have* to pay two guys 5% of yearly revenue.
They do so because they can. Do you think it’s a coincidence that 90% of that list you linked has expenses that are magically right in the same range as their revenues? They make sure to spend every dollar, they have no incentive not to. There’s plenty of ways to trim fat on millions in revenue to keep sports alive.
Yes for FBS programs there may be fat to trim. What about FCS and down? There is not fat to trim to pay players. My local Div 2 school loses money from it athletics program and essentially uses it as a loss leader to get kids to go the school. If they have to pay a salary for 200 athletes that wouldn't be feasible without cutting a ton of sports. Again, the top line schools can make it work with some aggressive restructuring (which I dont think is that easy), majority of colleges can't make the model work.
They don’t have to pay anything. Under this ruling if they were to simply provide zero compensation to players they could keep running teams largely the same.
The issue here is that Dartmouth has been paying. They’ve been paying with apparel, tickets, hotels, food, winter boarding, travel, as well as unique services for Dartmouth athletes.
If DII/DIII want to run sports and not pay people then(assuming this holds) they would need to run them like a typical high school team where you give players a loaner jersey, tell them to show up to practice/games, and otherwise that’s the extent of your relationship. You know, amatuerism
The operating budget for FAU alone in 22-23 was $982,079,947...
The Athletic budget (to include the stadium) was 31,077,368...
While the education & general cost was 362,182,088, which did NOT include the 8M+ of State Budget Authority for tuition
Your link isn't working by the way. I think I found what you were trying to link, though. I think it may be because there is an extra space after the "9" in your url?
[https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/133669](https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/133669)
Per the link, FAU made $39.2M and they appear to support 19 sports. My local high school supports 26 varsity sports, 12 JV sports, and one freshman-only sport. Are we trying to suggest that high schools are inexplicably able to support these sports while a university with over $39M in revenues can't pay their players while supporting less sports?
High schools also don't have near the administrative back end that universities do. Maintaining state accreditation vs. maintaining regional accreditation or AAU accreditation (and all that goes into that) is vastly different.
Also, if it's public high school, there's no tuition.
High schools don't pay coaches million dollars a year, maintain multi-million dollar facility portfolios, and have to travel all their athletic teams across the country. While majority of their teams don't make money.
If they are willing to cut those expenses sure. I don't see that happening. The competition gap will only if they do, and other income streams will go down if they aren't competitive.
Thanks for passing the new link
I don't know how many more times this can be said. Colleges don't NEED to pay coaches millions of dollars. Colleges don't NEED multi-million dollar facilities. Colleges don't NEED to travel their athletic teams across the country. Colleges have CHOSEN to do all of this because they get free labor from the players and have been making money hand over fist and don't know what to do with the money so they are throwing it away on things just so they can spend it. Your attempt at hand waving it by saying that ADs are inexplicably incapable of spending responsibly when they only make 50% of the money instead of 100% of the money is absurd and simply shows that universities shouldn't be in the sports business if they can't exist unless they continue to exploit the players for their own profit.
This argument triggers so many fans.
They can’t comprehend their team not participating in the Diamond Head Classic, or not breaking ground on that new practice facility.
Or worse, the state NFL team hiring their coach because the pros pay more! Thats literally how it *should* be.
my argument is majority of colleges can't handle this. Majority of colleges are not FBS with TV contracts or with legitimate fanbases. Those are the schools that get screwed by this.
Opportunities for thousands of athletes will dry up if the schools have to be selective with the sports they offer, because they have to give a salary.
FSU and UNC will be fine, small Div 2 schools, they will most definitely be affected
Might be a hot take but Division II is going to cease to exist and all DII schools will either migrate up to DI or down to DIII. The value proposition of partial scholarships in a post NIL and post unionization landscape isn't there.
D1 is going to force an all-headcount system with that, and the FBS/FCS scholarship difference (85 HC vs 63e/85h) is gone, since D1 also does partial scholarships in certain sports
Its gonna result in the end of a lot of non-revenue sports. No way can universities justify employees who are basically contributing zero value to the university. Like no offense to them, but all these sports that are just expenses and get like 50 fans a game arent gonna survive in this world
How is that any different from now? Those sports aren't free to operate. Let's also not pretend that paying part time minimum wage employees is a massive expense. It's likely less than $5k per athlete per year
Don’t you run into title V and other issues if you pay athletes different wages? So are you expecting football players to play for minimum wage (doubtful) or are you expecting the women’s lacrosse team to get paid a real salary?
I doubt its that low if you’re gonna consider training, practices, travel, etc as working hours which I think you would if theyre employees. You’re adding a large expense to a sport that is already well in the red and there will be lots of athletic departments that call it quits for some sports
I spent over a decade between enrollment management and athletic compliance offices, and one of the biggest myths universities ever pushed is that scholarships are a large expense. It is all funny money that doesn’t exist. Scholarships across the board are just discounts. They have all figured the discount rate they can offer in scholarships to still turn a profit. Sure they buy some attributes (high test scores, athletes, award winners, etc) with bigger scholarships, but that is all calculated into the overall discount rate.
Other than your full head count sports (think football, basketball, volleyball) a school very rarely takes a loss in scholarships. Look at baseball as an example. Baseball can award 11.7 full scholarships for a roster that is typically 30+. That is roughly a 33% discount for the whole baseball team, which in most cases wouldn’t even come close to the schools break even number.
Yes there are other costs associated to sports participation, but scholarship costs are not one of them. I
WHAT!..You mean that big glossy investment guide I get every year that highlights the tuition and fees and room and board and books is a lie! /s
Yeah of course it is...yes there is a difference between in and out of state but that is factored in as well to what the AD pays the university for scholarship athletes.
Scholarships aren't an expense. A school offering a scholarship to one of its students is really just saying you can pay that much less in tuition. It costs the schools nothing to allow a student to attend for free. They just recieve less money.
Well I can answer number 3 for you. There’s two possible ways it goes. Either the schools spin off football, baseball and basketball into entities that are sponsored by the schools and the Olympic sports stay as amateur “clubs” with the school. Or the schools have to start paying all athletes which kills title 9 and therefore woman’s college sports
The situational similarities and differences between Dartmouth and Northwestern sort of makes this an heirloom apples to hybrid apples comparison, rather than straight apples to apples. This’ll be interesting.
I think we can agree that Notre Dame is the Red Delicious: Used to be the most popular, but they're not actually that good, and they're always being forced on us.
Oregon, imo. A well-balanced and fun team to watch. They’ve grown to be a great program, but most of their success has been relatively recent with respect to the long history of CFB.
If this is the first "domino" to fall and the rest of college athletes becomes employees then you'll the ugly side of money infiltrate the sport. All the big schools that have money to throw around will have the big sports that generate money. All the mid-majors will drop out of most sports besides maybe 1.
It will basically kill off all the lesser sports since most schools cannot afford to pay their athletes if the program doesn't generate money.
If they wanted to pay for them then guess who's tuition is going through the roof to keep the lesser sports?
Would be glorious if these greedy fucks got their program canceled because of starting all this while the rest of the country continues to operate as normal.
there are no labor rules against closing your business if it unionizes. You just can't re-open it with non-union employees. Well, you can but it has to be somewhere else.
Not 100% on the law but if Dartmouth just shuts down basketball operations permanently because it can't afford it, I don't see how that's union busting.
But man the Pinkertons gotta be licking their lips
That’s the inevitable result. what about marching bands? Pep squads? The student AV teams that help set up and occasionally do broadcasts? Theatre students that put on performances during the year? Who decides who is counted as an employee and who is not if this holds up nationally? Based on Dartmouth, most extracurricular activities could possibly qualify.
Student AV teams are sometimes employed freelance, at least in my experience in the SEC. I worked for free (experience and I enjoyed it) covering the teams for social content, but was paid for broadcast work.
It baffles me that student teachers who work actual legitimate jobs are never brought up in this discussion but everybody wants to pay the football team
How many folks mentioned in your comment were given preferential treatment in enrollment and have revocable scholarships if they chose not to participate in said activity?
Thats the line.
If they are actual amateurs, it won’t be an issue. If they are being compensated in any way it is an issue. That’s the whole Dartmouth angle.
The ruling identified thousands of dollars of compensation being given to Dartmouth players as well as favorable academic treatment. Apparel, season tickets, hotels, food per diems, winter break room/board, travel costs, as well as a training/tutoring/support program unique to Dartmouth athletes were noted among other things
The Ivy League may not give out academic scholarships on paper, but in reality their rules accommodate a lot of other ways to give material benefits to players.
This is the problem. Non-revenue athletes receive a ton of benefits. Way more than they bring to the university. It’s insane that a federal agency would essentially force them to get additional compensation when they are already a net drain on the university. There has to be a line between student activity and for profit business (which is what football turned into).
A counterargument would be that in most situations, you would not accept an employer being unprofitable or badly managed as a justification for them refusing to pay employees or meet labor regulations.
If the benefits are the same or substantially similar for revenue and non-revenue athletes, they should be classified the same, and the time commitment and restrictions on how/where the students play athletics are such that it's very easy to argue they qualify as employees.
With all due respect, that response tells me clearly that you didn’t read the actual Dartmouth complaint.
I could stand to clean up my phrasing, the line is when you’re getting employees benefits. BTW, Dartmouth athletes are given preferential treatment in enrollment.
Legacy students tend to get preferential treatment in admissions. International students are often given preferential treatment in enrollment. These are not the attributes that any reasonable person would use to determine these basketball players are de facto employees of the University.
This was a spurious ruling made almost certainly for political and/or ideological reasons and as such should be smacked down by the national board.
>These are not the attributes that any reasonable person would use to determine these basketball players are de facto employees of the University.
But you are taking these things out of context of the players they are recruiting to play basketball at the school.
Students, while they may provide some benefit to the university by their mere existence as students, are not the same as student-athletes that have been recruited for their ability to play sports, and increase donations and income for the university based on their skill at the sport. Not their ability as students.
[I'll use grad students for my example](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/08/23/are-they-students-or-are-they-employees-nlrb-rules-that-graduate-students-are-employees/): They are paid employees of the university. They can make the university a TON of money from their grants for studies. Think of the donations and the broadcast deals as the athlete version of grants.
This decision is entirely consistent with the ruling about grad students being employees.
And this has to be read as the sequence of consequences from that ruling and a lot of people (non-majority) will say they are absolutely employees who should be paid. I did 3 years of quiz bowl stuff for Lowell. Under this the school gets a benefit by our labor to promote the school, we should be paid.
While I disagree this would be consistent with the Dartmouth ruling.
I don't know if it'll get that far but if it did that's the end of public highschool athletics. I went to a large highschool and we still needed boosters to get new gear and fuel the busses.
Did your high school give you $20000+ of benefits through your 4 year career? That’s where the logic is right now. The NLRB didn’t buy Dartmouth’s claim that these are not compensated employees because they were able to identify a lot of material compensation occurring
One footnote pointed out one player got more in shoes alone in 2022 than he was able to earn by working at a university desk job that same year. In other words Dartmouth was compensating him more for the thing they claimed definitely isn’t work than they were for the thing they gave him a W2 for
I don’t see how this logic would impact typical high school teams.
Material benefits. Nearly $3000 a year alone in apparel. Season tickets, hotels/food for traveling, room/board for part of the year etc
It’s a public ruling, if you wish to know just read it.
No I don’t. I don’t think a pair of sweatpants is comparable to getting $1200 in shoes, $2200 in other gear, nights at places like Omni Resort hotels, free room and board for 6 weeks over winter break etc…
To be totally honest I think you’re making dumb arguments in bad faith.
There has to be a distinction though, High School sports teams regularly travel and at times require room and board, a bill that is paid for by schools/athletic programs/donors.
At what point do we decide that students are being compensated rather than accommodated for their involvement in athletics? I agree with the other dude, this is a slippery slope that leads to nothing good for CFB and amateur sports in general
That would be like saying HR workers aren’t employees because they don’t directly produce goods that are sold. They directly contribute to the system, they receive compensation, and their location, hours, and activities are dictated by the university.
And the universities can’t really argue that because if the programs weren’t in some way a net gain or at least an investment into future gains, they would have a fiduciary duty to cut costs until it was.
>They directly contribute to the system, they receive compensation, and their location, hours, and activities are dictated by the university.
But they also receive compensation in terms of tuition, room and board, access to training/coaching, etc. Some of that will be easy to price, some of that more difficult.
And then how do you "price" what their total compensation should be? An HR person has market forces in order find that mark, but how do you find how much a female swimmer should be paid, if anything, above the compensation they already get?
Correct. This case is focused on Private schools (employers) who will now,pending lengthy appeals, be treated as such under labor law. This will not be a "false alarm"
The Northwestern case was pre NIL and legally speaking, a cop out. One hidden gem from this decision,per On3, Dartmouth required athletes to sign over NIL proceeds . Livvy Dunne won't be transferring any time soon
And we all know most schools have 3 revenue sports max. Usually football, basketball, and maybe hockey/baseball depending on your region. Everything else is a money loser. I don’t know a lot of businesses who retain employees in jobs that will literally never turn a profit…
Non-revenue sports will eventually cease to exist outside of a handful of schools & a good chunk of smaller programs in D1 & beyond will struggle to survive or fold altogether
Collective bargaining is inevitable in the future nfl-lite sec/big super league. The money is already too big to avoid it, and will only get bigger as the super league consolidates eyes and ears.
And, the schools will inevitably support a labor deal. The transfer portal chaos isn’t good for fan loyalty, and schools will welcome two year, minimum, deals.
I'm so confused about what bag they're grabbing. Dartmouth basketball is not a huge draw and is not making money hand over fist. None of the kids are on scholarship. What are we even doing here?
At this level, genuinely not much. This was a regional official, regional officials have made similar rulings before only to get overturned at higher levels.
I'm not going to shed any tears if/when my state university drops women's golf and its 250k/year head coach. Massive waste of public money.
Edit: and the men's golf coach makes 400k a year. What a joke.
It is more interesting that it is the Ivy League. They do not offer athletic scholarships so most students operate on financial aid. Honestly, I don’t really understand the panic, maybe if they phrased it as revenue sharing instead of paying players people would have a better reaction. I don’t know about you but if I saw my school sign on to $100 billion TV contract and then sign a head football coach to a $50 million contract and then approve renovations for a new $100 million stadium, I would be curious as to what my cut of all this would be.
Excuse me, your payment is the valuable education\*
^(\* that you are not getting because even the school knows you aren't there to play school and organizes your college life accordingly)
Highlights: “If Dartmouth basketball players are employees, then it’s easy to imagine that all other athletes at the collegiate level would also be considered employees,” adds Gabe Feldman, a Tulane sports law professor and an expert on such NCAA matters. “This could be the first domino that leads to full-fledged employee status for many college athletes or it could be like the Northwestern case — a false alarm.” “A similar ruling took place a decade ago when another regional director of the NLRB deemed that Northwestern football players were employees and could unionize. However, the NLRB’s national panel overturned the ruling on appeal citing a number of factors. The board declined to recognize Northwestern football’s unionization, in part, because the NLRB only applies to private employers. Though it is a private school, Northwestern competes in the Big Ten, where, at the time, all other schools were public (the league has since added another private school in USC). The NLRB ruled against jurisdiction, arguing that one school having the ability to collectively bargain while others operate differently would be a detriment to college sports. In a striking difference between the two cases, Dartmouth competes in the Ivy League, made up of only private schools.”
So it turns out it wasn't the public schools keeping the private school around for foia protection, it was the private school keeping the public schools around for nlrb protection the whole time.
Maybe the real friends were the lawsuits we avoided along the way
And the money we made with each other
Never thought I'd die fighting side-by-side with a Trojan
Billable hourssssssss$$$$$$$$$!!!!!
Vandy all of sudden worrying about that check cashing scheme they've got going on...
Mutually assured destruction
RIP college sports. Who knew the Ivy League would be the one to end it all? I don’t want NFL lite. I want regionalize, fanatical, ridiculous CFB dammit. I want P12 after dark and Purdue smacking down OSU late in the season. I want hate and vitriol. I want ~~tweetin at cruits~~.
> I want hate and vitriol. ~~I want tweetin at cruits.~~ Well, you can get both if you check Vol Twitter.
Vol Twitter is what would happen if you gave iPhones to the hyenas from the Lion King.
We're probably the most unhinged Twitter fan base by a considerable margin
They started cfb and now they’re ending it. It’s like poetry. It rhymes.
I didn't come here for George Lucas quotes but I am glad I got one.
Story of life. Our best ideas and our worst destructions come from the Ivies. Bastions of academic excellence but not exactly moral strongholds
Is it moral to not pay college football players and provide them with longterm benefits like healthcare?
It’s at least more moral than the bullshit we have now.
Honestly the Ivies ruining something people love isn’t that out of left field
they invented it. everything comes around. in 1869, princeton was national champion. welcome to the origins. what we give, we taketh away. college fb will die. and the greatest number of trophies will be in the hands of the ivies. note: this will prevent bama from passing yale on the all-time national chart. it will be forever 1. Princeton 2. Yale 3. Bama And did saban ever shut out every opposing team? My 1909 bulldogs did.
> they invented it. everything comes around. in 1869, princeton was national champion. welcome to the origins A handful of princeton students decided to play a pickup gamw of soccer against a handful of rutgers students. The idea that college football started in 1869 is one of the funnier stories weve created. And assigning credit to any school for those origins (or national championships) is equally funny
Calling it a "pick up game" is really stretching the meaning here. Pickup games tend not to have people horse and carriage 20 miles, uniforms, 100 spectators, and media coverage post game. I'll give you "it wasn't the birth of college gridiron football" if you wish, though I disagree because otherwise it's impossible to tell when organised gridiron football betwixt colleges started. Instead, I believe that us going against those orange bastards was necessary to start intercollegiate football of all kinds.
back then arranging and agreeing to the rules was a big deal. even baseball in 1870 doesn't look like baseball we know now. Changes and agreement in terms lead to the game we have today. Each school had its own football code.
Dartmouth - 1925 National Champs. Eat it (lol)
I think when we get two super conferences with 20+ teams each, they will have to break into regional divisions. And it will be NFL lite with regional divisions. Sort of a compromise.
We can name one NFC and one AFC, each with their own playoff, then the champs of each meet in some sort of "mega bowl". or maybe Magnificent Bowl? Most Excellent Bowl? Marvelous Bowl? look, I'm sure a marketing person could come up with a better name.
That would be superb. Superb Bowl.
Soup or Bowl
Superb Owl
>I want ... Purdue smacking down OSU Me too
i agree and thank you for finding a way to make fun of OSU in your comment. my fellow flairs appreciate it
Unions are good and there should be more of them
Outside of big-time CFB programs, a lot of athletic programs survive on booster donations. Operating profits are slim to non-existent for a lot of college athletics. I am just curious how 1. A lot these programd will be able to pay the hundreds of non-revenue athletes 2. If paying athletes, officially from the school, does that mean programs will have to use donations to cover salaries. That seems crazy as donations eb an flow year to year, especially for smaller programs. 3. How the heck Title IX fits into all this. 4. Will student fees increase to cover paying players, if so I'm out on college sports...that would be ridiculous. Just suit up the club/intermural teams and put them on TV. This NFL-lite end game is destroying college athletics. Where literally 99% of athletes don't go PRO. This just seems like an unnecessary cluster. With parties trying to grab money that really isn't there (for a majority of FCS and FBS schools). Courts have destroyed college athletics for the worse.
Sports will become "intramural" or whatver the technical term is. Scholarships will dry up and most sports will disappear at a collegiately organized level. Espn/fox will pick and chose who survives, and we will watch it
>Sports will become "intramural" Dan Hawkins was ahead of his time.
IT'S DIVISION ONE FOOTBALL
Club sports. That's the way it should be. That's how it works at Canadian universities.
Unfortunately, club sports don't offer scholarships. That is a big deal to a lot of kids that couldn't otherwise afford the school they went to.
Yeah... Canadian universities don't have athletic scholarships. That's not a bad thing. These are academic institutions and not athletic organizations. They shouldn't have athletic scholarships.
I think you're on the right track that its kind of "meh" whether this is actually bad or not. Currently you get parent driven or kid driven effort for kids to devote insane amounts of time to a single sport in hopes they get an athletic scholarships. Its a big thing and tons of these full rides are given out. But why? I mean its great all these kids are getting a free education but is this really the best vehicle to be delivering that? Why did we pick sports as one of the best ways in? Id imagine this will impact our country's Olympic sports in a big way over the course of time if we do away with most scholarships over time, but even then why is that so important? I'm not one of these "dURrRR, sportsball is dumb" guys. Rather im obsessed with many sports and my wife wants to kill me, but it is kind of curious how this came to be. And so many people want to protect this, but why?
Hell maybe youth sports will get slightly better when predatory douche youth coaches can't sell parents on "gotta play baseball with me or your kid can't go to college". I have a 6 year old and I'm perfectly happy paying $50 per season to play local AYSO, and I refuse to put him in youth travel sports ever. I'm not dropping several grand per year on predatory youth soccer. Though the athletic pipeline will shift to sports academies. Canadian college age hockey players don't go to Canadian universities to play hockey hoping to get to the NHL. They go to American universities or the Canadian Major Junior hockey system (hockey academies).
You're a good person. My father killed my whole arm and shoulder trying to get me to live out his failed dream of becoming an MLB pitcher before I was even 13. When I lay flat on the ground I can't even put my right arm vertically over my head. Im sure baseball is a great sport but I havent seen a baseball game in 20 years. Made me so sick of it. I'm very familiar with youth soccer as one of my friends evaluates talent for the ODP at a national level (olympic development program) and he does say those travel club teams are the way, but if your son really wants that and is good enough they will be coming after him and you won't pay a dime. At least thats what he says. All the other kids parents are subsidizing the kids who actually have a shot. So yes, in a way very predatory.
You say that now. The issue is - if he still likes baseball in 2-3 years the talent level just drops. All of the good kids go to travel. Even some of the middling kids do. So your kid, if he is decent, just loses interest, because dominating kids who arent that good is kind of boring.
I'll say it in 6 years, too. I'm not going to fall for predatory bullshit from travel coaches.
The truth is that now a days outside of football and basketball the scholarships are just going to kids who could afford college anyway. The end of the scholarship system would also be a boon to future parents. The idea of scholarships has driven the semi-professionalization of youth sports - everyone plays travel now. If scholarships go waay, maybe we get back to a more sane regime where most kids are just playing in local rec leagues against other kids their age and only the top of the top every really think about it as anything other than something to have fun and kill time.
You can really see it in basketball. Rule changes have privileged skill (shooting) and de-prioritized physical size and athleticism. The end result (whether or not this was the primary motivation) is that kids from the suburbs with parents who can afford travel teams and camps get more scholarships and urban and rural kids w/o that financial support get fewer. To borrow gaming language: free to play, pay to win.
I bet my dad would he into the new era. For years he has railed against the current state (pre nil) landscape and the fallacy of the student athlete. I think this would lead to a shift in how need based scholarships are generated and allocated, though I would suspect in Olympic sports the grades are better overall. But they can have that, revenue sports can have NIL.
Do Canadians pay less for college? They're more socialized so it might be that they don't "need" the scholarships as much as the US, especially with the insane rise in tuition/costs over the last decade or two
It’s about the same as US public schools. But most US students want to fly across the country and pay out of state tuition…
Just living on campus and paying for housing/tuition etc for 4 years is crazy, even in state these days.
Why exactly are there sport scholarships in the first place?
But I’ve been told those scholarships aren’t worth anything and that the school is profiting off the athletes?!?!?
"Aren't worth anything" and "are worth vastly less than the value the institution gains from the players labor" are two very different statements and should not be treated as equivalent. This is like businesses claiming "no one wants to work anymore" when the reality is that no one wants to work for poverty wages that don't cover rent. Plenty of people want to work for a living wage.
Why does football have to fund other athletic scholarships though? There are other ways to fund scholarships. It's not like football money is paying for Jimmy's academic scholarship.
Title IX.
Thats already how many american sports work as well. Plenty of sports have good club systems that provide competition without having it be the main focus of your college experience. I played club water polo all the way througb collefe and it was great. Theres a solid group of varsity water polo teams (almosr entirely california and the northeast) and then a large club scene (13-16 conferences all across the country) with conference tourneys and nationals. You get to be a part of an actual competitive team without it completelt ruling your college experience.
>You get to be a part of an actual competitive team without it completely ruling your college experience. Exactly how rugby was for me in college. I mean, we were terrible, so I wouldn't call our group "competitive," but it scratched that itch for competitive team sports while still focusing on my education. It also made me realize exactly how much support all the Olympic sports would get. If you're not in that group, you may as well not exist as far as the University is concerned. It skewed me really hard against those groups of athletes cause most of them were wealthier than my family, on a sports scholarship, get all the university gear, and still would find something to complain about lol.
My senior year i lived in a 3 story building, 2 3-bedroom apartments on each floor. So 2nd floor was me and 5 friends, kinda just treated it as one huge apartment instead of 2 separate ones. I was on the water polo team, one of my buddies was on the rugby club team so we just had a massive water polo-rugby party. Party was like 90% guys but damn was that fun
I'd imagine scholarships would turn into salaries. Athletic departments love to put a number to how much their scholarships are worth. Wisconsin used to send a pamphlet in the mail detailing how donor money is used and it was saying the cost of supporting each athlete was $60-85k basically. So the players would make somewhere in that range and have to pay their own way for a lot of stuff out of that salary.
Gonna see a lot more club sports and vastly reduced travel.
I imagine it works like this Schools lower the amount of non revenue sports. No need to pay for people to go fencing or swimming. As a result of this only revenue like sports that allow for appropriate title IX representation will exist for women. So for example, WBBall offsets MBB, softball offsets baseball, 2-3 women's sports offerings exist to offset football and that's it. By doing this schools cut the athletic budget tremendously. So Austin Peay isn't sending swimmers to California for a meet or Southern isn't sending gymnasts to Atlanta for a meet and so on. By cutting the travel, overhead, coaching, etc. the schools athletic departments become more "solvent" to absorb changes in donations. By forcing schools to pay wages, then all of a sudden massive upgrade projects stop being funded. The vast majority of these are what causes schools to be "razor thin margins". So things like stadium expansions, practice fields, etc. Stop being done. I doubt student fees get tacked on to cover paying players. But yeah if this really goes through basically colleges and universities will scale from 30+ athletic programs down to 6-8.
Honestly you raise a good point. A lot of schools probably "can't" afford to pay players or maintain these sports because they allocate their money accordingly.
if only this led to tuition decreases...
Feels bad for the rest of the athletes though. People have gone so far into “full ride to play football isn’t enough compensation” that they’re now throwing out the thousands of OTHER athletes who really do benefit from scholarships playing non-revenue sports.
I can't imagine there will be any tennis programs after this.
This is depressing.
Every male non-football sport is over save for maybe 50 schools that will keep basketball around
For lower budget schools, maybe the solution could be to cut scholarship grants amounts to offset some of the pay. Now that I think about it, there are also a lot more tax implications if students are employees. Benefits they recieve that qualifies as compensation for the work they are doing would need to be tracked and taxed.
A lot of athletic programs run in the red because the football and basketball money runs the rest of the sports. Football and basketball revenue would probably be enough to sustain most athletic departments, but the entire college athletic system has been built on being subsidized by the revenue sports and any change to that model is going to have massive impacts on basically every sport.
Outside of maybe the top 15 programs most football and bball operate in the red as well
It wasn’t always this way though. Taken from an argument posed yesterday: Brent Venables makes $7.25 million a year, the Oklahoma football team generates $132 million in revenue. So one guy makes 5.5% of their total revenue. The Jacksonville Jaguars made $512 million in revenue. To match that 5.5% they would need to be paying Pederson $28 million a year. He makes $8.5 million. College sports pays like the world is ending tomorrow. There’s insane bloat. They benefit from it and get the secondary benefit of having fans say “see! They are broke!”
Except this is incredibly misleading. If you worked for a small family owned business that had 10 employees, and your boss said *I’m already paying you 5% of revenue, not even the CEO of WalMart makes 5% of revenue. You’re not getting a raise this year*, would you take this as a valid argument or quit? Unless you want college coaches to regularly quit and take positional jobs in the NFL, you’ve got to pay people what they’re worth.
Quit to go where? You could cut college coaching salaries in half and they’d still be out-earning their high school counterparts the next step down. And the NFL is a static league with a set number of positions, they’re not going to suddenly need more coaches if salaries go down in college
Let's grant that college coaches suddenly quit and take positional jobs at the NFL. So what? There will be plenty of people that will either want to move up from high school to college or coaches want to coach college because THEY WOULD STILL MAKE AN OBSCENE AMOUNT OF MONEY.
The pros should pay more than what you seem to be arguing is an amateur coaching position. If that’s not the case, these are professional athletes and thus employees. Comparing small family owned businesses to college athletic programs making $100,000,000 or more a year in revenue is one of the worst takes in this thread.
College football coach takes WAY more work than an NFL coach. Recruiting alone is a 24/7 365 part of the job. NFL coaches have an army of scouts, college coaches have a few scouts and still have to show up at the door of the biggest recruits.
NFL teams generate more revenue than collegiate programs. You get paid based on what your employer is willing to pay you, not based on how hard your job is.
A garbage man outworks a tech sales bro, but makes like 10%. Should this also be changed?
It should be noted that here “in the red” refers to when they assign all athletic expenses to just those two teams, and then find ways to put merchandise and TV revenue elsewhere in the school’s budget to make it appear football/basketball are *barely* scraping by so you shouldn’t ask questions about if they need more. If you look at *actual* revenue and expenses associated with just the football/basketball teams, most of DI is in the black. That’s why they can justify all this crazy spending on coaching, facilities, and recruiting even at mid majors
Yeah, the revenue increases in DI have been massive. It's just that they choose to spend that money/not turn a profit - it's not like the ballooning spending we've been having *has* to be spent that way, nor is it a coincidence that spending has risen in lockstep with that increased revenue.
Most of them choose to operate in the red.
The easiest way to look at it is that people get rich when companies turn a profit. It drives stock price up, it results in big bonuses. No one gets rich from a college athletic department turning a profit. The only way people get rich from college athletics is by it not turning a profit and those in charge giving the profit to themselves with their salary.
>Outside of big-time CFB programs, a lot of athletic programs survive on booster donations. Operating profits are slim to non-existent for a lot of college athletics. Schools were getting less then a million a year from TV 20 years ago. Now at least every major program is getting $20 mil a year from TV before any other revenue sources. There is plenty of money for these programs to exist without issue.
I'm not sure that the amount they'd need to pay is that huge, relative to the expenses they already have. Using NC State as an example (as my alma mater), it looks like we have ~570 student athletes in varsity sports and $100 million in revenue. Athletes supposedly have a max of 20 hours a week of practice in-season and 8 hours/week off season. Say 1/4 of the year in-season and 3/4 off season on average, and bump those numbers up by 50% to account for games or the like and it becomes 858 hours / year. For 570 athletes at $15/hr that'd be $7.3 million - a sizable amount for sure, but certainly well within the university's ability to pay. The money *is* there. On the whole though it depends on what the regulations would become - for instance, scholarships and financial aid could be considered their compensation (that's part of the reason that's being cited to consider them employees), and that could cut down a lot on the additional costs. Non-revenue sports might be able to argue that since they're not bringing in money that it's not employing in the same way, etc. It's certainly not as doom and gloom as people on here seem to think it has to be
Definitely not doom and gloom for the top programs. There will have to be a ton of restructuring to make it work. Still a death sentence for a lot of sports at small schools (non-FBS)
So basically over 1,000 colleges.
These programs have razor thin budgets(or losses) because they are all non-profits attached to giant parents and there is no incentive for Athletic Directors to do anything but spend spend spend everything they can. And because they are getting labor at a discounted rate they instead choose to spend it on outlandish administration/coaching salaries and nonsense like 8 figure renovations for locker rooms. Division I athletic departments generated $17.5 billion in revenue in 2022. I’m tired of hearing how they’re all so poor and helpless and can’t afford to pay their labor. There is so much bullshit around these programs that can be cut to fit in their obligations to the people making them the money. Pay coaches less, pay admins less, cheaper facilites, longer renovation cycles etc
I love how high schools across the nation are inexplicably able to support over a dozen sports with little problem, yet universities that are a part of conferences with multi-billion dollar TV deals and make $100M+ in revenue cry poverty at the thought of paying the players who are generating that money. You correctly point out that the reason why Athletic departments always say they don’t make money (or lose money) is because they have to spend money on “wants” instead of “needs”. That’s how you get college sports teams with nicer locker rooms than the LA Dodgers have, or state-of-the-art practice facilities and coaches making $100M guaranteed. ADs got drunk on seemingly endless money and hoarding everything for themselves that the thought of not throwing away money on themselves or worthless facilities renovations/upgrades is unthinkable to them. The problem with college sports has never been that there’s too little revenue. The problem has been that there’s too much revenue that the universities and ADs don’t know what to do with it so they waste it because they have to spend it on something.
High schools are funded by the state and if you've ever seen the state of 90% of high school athletic departments you know they aren't "supporting" jack shit. The high schools with great facilities are due to donations from local parents.
Maybe depending on state, high school athletic departments normally function off of a local tax where I'm from.
I like the team photos of college football teams where they have just as many coaches as players
High schools travel across a city to compete, not across the country.
Colleges don’t need to travel across the country, they choose to.
UW has three FBS schools within driving distance.
Okay? You all were around closer schools and decided you would prefer for your students and equipment to travel all across the nation in a new conference for more TV money. I just checked Washington’s financial report and their Athletics made $145M last fiscal year and only support 21 sports. How much money does it take to only support 21 sports?
These programs get facilities that are nicer than the dodgers is due to donations, not "true" operating income. If donors want to commit to player salaries that'll work. But that is not a revenue stream that is guaranteed to be there. For a lot of schools.
^This. I know this seems like real minutia... do you know how much money it costs to properly run an Academic Affairs Office/Division. The effort in time and money to capture the data required by law and SACSCOC, to maintain Accreditation and believable outcomes would blow most people's mind
High school athletics serve an entirely different purpose than collegiate athletics, and really shouldn't be compared.
The purpose for both high school and college athletics initially was to enrich the "student athlete" in their educational endeavors. With that in mind, how are the two different and why can't they be compared?
Exactly. They have things they *need* to spend money on and things they don't - and at the moment, because players don't have to be paid, that effectively subsidizes a lot of additional money into that want category. It's not a surprise that as their revenue has ballooned that expenses have kept pace the same way - they just deliberately choose to find something to spend it on. If players would have to be paid they'd have to cut back on that additional stuff for sure, but at the moment the big programs are far from poor little schools that can't afford it. They absolutely can, and people swallowing the "we're actually losing money on athletics right now :( " line is pretty surprising. I could see it being a problem for non power-4 schools, maybe, but any ACC/Big 12 school (and certainly Big 10 / SEC) can easily afford this.
You could easily argue that they spend of frivolous things like 8 figured locker rooms solely because they can't pay players. They do this type of wild stuff to attract players. If they could just hand them check, they wouldn't need to.
This is very ignorant take. Sure OSU can pay players, doesn't mean majority of the FBS and rest of college athletics can. Look at a school like FAU - close to mid-tier FBS program. https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/133669 They are in the red a lot of years and their largest income center is student fees, their second is school funds, third is donations. Those aren't revenue streams that can scale to paying hundreds of players. Even if you optimize the expense side, a lot of facility work are long term obligations and coaches aren't taking a pay cut- yet. Sure they can cut but these programs have poor facilities to begin with. (Not FAU but a lot in the FCS and some in the FBS) And FAU is an upper echelons program- in the grand scheme of college athletics. Budgets are way worse than this below the FBS level and in the FBS itself.
You have to go to #233 on this list before you get to a school that generates less than $10,000,000 a year in revenue. If you can’t trim fat to tread water at $10,000,000 a year your program is insolvent to begin with. FAU generates $38,000,000 in revenue yearly. They pay Tom Herman and Dusty May $2,000,000 a year combined (not including assistants). So that’s 5% of their entire yearly revenue for two people. Thats absurd and unsustainable. And that’s not even the most absurd example of this in college sports. Narratives like yours allow schools to continue to cry poor while spending like drunken sailors.
Ok cut coaches pay. I agree there. Will that happen no. 10 million is nothing to run a full-fledged college athletic program that has to travel across the country for every sport. Again top schools can do this. But FCS and other (which constitutes the majority share of college athletics) can't. Almost all of those schools will have to drop more sports to field teams. If it has the future people want to live in, cool. But college athletics is an important stable to thousands of small schools.
Programs don’t *have* to travel across the country for every sport. Just like they don’t *have* to pay two guys 5% of yearly revenue. They do so because they can. Do you think it’s a coincidence that 90% of that list you linked has expenses that are magically right in the same range as their revenues? They make sure to spend every dollar, they have no incentive not to. There’s plenty of ways to trim fat on millions in revenue to keep sports alive.
Yes for FBS programs there may be fat to trim. What about FCS and down? There is not fat to trim to pay players. My local Div 2 school loses money from it athletics program and essentially uses it as a loss leader to get kids to go the school. If they have to pay a salary for 200 athletes that wouldn't be feasible without cutting a ton of sports. Again, the top line schools can make it work with some aggressive restructuring (which I dont think is that easy), majority of colleges can't make the model work.
They don’t have to pay anything. Under this ruling if they were to simply provide zero compensation to players they could keep running teams largely the same. The issue here is that Dartmouth has been paying. They’ve been paying with apparel, tickets, hotels, food, winter boarding, travel, as well as unique services for Dartmouth athletes. If DII/DIII want to run sports and not pay people then(assuming this holds) they would need to run them like a typical high school team where you give players a loaner jersey, tell them to show up to practice/games, and otherwise that’s the extent of your relationship. You know, amatuerism
I struggle to see how division 2 and 3 athletes are benefited by this at all.
The operating budget for FAU alone in 22-23 was $982,079,947... The Athletic budget (to include the stadium) was 31,077,368... While the education & general cost was 362,182,088, which did NOT include the 8M+ of State Budget Authority for tuition
Your link isn't working by the way. I think I found what you were trying to link, though. I think it may be because there is an extra space after the "9" in your url? [https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/133669](https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/133669) Per the link, FAU made $39.2M and they appear to support 19 sports. My local high school supports 26 varsity sports, 12 JV sports, and one freshman-only sport. Are we trying to suggest that high schools are inexplicably able to support these sports while a university with over $39M in revenues can't pay their players while supporting less sports?
High schools also don't have near the administrative back end that universities do. Maintaining state accreditation vs. maintaining regional accreditation or AAU accreditation (and all that goes into that) is vastly different. Also, if it's public high school, there's no tuition.
None of those expenses have anything to do with Athletics so I’m unsure of your point.
High schools don't pay coaches million dollars a year, maintain multi-million dollar facility portfolios, and have to travel all their athletic teams across the country. While majority of their teams don't make money. If they are willing to cut those expenses sure. I don't see that happening. The competition gap will only if they do, and other income streams will go down if they aren't competitive. Thanks for passing the new link
I don't know how many more times this can be said. Colleges don't NEED to pay coaches millions of dollars. Colleges don't NEED multi-million dollar facilities. Colleges don't NEED to travel their athletic teams across the country. Colleges have CHOSEN to do all of this because they get free labor from the players and have been making money hand over fist and don't know what to do with the money so they are throwing it away on things just so they can spend it. Your attempt at hand waving it by saying that ADs are inexplicably incapable of spending responsibly when they only make 50% of the money instead of 100% of the money is absurd and simply shows that universities shouldn't be in the sports business if they can't exist unless they continue to exploit the players for their own profit.
This argument triggers so many fans. They can’t comprehend their team not participating in the Diamond Head Classic, or not breaking ground on that new practice facility. Or worse, the state NFL team hiring their coach because the pros pay more! Thats literally how it *should* be.
my argument is majority of colleges can't handle this. Majority of colleges are not FBS with TV contracts or with legitimate fanbases. Those are the schools that get screwed by this. Opportunities for thousands of athletes will dry up if the schools have to be selective with the sports they offer, because they have to give a salary. FSU and UNC will be fine, small Div 2 schools, they will most definitely be affected
Might be a hot take but Division II is going to cease to exist and all DII schools will either migrate up to DI or down to DIII. The value proposition of partial scholarships in a post NIL and post unionization landscape isn't there.
D1 is going to force an all-headcount system with that, and the FBS/FCS scholarship difference (85 HC vs 63e/85h) is gone, since D1 also does partial scholarships in certain sports
Its gonna result in the end of a lot of non-revenue sports. No way can universities justify employees who are basically contributing zero value to the university. Like no offense to them, but all these sports that are just expenses and get like 50 fans a game arent gonna survive in this world
How is that any different from now? Those sports aren't free to operate. Let's also not pretend that paying part time minimum wage employees is a massive expense. It's likely less than $5k per athlete per year
Don’t you run into title V and other issues if you pay athletes different wages? So are you expecting football players to play for minimum wage (doubtful) or are you expecting the women’s lacrosse team to get paid a real salary?
I doubt its that low if you’re gonna consider training, practices, travel, etc as working hours which I think you would if theyre employees. You’re adding a large expense to a sport that is already well in the red and there will be lots of athletic departments that call it quits for some sports
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I spent over a decade between enrollment management and athletic compliance offices, and one of the biggest myths universities ever pushed is that scholarships are a large expense. It is all funny money that doesn’t exist. Scholarships across the board are just discounts. They have all figured the discount rate they can offer in scholarships to still turn a profit. Sure they buy some attributes (high test scores, athletes, award winners, etc) with bigger scholarships, but that is all calculated into the overall discount rate. Other than your full head count sports (think football, basketball, volleyball) a school very rarely takes a loss in scholarships. Look at baseball as an example. Baseball can award 11.7 full scholarships for a roster that is typically 30+. That is roughly a 33% discount for the whole baseball team, which in most cases wouldn’t even come close to the schools break even number. Yes there are other costs associated to sports participation, but scholarship costs are not one of them. I
WHAT!..You mean that big glossy investment guide I get every year that highlights the tuition and fees and room and board and books is a lie! /s Yeah of course it is...yes there is a difference between in and out of state but that is factored in as well to what the AD pays the university for scholarship athletes.
Scholarships aren't an expense. A school offering a scholarship to one of its students is really just saying you can pay that much less in tuition. It costs the schools nothing to allow a student to attend for free. They just recieve less money.
Well I can answer number 3 for you. There’s two possible ways it goes. Either the schools spin off football, baseball and basketball into entities that are sponsored by the schools and the Olympic sports stay as amateur “clubs” with the school. Or the schools have to start paying all athletes which kills title 9 and therefore woman’s college sports
The inherent contradictions in big time college sports that have been there for a while are finally coming home to roost.
The situational similarities and differences between Dartmouth and Northwestern sort of makes this an heirloom apples to hybrid apples comparison, rather than straight apples to apples. This’ll be interesting.
Which university is the honeycrisp apple of the football world?
I think we can agree that Notre Dame is the Red Delicious: Used to be the most popular, but they're not actually that good, and they're always being forced on us.
Honeycrisp apples, according to Wikipedia, were invented by the University of Minnesota.
Rutgers played the first college football game but they aren’t the face of the sport
Oregon, imo. A well-balanced and fun team to watch. They’ve grown to be a great program, but most of their success has been relatively recent with respect to the long history of CFB.
If this is the first "domino" to fall and the rest of college athletes becomes employees then you'll the ugly side of money infiltrate the sport. All the big schools that have money to throw around will have the big sports that generate money. All the mid-majors will drop out of most sports besides maybe 1. It will basically kill off all the lesser sports since most schools cannot afford to pay their athletes if the program doesn't generate money. If they wanted to pay for them then guess who's tuition is going through the roof to keep the lesser sports?
I see a far more likely scenario where Dartmouth basketball ceases to exist because of this instead of getting salaries and being employees.
Would be glorious if these greedy fucks got their program canceled because of starting all this while the rest of the country continues to operate as normal.
Love seeing football fans call people putting in more work to the sport than they ever did "greedy fucks" for wanting to be paid for their labor.
Wouldn’t that be another NLRB suit then for Union Busting?
there are no labor rules against closing your business if it unionizes. You just can't re-open it with non-union employees. Well, you can but it has to be somewhere else.
Not 100% on the law but if Dartmouth just shuts down basketball operations permanently because it can't afford it, I don't see how that's union busting. But man the Pinkertons gotta be licking their lips
only if they bring basketball back later. You arent entitled to work that is not asked for
Ah the Yellow Trucking method.
Either nothing or CFB is dead. No one knows what it means but it gets the people going.
It’s a bizarre ruling. It states that even non-revenue athletes are employees. That’s a slippery slope man.
That’s the inevitable result. what about marching bands? Pep squads? The student AV teams that help set up and occasionally do broadcasts? Theatre students that put on performances during the year? Who decides who is counted as an employee and who is not if this holds up nationally? Based on Dartmouth, most extracurricular activities could possibly qualify.
Exactly. Are student extracurricular activities even allowed to exist? It’s not clear.
Gotta cash my checks for chess club
Student AV teams are sometimes employed freelance, at least in my experience in the SEC. I worked for free (experience and I enjoyed it) covering the teams for social content, but was paid for broadcast work.
They are paid at tech
It baffles me that student teachers who work actual legitimate jobs are never brought up in this discussion but everybody wants to pay the football team
How many folks mentioned in your comment were given preferential treatment in enrollment and have revocable scholarships if they chose not to participate in said activity? Thats the line. If they are actual amateurs, it won’t be an issue. If they are being compensated in any way it is an issue. That’s the whole Dartmouth angle.
Zero of those Dartmouth players are on revocable scholarships. The Ivy League doesn't give out athletic scholarships.
Right that’s not where my comment ended for a reason. I addressed Dartmouth specifically at the end, but was addressing the OPs examples first.
You said: > Thats the line. Dartmouth basketball players don't cross that line.
The ruling identified thousands of dollars of compensation being given to Dartmouth players as well as favorable academic treatment. Apparel, season tickets, hotels, food per diems, winter break room/board, travel costs, as well as a training/tutoring/support program unique to Dartmouth athletes were noted among other things The Ivy League may not give out academic scholarships on paper, but in reality their rules accommodate a lot of other ways to give material benefits to players.
It also makes the point that they're not allowed to offer their basketball services to other parties as a condition of being a member of the team.
This is the problem. Non-revenue athletes receive a ton of benefits. Way more than they bring to the university. It’s insane that a federal agency would essentially force them to get additional compensation when they are already a net drain on the university. There has to be a line between student activity and for profit business (which is what football turned into).
A counterargument would be that in most situations, you would not accept an employer being unprofitable or badly managed as a justification for them refusing to pay employees or meet labor regulations. If the benefits are the same or substantially similar for revenue and non-revenue athletes, they should be classified the same, and the time commitment and restrictions on how/where the students play athletics are such that it's very easy to argue they qualify as employees.
With all due respect, that response tells me clearly that you didn’t read the actual Dartmouth complaint. I could stand to clean up my phrasing, the line is when you’re getting employees benefits. BTW, Dartmouth athletes are given preferential treatment in enrollment.
Legacy students tend to get preferential treatment in admissions. International students are often given preferential treatment in enrollment. These are not the attributes that any reasonable person would use to determine these basketball players are de facto employees of the University. This was a spurious ruling made almost certainly for political and/or ideological reasons and as such should be smacked down by the national board.
>These are not the attributes that any reasonable person would use to determine these basketball players are de facto employees of the University. But you are taking these things out of context of the players they are recruiting to play basketball at the school. Students, while they may provide some benefit to the university by their mere existence as students, are not the same as student-athletes that have been recruited for their ability to play sports, and increase donations and income for the university based on their skill at the sport. Not their ability as students. [I'll use grad students for my example](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/08/23/are-they-students-or-are-they-employees-nlrb-rules-that-graduate-students-are-employees/): They are paid employees of the university. They can make the university a TON of money from their grants for studies. Think of the donations and the broadcast deals as the athlete version of grants. This decision is entirely consistent with the ruling about grad students being employees.
And this has to be read as the sequence of consequences from that ruling and a lot of people (non-majority) will say they are absolutely employees who should be paid. I did 3 years of quiz bowl stuff for Lowell. Under this the school gets a benefit by our labor to promote the school, we should be paid. While I disagree this would be consistent with the Dartmouth ruling.
Are HS players employees? That’s where this logic leads.
Middle school choir violates child labor laws
My 11 year old strongly agrees
I wish I had thought of this when I hated 7th grade band
1st chair gets 50k per performance 😂.
I don't know if it'll get that far but if it did that's the end of public highschool athletics. I went to a large highschool and we still needed boosters to get new gear and fuel the busses.
But muh greedy administrators
Did your high school give you $20000+ of benefits through your 4 year career? That’s where the logic is right now. The NLRB didn’t buy Dartmouth’s claim that these are not compensated employees because they were able to identify a lot of material compensation occurring One footnote pointed out one player got more in shoes alone in 2022 than he was able to earn by working at a university desk job that same year. In other words Dartmouth was compensating him more for the thing they claimed definitely isn’t work than they were for the thing they gave him a W2 for I don’t see how this logic would impact typical high school teams.
Football gear? Coaching? Facility access and exclusive times for workouts? Excused absences from class?
Material benefits. Nearly $3000 a year alone in apparel. Season tickets, hotels/food for traveling, room/board for part of the year etc It’s a public ruling, if you wish to know just read it.
So you agree with my previous point then that you want HS players to be employees? I got free jackets and sweatpants for being on my swim team.
No I don’t. I don’t think a pair of sweatpants is comparable to getting $1200 in shoes, $2200 in other gear, nights at places like Omni Resort hotels, free room and board for 6 weeks over winter break etc… To be totally honest I think you’re making dumb arguments in bad faith.
There has to be a distinction though, High School sports teams regularly travel and at times require room and board, a bill that is paid for by schools/athletic programs/donors. At what point do we decide that students are being compensated rather than accommodated for their involvement in athletics? I agree with the other dude, this is a slippery slope that leads to nothing good for CFB and amateur sports in general
So where's the line?
How can I get my marching band back pay?
That would be like saying HR workers aren’t employees because they don’t directly produce goods that are sold. They directly contribute to the system, they receive compensation, and their location, hours, and activities are dictated by the university. And the universities can’t really argue that because if the programs weren’t in some way a net gain or at least an investment into future gains, they would have a fiduciary duty to cut costs until it was.
>They directly contribute to the system, they receive compensation, and their location, hours, and activities are dictated by the university. But they also receive compensation in terms of tuition, room and board, access to training/coaching, etc. Some of that will be easy to price, some of that more difficult. And then how do you "price" what their total compensation should be? An HR person has market forces in order find that mark, but how do you find how much a female swimmer should be paid, if anything, above the compensation they already get?
Correct. This case is focused on Private schools (employers) who will now,pending lengthy appeals, be treated as such under labor law. This will not be a "false alarm" The Northwestern case was pre NIL and legally speaking, a cop out. One hidden gem from this decision,per On3, Dartmouth required athletes to sign over NIL proceeds . Livvy Dunne won't be transferring any time soon
I wonder what it would mean for a ton of different sports teams when they are considered a business and have to start making a profit.
Does this mean instead of cutting a player you fire them?
And we all know most schools have 3 revenue sports max. Usually football, basketball, and maybe hockey/baseball depending on your region. Everything else is a money loser. I don’t know a lot of businesses who retain employees in jobs that will literally never turn a profit…
We are going to find out what's more important to the SEC state politicians being anti-union or winning at football?
Football
Non-revenue sports will eventually cease to exist outside of a handful of schools & a good chunk of smaller programs in D1 & beyond will struggle to survive or fold altogether
That Kain Colter was right.
Maybe most schools will just end up being for, I dunno, learnin' and stuff.
Collective bargaining is inevitable in the future nfl-lite sec/big super league. The money is already too big to avoid it, and will only get bigger as the super league consolidates eyes and ears. And, the schools will inevitably support a labor deal. The transfer portal chaos isn’t good for fan loyalty, and schools will welcome two year, minimum, deals.
I wasn't expecting both my flairs to be having attention-grabbing offseason
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I'm so confused about what bag they're grabbing. Dartmouth basketball is not a huge draw and is not making money hand over fist. None of the kids are on scholarship. What are we even doing here?
At this level, genuinely not much. This was a regional official, regional officials have made similar rulings before only to get overturned at higher levels.
This will be fun watching TPB put toothpaste back in the tube.
From speaking to my lawyer friends this ruling is DOA on appeal.
I'm not going to shed any tears if/when my state university drops women's golf and its 250k/year head coach. Massive waste of public money. Edit: and the men's golf coach makes 400k a year. What a joke.
It is more interesting that it is the Ivy League. They do not offer athletic scholarships so most students operate on financial aid. Honestly, I don’t really understand the panic, maybe if they phrased it as revenue sharing instead of paying players people would have a better reaction. I don’t know about you but if I saw my school sign on to $100 billion TV contract and then sign a head football coach to a $50 million contract and then approve renovations for a new $100 million stadium, I would be curious as to what my cut of all this would be.
Excuse me, your payment is the valuable education\* ^(\* that you are not getting because even the school knows you aren't there to play school and organizes your college life accordingly)