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Is college athletics turning into another professional apparatus?
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AllTideUp Offline
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Post: #1
Is college athletics turning into another professional apparatus?
The answer to that may seem obvious. If the players get paid straight up then it's obviously professional, but that's actually not what I'm talking about.

I'm also not here to advocate for a model that separates the players from the student body, I don't want to be misunderstood. What I am asking though is what sort of potential does college athletics have if they essentially become another avenue for professional athletes?

In other words, what if we're not worried about traditional eligibility standards.

1. Scholarship limits only serve a purpose if your goal is to create parity across a large body of programs. We're obviously moving away from a place where we're interested in creating parity outside the top echelon.

2. Do we really need to worry about players having 4 years of eligibility? As long as they're attending school maybe half time and passing all their classes, then you could make a strong argument these players are just professionals going after a degree in their spare time.

3. Perhaps most importantly, if these conferences and schools become more concerned with monetizing certain aspects then could see the economic impact rise to the level of a major professional sports league? I mean, college football is really only 2nd to the NFL when it comes to popularity. Then you add in the potential of keeping fans attention all year with basketball and baseball under the same roof? How long does it take before these entities stop trying to serve the academic mission and start taking full advantage of popularity to create a quasi-professional league in how they operate?

Again, I'm not saying I want a world where the academics don't matter. I think it's important for these kids and for these communities that we be more concerned with generating alumni than simply hiring athletes. With that said, I see some of these earth shaking changes as a means to capitalize on untapped markets.

The fan bases of college athletics are perfectly capable of supporting a more robust system. Who is to say that ALL the best players have to be in the NFL or the NBA or the MLB?

I mean, let's think about it. Most of these professional leagues in America exist because a long time ago people saw a business opportunity in utilizing athletes that were no longer eligible to compete at the college level. Of course, the MLB is an older league, but with minor league teams disappearing across the country and with MLB prices just being impractical...there's an opportunity even there for the colleges to capitalize on a fan demand.
07-30-2022 09:51 PM
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unalions Offline
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RE: Is college athletics turning into another professional apparatus?
Coach Saban seems to think the top college football programs are heading toward an NFL-style league with 60 teams competing in two or three megaconferences.

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08-14-2022 11:19 AM
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OdinFrigg Offline
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RE: Is college athletics turning into another professional apparatus?
My opinion may not be popular on this board, but a 60+ school separation from the rest of college football and other sports will have long term negative consequences. Add whoever, the excitement for it is just about gone. Maybe I am reading too much speculation that is anticlimactic. This we’ll just adjust to NIL as we move along and we’ll get to the rules later, will be a bumpy road unaware where the exits may be. A playoff, to be decided by a load of BIG and SEC teams, and can’t do without Notre Dame, and bid or two tossed elsewhere, will be the thrilling decision for the profiteers. The four best will be in there somewhere I suppose.

Academics left the formula long ago. They can’t pretend much longer that the majority of these football and basketball players are real students. They would be better off to acknowledge the reality.
08-16-2022 04:52 PM
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JRsec Offline
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Post: #4
RE: Is college athletics turning into another professional apparatus?
(08-16-2022 04:52 PM)OdinFrigg Wrote:  My opinion may not be popular on this board, but a 60+ school separation from the rest of college football and other sports will have long term negative consequences. Add whoever, the excitement for it is just about gone. Maybe I am reading too much speculation that is anticlimactic. This we’ll just adjust to NIL as we move along and we’ll get to the rules later, will be a bumpy road unaware where the exits may be. A playoff, to be decided by a load of BIG and SEC teams, and can’t do without Notre Dame, and bid or two tossed elsewhere, will be the thrilling decision for the profiteers. The four best will be in there somewhere I suppose.

Academics left the formula long ago. They can’t pretend much longer that the majority of these football and basketball players are real students. They would be better off to acknowledge the reality.

You are 54 years too late with your opinion. Perhaps a century too late. And those imbeciles up North who call it academic are hypocrites, and the NCAA is a bureaucratic money filching boondoggle which banked 2 billion in endowments to perpetuate itself by propping up the illusion of amateurism. It has always been a wealthy well educated minority which has hired ringers instead of students to project regional power for their own aggrandizement and called it "sport" when really it was a publicity proxy war.

I don't castigate your stance, simply the wholesale naivete that it has ever been remotely clean and above board. What I applaud is that a huge underground economy which by its nature made young men and women complicit in its hypocrisy, complicit in its skirting of law, and which has flourished on the physical sacrifices of the poor without compensating even the injured is finally judged and found wanting!

So, piss on the NCAA and the last vestiges of slavery it represented, and hoorah that CEO powerbrokers can no longer claim a tax deduction for their upscaled cockfights, and welcome to the compensation young people will receive for the skills they possess and the physical and mortal risks they assume!

It all needed to change. And while change will take time at least the old ships have been burned and only a novel way forward exists! I weep not for the devil and his losses!
(This post was last modified: 08-16-2022 06:42 PM by JRsec.)
08-16-2022 06:39 PM
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OdinFrigg Offline
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Post: #5
RE: Is college athletics turning into another professional apparatus?
(08-16-2022 06:39 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(08-16-2022 04:52 PM)OdinFrigg Wrote:  My opinion may not be popular on this board, but a 60+ school separation from the rest of college football and other sports will have long term negative consequences. Add whoever, the excitement for it is just about gone. Maybe I am reading too much speculation that is anticlimactic. This we’ll just adjust to NIL as we move along and we’ll get to the rules later, will be a bumpy road unaware where the exits may be. A playoff, to be decided by a load of BIG and SEC teams, and can’t do without Notre Dame, and bid or two tossed elsewhere, will be the thrilling decision for the profiteers. The four best will be in there somewhere I suppose.

Academics left the formula long ago. They can’t pretend much longer that the majority of these football and basketball players are real students. They would be better off to acknowledge the reality.

You are 54 years too late with your opinion. Perhaps a century too late. And those imbeciles up North who call it academic are hypocrites, and the NCAA is a bureaucratic money filching boondoggle which banked 2 billion in endowments to perpetuate itself by propping up the illusion of amateurism. It has always been a wealthy well educated minority which has hired ringers instead of students to project regional power for their own aggrandizement and called it "sport" when really it was a publicity proxy war.

I don't castigate your stance, simply the wholesale naivete that it has ever been remotely clean and above board. What I applaud is that a huge underground economy which by its nature made young men and women complicit in its hypocrisy, complicit in its skirting of law, and which has flourished on the physical sacrifices of the poor without compensating even the injured is finally judged and found wanting!

So, piss on the NCAA and the last vestiges of slavery it represented, and hoorah that CEO powerbrokers can no longer claim a tax deduction for their upscaled cockfights, and welcome to the compensation young people will receive for the skills they possess and the physical and mortal risks they assume!

It all needed to change. And while change will take time at least the old ships have been burned and only a novel way forward exists! I weep not for the devil and his losses!

I did two terms as a faculty representative to the NCAA. While it was a quarter century ago, I was directly there (Div. II campus rep.). That is not naïveté. I’ve experienced academia, physically and substantively, both “north” (with the imbeciles as you say) and “south”. While my age can cover the 54 years you labeled as my too-late opinion, it was not a defense or endorsement of a prior system. I did not make certain arguments you bashed.

The NCAA, politically, has been dominated by Big 10 figures for decades. That is not a sudden or new revelation. The BIG and SEC are doing this tweedle dee and tweedle dum routine. If they weren’t, there wouldn’t be all this orgasmic rush to P2 which the framework and early outcomes have pre-existed.

As ATU introduced this thread, the “professional turn” in intercollegiate athletics is fundamentally here, not just on the cusp. People that don’t favor it, are not necessarily living in or yearning for the dark ages or necessarily the times when it was post-WWII joyful that was collegiate based.

As the shift will move from academia completely in terms of practicality, the professionalism of the “sport” will only grow and get ingrained in the psychic of the public which hasn’t spread too deeply yet. NFL Lite will have a market. How long? A few decades.
08-17-2022 03:35 AM
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JRsec Offline
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Post: #6
RE: Is college athletics turning into another professional apparatus?
(08-17-2022 03:35 AM)OdinFrigg Wrote:  
(08-16-2022 06:39 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(08-16-2022 04:52 PM)OdinFrigg Wrote:  My opinion may not be popular on this board, but a 60+ school separation from the rest of college football and other sports will have long term negative consequences. Add whoever, the excitement for it is just about gone. Maybe I am reading too much speculation that is anticlimactic. This we’ll just adjust to NIL as we move along and we’ll get to the rules later, will be a bumpy road unaware where the exits may be. A playoff, to be decided by a load of BIG and SEC teams, and can’t do without Notre Dame, and bid or two tossed elsewhere, will be the thrilling decision for the profiteers. The four best will be in there somewhere I suppose.

Academics left the formula long ago. They can’t pretend much longer that the majority of these football and basketball players are real students. They would be better off to acknowledge the reality.

You are 54 years too late with your opinion. Perhaps a century too late. And those imbeciles up North who call it academic are hypocrites, and the NCAA is a bureaucratic money filching boondoggle which banked 2 billion in endowments to perpetuate itself by propping up the illusion of amateurism. It has always been a wealthy well educated minority which has hired ringers instead of students to project regional power for their own aggrandizement and called it "sport" when really it was a publicity proxy war.

I don't castigate your stance, simply the wholesale naivete that it has ever been remotely clean and above board. What I applaud is that a huge underground economy which by its nature made young men and women complicit in its hypocrisy, complicit in its skirting of law, and which has flourished on the physical sacrifices of the poor without compensating even the injured is finally judged and found wanting!

So, piss on the NCAA and the last vestiges of slavery it represented, and hoorah that CEO powerbrokers can no longer claim a tax deduction for their upscaled cockfights, and welcome to the compensation young people will receive for the skills they possess and the physical and mortal risks they assume!

It all needed to change. And while change will take time at least the old ships have been burned and only a novel way forward exists! I weep not for the devil and his losses!

I did two terms as a faculty representative to the NCAA. While it was a quarter century ago, I was directly there (Div. II campus rep.). That is not naïveté. I’ve experienced academia, physically and substantively, both “north” (with the imbeciles as you say) and “south”. While my age can cover the 54 years you labeled as my too-late opinion, it was not a defense or endorsement of a prior system. I did not make certain arguments you bashed.

The NCAA, politically, has been dominated by Big 10 figures for decades. That is not a sudden or new revelation. The BIG and SEC are doing this tweedle dee and tweedle dum routine. If they weren’t, there wouldn’t be all this orgasmic rush to P2 which the framework and early outcomes have pre-existed.

As ATU introduced this thread, the “professional turn” in intercollegiate athletics is fundamentally here, not just on the cusp. People that don’t favor it, are not necessarily living in or yearning for the dark ages or necessarily the times when it was post-WWII joyful that was collegiate based.

As the shift will move from academia completely in terms of practicality, the professionalism of the “sport” will only grow and get ingrained in the psychic of the public which hasn’t spread too deeply yet. NFL Lite will have a market. How long? A few decades.

My remarks are addressed to the topic and have specifically been anti corporate for well over a decade. But corporate America is merely exploiting a myriad of flaws for which the NCAA was an author to, and cover for, and which have led to this eventuality.

I too lived it. I followed up violations for over a decade. I saw firsthand how "amateurism" was applied, and not from the sheltered "how it should be" phony collegial committee approach where liberal academics posed esoteric positions for problems they never really witnessed, and where the NCAA chose carefully when and where to enforce rules so as not to upset cash cows, while spanking harshly less influential institutions. And I had a belly full of cowardly political shenanigans plied by our polite academics who truly had no clue of street level events.

The NCAA gave those who wished to live a myth a comfortable way to do so, rubbing elbows with each other and getting to "feel" like they were accomplishing something for the greater good.

Meanwhile down on the street I talked to high school teachers who were pressured to change grades so State U could have a running back who could make a legible X for his signature, and schools which had ringers take SAT's, and recruits which had parents whose jobs were threatened, meager though they were, if Junior didn't sign with local state U, and that while local state U recruited a kid over the state line by offering the parents of a 5 star running back a $40,000 dollar supervisory position with a corporation so that their son didn't go to that state's local state U.

I got the goods back in the day on key schools from the Big 10 (academics first BS) schools, from the SWC schools, from Big 8 powers, from ACC hoops giants, and from the SEC. I didn't run into PAC 12 recruiters.

It's all a dump truck full of stinking manure that academics attending NCAA meetings never took a serious look at! Oh, you may have seen a dossier on an event, but you never saw what it did to the kid, or the family. The cash, cars, ancillary jobs, the pressure, the momentary fame and the sudden abandonment if the young person let attention and money go to their head, or God forbid had a career ending injury!

The practices of recruiters today have changed but only in stealth. Now state representatives who cannot be subpoenaed give the perks so State U's law grads can cover State U's sins, a practice engineered by some of the leadership inside the NCAA.

I embrace contracts! Contracts give the kids both rights and responsibilities and define services. Contracts do not make kids complicit with shady practices, legal dodges, and crime. It cleans up coeds at schools being used as an escort service for players, a practice one Big Ten coach was alleged to have (and many others elsewhere) employed as enticements. Contracts give injured kids a redress and a form of workman's comp. And contracts help schools clean up their act as well.

It has been a sleazy underworld environment for a century and Pop Warner, Knute Rockne and others did fight for the game and reform and the NCAA was to be part of that. But as all things in which big money flows, corruption grows. You don't manage graft with bureaucracy. But you do end it with contracts and taxes!

Teachers are usually beloved if they are worth a damn. The old saying goes when you really want to screw over an innocent man you assemble a distinguished panel of personalities to do it. Academics functioning within the NCAA were used as a perfume to cover the stench. They were never shown the street, got sanitized copies of allegations which assisted cash cows, and blatant copies of allegations on those selected to be examples of NCAA enforcement. It has been a farce for most of the decades of my life, and according to older people I knew and trusted when young, much, much longer than since WWII.

I say good riddance! If education is about building character and skill sets then contracts are a much-welcomed approach as opposed to turning coeds into whores, assigning honors students as tutors for athletes when it's the honors student which actually attends athlete classes, writes their notes, drills the kid in preparation and provides their papers for them, all while the athlete does nothing while at State U. Now the athlete knows what he/she must do, how much they get paid, and what their benefits are.

I agree college sports are dying, but that has nothing to do with this. They are dying because today's children play them less and less, spend more time on electronic devices, and because academic institutions hand out 40% A's for all classes taken by all students blowing the damned bell curve to hell and back while pumping out kids who can't and won't find a balance between mind, body and spirit, and in many cases college graduates with low reading comprehension skills, a lack of rudimentary mathematics, and poor communications skills. And that is far more damning than past athletic abuses, as our wonderful academics now sell kids degrees to keep the coffers full and their pensions funded, while our nation gets dumber and dumber. But hey, higher education is now a bureaucracy which is why there is such an affinity for the NCAA. One pretends to protect student modeled athletics and the other pretends to educate them, and neither is tethered to reality!
(This post was last modified: 08-17-2022 08:40 AM by JRsec.)
08-17-2022 07:34 AM
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