The idea of paying college athletes a stipend is nothing more than a PR move by the NCAA to divert attention from the corruption that pervades the recruiting process in both basketball and football. I have no problem paying athletes,I support it in theory, but it is not going to change the current corrupt practices one bit, except in the spin coming from the NCAA. The problem is, eventually it will lead to the further demise of less popular sports because down the road some greedy administration is going to decide paying athletes in sports that don't generate revenue is just bad business and taking money out of their pockets, so bingo, eliminate lacrosse and you've eliminated the problem.
Paying College Athletes
- Thread starter jerseyshorejohnny
- Start date
Even if the players union put forth the age limit - which I find impossible to believe - the union doesn't represent high school players. So what you have is an agreement between the NCAA, the NBA, and union to restrict the employment rights of non union members. The government coercion takes the form of a limited exemption from the antitrust law. In any other business if all the owners got together and agreed not to hire certain people because of their age or some other constitutionally protected classification they'd get sued and they'd lose. Here the government enforces the rule and even abets the practice by providing funding to NCAA universities.
beast of the east
Active member
[attachment]PovertyRatesbyRace.png[/attachment]
I was wrong about Curtis Redding, but he did have such a successful freshmen campaign, that he received votes for student government president as a write in. The facts about poverty in the US are correct. See the chart above, derived from the 2010 US census.
Tell you what, since your total knowledge base comes from your internet searches. Do a study of the top 50 NCAA basketball and football programs, and check the racial makeup of the teams.
Are you trying to say that the top athletes in NCAA D1 basketball and football are not black? I don't think you know what you are trying to say, actually.
The point remains is that NCAA football and basketball are big business, and the players get almost nothing, except room and board and tuition for four years. At the minimum, schools should give athletes tuition free education until they attain degrees.
Since oyu are interested in facts, and we are talking about facts, you are wrong about poverty, again:
From the US 2010 Census
64.7% of the US population is white
16% Hispanic
12.2% African American
In the 2010 ACS, White and Asian children had poverty rates below the U.S. average. Other race groups had higher rates, including Black children (38.2 percent) and children identified with Two or More Races (22.7 percent). Poverty for Hispanic children was 32.3 percent.
Where there are more white kids living in poverty, there are more than 5x as many whites living in this country than African Americans.
If a college athlete is popular enough for people to pay $50-75 or more, to watch them play in a game, they should be compensated.
I was wrong about Curtis Redding, but he did have such a successful freshmen campaign, that he received votes for student government president as a write in. The facts about poverty in the US are correct. See the chart above, derived from the 2010 US census.
Tell you what, since your total knowledge base comes from your internet searches. Do a study of the top 50 NCAA basketball and football programs, and check the racial makeup of the teams.
Are you trying to say that the top athletes in NCAA D1 basketball and football are not black? I don't think you know what you are trying to say, actually.
The point remains is that NCAA football and basketball are big business, and the players get almost nothing, except room and board and tuition for four years. At the minimum, schools should give athletes tuition free education until they attain degrees.
Since oyu are interested in facts, and we are talking about facts, you are wrong about poverty, again:
From the US 2010 Census
64.7% of the US population is white
16% Hispanic
12.2% African American
In the 2010 ACS, White and Asian children had poverty rates below the U.S. average. Other race groups had higher rates, including Black children (38.2 percent) and children identified with Two or More Races (22.7 percent). Poverty for Hispanic children was 32.3 percent.
Where there are more white kids living in poverty, there are more than 5x as many whites living in this country than African Americans.
If a college athlete is popular enough for people to pay $50-75 or more, to watch them play in a game, they should be compensated.
I don't know but I see minimum age limits with respect to hiring in some fields. Maybe you can shed some light. I remember that one of my colleagues could not practice medicine in NYS until he was 21 even though he had graduated. Maybe it has something to do with state law and there are exceptions? I have no idea. If the NBA doesn't want to use age to discriminate, they can always just do it under some other ruse.
I always found it ironic that the most revered institutions of higher learning are the perpetrators and benefactors of all the abuses of the system. I believe the solution lies in seperating true student athletes from pros in waiting. The universities are the only organizations in a position to police this. If all scholarships were fixed as four year endowments and not replaced when students leave early teams who use one and donners to make money would come back to the pack in a heartbeat. Then, the schools with the best graduation rates would be in the final four instead of all the opportunistic cheaters. Of course revenues would plummet but academics would soar. Revenues in the devopmental leagues should climb though and a lot more kids could make a buck playing hoops in the US which is their dream to begin with. The baseball model is much closer to the ideal and a lot of non major leaguers manage to make a living in the process. Of course I'll hear cries that nobody would pay to see scholar athletes play but I would. At least the very term "scholar athlete" would cease to be the joke it's become however and I believe that would be a good thing. I'm going to run and hide now having offered my 2 cents on an issue that really could use a major overhaul. See you at the Gtown (normally a very respected academic institution) "game."
jumbo_peanuts
Active member
My thoughts to your three arguments. I really don't think your first two statements are a negative thing at all. The universities are doing everything in their power to make it easy for these kids. At my university, the athletes were the first ones to schedule to make sure they got classes that didn't interfere with practice. I don't see how they are at a disadvantage when it seems the schools are trying their best to accommodate the student athletes. I would have loved to have just showed up and had my schedule and everything planned/picked out for me. Apparently you never had to go meet with an advisor or professor and ask them for special permission to get into their class or something because it was already full when you tried to schedule it.
For your third argument.....never really heard of anyone taking a reduced workload in order to ensure they maintain their eligibility, but wouldn't doubt if it does happen. But if it does, isn't that more of the student's fault? There are tons of college athletes that are really good on the playing field, and still graduate in 4 years. It happens every year. Hell, there are even students that play sports and still find a way to graduate EARLY!!! Its called not being lazy and being willing to put in the time and effort to make it happen.
I agree that they need money in order to buy school supplies and have some spending money, but there is zero reason as to why they can't get jobs during the summer or their offseason. Look at our basketball team during the summer (I am assuming that all the players are on campus during the summer). I don't see them taking a full class load during the summer. So they could take a class or two, spend a few hours a day at the gym, and still have time to get a part time job. No one ever said it would be easy, but it is definitely possible.
As far as the $175/week stipend. While it would be nice in theory, it could never work. It would cost the universities way too much money, because they would have to pay every single student athlete in the school. You could use the argument that they could only pay students in the top sports. However, what constitutes a top sport? People could say that the obvious top sports are football and basketball. While that may be true for most schools, it is not true for all. Look at Cal-State Fullerton. They are a top baseball team mostly every year, and who knows/cares if they even have a football team. Would you not pay their baseball team because they aren't in one of the two "top" sports. Then you could argue that they should pay the most successful teams and especially the ones that generate the highest revenue. But that won't work either. I will use both Michigan and Notre Dame as examples. Their obvious top sports are football and basketball. However, in the world of college hockey, Notre Dame is currently ranked #3 in the country, and Michigan is #15. So if you go by success, one of either teams' "top" sport's athletes wouldn't be paid. You could go by revenue generated, but that would be like comparing apples and oranges. The nature of the stadiums obviously makes football the highest money maker. Penn State's Beaver stadium is going to make the school more money than the basketball team's Bryce Jordan Center. Not because the football team is that much better, but because Beaver Stadium holds 102,000 people compared to the BJC holding like 10,000. And then how would a school like Penn State explain to their women's volleyball team (who had won 4 straight national championships coming into this season and sellout almost every game) that they aren't being paid, just because they play in a smaller arena.
You just can't pay some athletes and not others. For what would be the non-paid athletes, it would be like the school is saying that they don't care about all the time and effort that they are putting into the sport that they love. It's just not possible.
It's unclear to me how you might be privy to Curtis Redding's electoral status at K State but what's even less clear its relevance, except as evidence that you don't know what you're talking about even as concerns SJ basketball, in which you fancy yourself an expert.
No. Are you saying that the "top athletes in division 1 basketball and football" fail to graduate college and end up back in "the projects"? Because most of the top d1 athletes go on to lucrative athletic careers. It's the sucky ones who don't. So the top ones are irrelevant as well.
I suspect most people know what I'm saying but since you seem to be having trouble following along I'll spell it out. I'm scoffing at your antedeluvian racial attitudes: your belief that all blacks come from "the projects"; that blacks are ill equipped for college and not intelligent enough to graduate in 6 years with a degree in sports management, like white people; and that if blacks can't make a living at playing basketball their dream is to make $11 hr checking your crotch for explosives at the airport like that character Tyrone or Rastus or whatever that you invented last year when you shared an allegory about wandering around LaGuardia asking random black people if they knew the score of the SJ game and stumbled up Dwight Hardy's teammate. It's only a wonder that he wasn't noshing on a fried watermelon.
(Since you need a narrator, I'm finished scoffing at your racial attitudes and will now be moving on to mocking your math.)
Your statistics are percentages and hence they're meaningless in this context. Consider. There are 10 people, 8 whites and 2 blacks. If 100 percent of the blacks live in poverty, and only 50 percent of whites do, there are 200 percent as many poor whites as there are poor blacks. Because there's 4 times fewer blacks: that's why they're called a "minority."
The problem for you is that D1 athletes comprise a number, not a percentage. That is, the number of division one athletes is countable: there are 21000. Eighty percent of whom are white. That means that there are about 4000 black division one athletes total.
Now. In the US 75 percent of blacks live above the poverty level ,so we can toss them out. 25 percent of 4000 is 1000, which is therefore the number of black D1 athletes who lived below the poverty level. Of those, "[although] poverty rates are highest in inner cities, only 23 percent of those in poverty live there." That means that 75 percent of the remaining 25 percent of poor blacks live in rural areas. Therefore, 25 percent of 25 percent - about 6 percent or 250 actual poor black D1 athletes - live in urban areas, much less in your " the projects." Take a minute to read that over again, because its unlikely you understood it the first time. I'll wait. Tick tock tick tock. Get it now? The tiny minority of poor blacks who play D1 sports are 4 times more likely to live in a shack in Appalachia than in a Brooklyn tenement. Thus is your rationale for paying college athletes - that they'll starve to death back in the ghetto otherwise - easily disproven. Most athletes are white; most athletes come from rural areas; most black athletes are not poor; and only a tiny minority of those who are come from the inner city.
Thus endeth today's lesson.
Licensing is state law.There are rational reasons for a state to restrict MDs from practicing until they're 21, just as they can restrict teens from drinking or driving. The Sherman Act is federal law. Absent an exemption the age agreement would be an illegal restraint of trade. Even the draft itself would be an illegal restraint absent the exemption.
