A bit of perspective....

Joe couldn’t even get Shotgun?

no need to throw my scholarship in their really.

Just because they weren’t your branch means their sacrifice is somehow less than yours? Seriously, you should just be proud that someone decided to serve at all.

More than fair, in fact, given the salaries coaches earn at major college football and basketball programs. I say: more power to the coaches and the administrators; they should earn what the market bears.

However, the players are not treated fairly under the current rules in college football. They’re college kids, like many of us were at one point, with little money. But unlike most of us, they provide an elite good — entertainment in the form of athletics performed at a very high level — that provides significant both tangible (in the form of gate receipts, TV deals, etc) and intangible (in the form of increased reputation, increased applications, etc) benefits to their university. Their compensation (in the form of a scholarship and room and board) is not commensurate with the value they provide the university; this is an injustice that is a black eye on major college athletics, and one that can be fixed relatively simply as Mike described above or in another fashion.

Anyone who thinks the system at present is fair to the players isn’t paying attention.

Very nice.

The NCAA and the universities offer these players free room and board and an education. Many times they coerce them into bogus majors that give them a degree that no serious employer would consider a qualification for the job they are looking to fill. The school makes millions of dollars off of their labor, doesn’t give them a penny, and goes beyond that to deny them the opportunity to wait tables to put some money in their pocket.

This, in my opinion, is not fair. I can go along if you don’t want the university paying the players, but what right do they have in America to deny them the opportunity to make money on their own? My employer can’t ban me from getting a second job or starting my own business on the side. As long as my performance doesn’t suffer or I’m not directly competing with them, they don’t and shouldn’t care. And they certainly don’t have a right to deny me from profiting from my labor outside of my duties to them.

What we’ve done by outlawing a player’s ability to make money is created a black market. Now we have boosters handing out $500 handshakes and agents flying players to glamorous parties in South Beach. What I’m suggesting is to get that stuff out in the open where we can regulate it. Allow players to market themselves or get a job waiting tables or washing cars. Just document it so we can regulate it. You’re saying they get a free education and they knew the rules when they signed up for it. I’m saying change the rules.

If a kid is making $25k/year, he’s less likely to take handouts if he knows he’s going to get suspended and lose the opportunity to make that $25k next year.

Mike’s idea does accomplish two things; 1) it increases the total compensation to the athletes and 2) it converts some of the compensation to a liquid form (cash). It does a good job of solving Joe Pa’s often cited example of “being able to pick up the tab for pizza”.

I believe in the goodness of people. Given the choice between making $1000 legally or $2000 illegally, most people will take the $1000 and be happy with that. There will always be the Terrelle Pryor’s of the world that think they are worth millions and won’t be satisfied with a few thousand dollars. So you put rules in place to punish those people, but…and this is the key part…you PUNISH those people when you catch them breaking the rules. The NCAA has become too weak in enforcing their rules the past few decades and that’s why the system is out of control now.

And who knows. If Pryor was making $25k legally with his room and board paid for, maybe he wouldn’t have been so disenfranchised with a system that was making millions off of him. Maybe he would have turned down that $40k and paid for his own tattoos.

The legal contention centers on Part IV of the NCAA’s "Student-Athlete Statement" for Division I, which requires every athlete to authorize use of "your name or picture … to promote NCAA championships or other NCAA events, activities or programs." Does this clause mean that athletes clearly renounce personal interest forever? If so, does it actually undermine the NCAA by implicitly recognizing that athletes have a property right in their own performance? Jon King, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, expects the NCAA’s core mission of amateurism to be its "last defense standing."

Of course it doesn’t. It only allows the NCAA to use the likeness in NCAA related activities. After the athlete is no longer participating in NCAA sanctioned activities there is nothing stopping the athlete from using their experience or likeness as an NCAA athlete for the athletes own personal interest.

There is nothing that prevents a former athlete was to use their notoriety as a former NCAA athlete to shlep cars or, insurance or whatever sponsorship or other duty they can get.

According to research by Charles Clotfelter, an economist at Duke, the average compensation for head football coaches at public universities, now more than $2 million, has grown 750 percent (adjusted for inflation) since the Regents decision in 1984; that’s more than 20 times the cumulative 32 percent raise for college professors.

Again, more of the same juxtaposition BS about someone getting paid more than someone else and that fact alone implying that there is something nefarious afoot or something that we should be outraged about.

NCAA officials have tried to assert their dominion—and distract attention from the larger issues—by chasing frantically after petty violations. Tom McMillen, a former member of the Knight Commission who was an All-American basketball player at the University of Maryland, likens these officials to traffic cops in a speed trap, who could flag down almost any passing motorist for prosecution in kangaroo court under a "maze of picayune rules." The publicized cases have become convoluted soap operas. At the start of the 2010 football season, A. J. Green, a wide receiver at Georgia, confessed that he’d sold his own jersey from the Independence Bowl the year before, to raise cash for a spring-break vacation. The NCAA sentenced Green to a four-game suspension for violating his amateur status with the illicit profit generated by selling the shirt off his own back. While he served the suspension, the Georgia Bulldogs store continued legally selling replicas of Green’s No. 8 jersey for $39.95 and up.

A few months later, the NCAA investigated rumors that Ohio State football players had benefited from "hook-ups on tatts"—that is, that they’d gotten free or underpriced tattoos at an Ohio tattoo parlor in exchange for autographs and memorabilia—a violation of the NCAA’s rule against discounts linked to athletic personae. The NCAA Committee on Infractions imposed five-game suspensions on Terrelle Pryor, Ohio State’s tattooed quarterback, and four other players (some of whom had been found to have sold their Big Ten championship rings and other gear), but did permit them to finish the season and play in the Sugar Bowl. (This summer, in an attempt to satisfy NCAA investigators, Ohio State voluntarily vacated its football wins from last season, as well as its Sugar Bowl victory.)

This has to do with the schools agreeing not to let their athletes engage in this behavior. The intent of this rule is to avoid the slippery slope of perpetually enlarged and expensive benefits given to athletes. Ultimately if left unrestrained it ends in a very small number of schools fielding athletic programs.

A different NCAA committee promulgated a rule banning symbols and messages in players’ eyeblack—reportedly aimed at Pryor’s controversial gesture of support for the pro quarterback Michael Vick, and at Bible verses inscribed in the eyeblack of the former Florida quarterback Tim Tebow.

This is in the schools interest to minimize potential controversy.

Obscure NCAA rules have bedeviled Scott Boras, the preeminent sports agent for Major League Baseball stars, in cases that may ultimately prove more threatening to the NCAA than Ed O’Bannon’s antitrust suit. In 2008, Andrew Oliver, a sophomore pitcher for the Oklahoma State Cowboys, had been listed as the 12th-best professional prospect among sophomore players nationally. He decided to dismiss the two attorneys who had represented him out of high school, Robert and Tim Baratta, and retain Boras instead. Infuriated, the Barattas sent a spiteful letter to the NCAA. Oliver didn’t learn about this until the night before he was scheduled to pitch in the regional final for a place in the College World Series, when an NCAA investigator showed up to question him in the presence of lawyers for Oklahoma State. The investigator also questioned his father, Dave, a truck driver.

Had Tim Baratta been present in their home when the Minnesota Twins offered $390,000 for Oliver to sign out of high school? A yes would mean trouble. While the NCAA did not forbid all professional advice—indeed, Baseball America used to publish the names of agents representing draft-likely underclassmen—NCAA Bylaw 12.3.2.1 prohibited actual negotiation with any professional team by an adviser, on pain of disqualification for the college athlete. The questioning lasted past midnight.

Another touching emotional tale of an athlete having to comply with the rules of the NCAA. While the reasoning for having all athletes maintain their amateur status is straightforward, defining exactly what is and is not allowed within the bounds of being an amateur athlete is what gives rise to these types of "Picayune Rules". Again the authors emotional plea falls short of anything of substance.

Rick Johnson, a solo practitioner specializing in legal ethics, was aghast that the Baratta brothers had turned in their own client to the NCAA, divulging attorney-client details likely to invite wrath upon Oliver. But for the next 15 months, Johnson directed his litigation against the two NCAA bylaws at issue. Judge Tygh M. Tone, of Erie County, came to share his outrage. On February 12, 2009, Tone struck down the ban on lawyers negotiating for student-athletes as a capricious, exploitative attempt by a private association to "dictate to an attorney where, what, how, or when he should represent his client,"…

It did no such thing. The lawyer is free to represent the athlete to his hearts content. That does not mean that there are not NCAA related penalties that the athlete may face as a result of the athlete permitting said lawyer to represent them.

…violating accepted legal practice in every state. He also struck down the NCAA’s restitution rule as an intimidation that attempted to supersede the judicial system. Finally, Judge Tone ordered the NCAA to reinstate Oliver’s eligibility at Oklahoma State for his junior season, which started several days later.

I fail to see how the NCAA’s self imposed rules on participating schools athletic programs has anything to do with the governmental judicial system.

The Toronto Blue Jays had made the left-handed pitcher James Paxton, of the University of Kentucky, the 37th pick in the 2009 draft. Paxton decided to reject a reported $1 million offer and return to school for his senior year, pursuing a dream to pitch for his team in the College World Series. But then he ran into the new NCAA survey. Had Boras negotiated with the Blue Jays? Boras has denied that he did, but it would have made sense that he had—that was his job, to test the market for his client. But saying so would get Paxton banished under the same NCAA bylaw that had derailed Andrew Oliver’s career. Since Paxton was planning to go back to school and not accept their draft offer, the Blue Jays no longer had any incentive to protect him—indeed, they had every incentive to turn him in. The Blue Jays’ president, by telling reporters that Boras had negotiated on Paxton’s behalf, demonstrated to future recruits and other teams that they could use the NCAA’s rules to punish college players who wasted their draft picks by returning to college. The NCAA’s enforcement staff raised the pressure by requesting to interview Paxton.

Though Paxton had no legal obligation to talk to an investigator, NCAA Bylaw 10.1(j) specified that anything short of complete cooperation could be interpreted as unethical conduct, affecting his amateur status. Under its restitution rule, the NCAA had leverage to compel the University of Kentucky to ensure obedience.

As the 2010 season approached, Gary Henderson, the Kentucky coach, sorely wanted Paxton, one of Baseball America’s top-ranked players, to return. Rick Johnson, Andrew Oliver’s lawyer, filed for a declaratory judgment on Paxton’s behalf, arguing that the state constitution—plus the university’s code of student conduct—barred arbitrary discipline at the request of a third party. Kentucky courts deferred to the university, however, and Paxton was suspended from the team. "Due to the possibility of future penalties, including forfeiture of games," the university stated, it "could not put the other 32 players of the team and the entire UK 22-sport intercollegiate athletics department at risk by having James compete." The NCAA appraised the result with satisfaction. "When negotiations occur on behalf of student-athletes," Erik Christianson, the NCAA spokesperson, told The New York Times in reference to the Oliver case, "those negotiations indicate that the student-athlete intends to become a professional athlete and no longer remain an amateur."

Paxton was stranded. Not only could he not play for Kentucky, but his draft rights with the Blue Jays had lapsed for the year, meaning he could not play for any minor-league affiliate of Major League Baseball. Boras wrangled a holdover job for him in Texas with the independent Grand Prairie AirHogs, pitching against the Pensacola Pelicans and Wichita Wingnuts. Once projected to be a first-round draft pick, Paxton saw his stock plummet into the fourth round. He remained unsigned until late in spring training, when he signed with the Seattle Mariners and reported to their minor-league camp in Peoria, Arizona.

Yet another anecdote pulling on the heartstrings of the reader without anything that seems illogical or even unreasonable. Of course the University of Kentucky has a responsibility to the rest of their athletes (not to mention the reputation of the University at large) to abide by the rules of the NCAA.

"When you dream about playing in college," Joseph Agnew told me not long ago, "you don’t ever think about being in a lawsuit." Agnew, a student at Rice University in Houston, had been cut from the football team and had his scholarship revoked by Rice before his senior year, meaning that he faced at least $35,000 in tuition and other bills if he wanted to complete his degree in sociology. Bereft of his scholarship, he was flailing about for help when he discovered the National College Players Association, which claims 7,000 active members and seeks modest reforms such as safety guidelines and better death benefits for college athletes. Agnew was struck by the NCPA scholarship data on players from top Division I basketball teams, which showed that 22 percent were not renewed from 2008 to 2009—the same fate he had suffered.

I think were all in agreement that this practice should stop.

In October 2010, Agnew filed a class-action antitrust suit over the cancellation of his scholarship and to remove the cap on the total number of scholarships that can be awarded by NCAA schools. In his suit, Agnew did not claim the right to free tuition. He merely asked the federal court to strike down an NCAA rule, dating to 1973, that prohibited colleges and universities from offering any athletic scholarship longer than a one-year commitment, to be renewed or not, unilaterally, by the school—which in practice means that coaches get to decide each year whose scholarships to renew or cancel. (After the coach who had recruited Agnew had moved on to Tulsa, the new Rice coach switched Agnew’s scholarship to a recruit of his own.) Agnew argued that without the one-year rule, he would have been free to bargain with all eight colleges that had recruited him, and each college could have decided how long to guarantee his scholarship.

We have explored why there is a limit to the number of scholarships schools are allowed to issue.

Academic performance has always been difficult for the NCAA to address. Any detailed regulation would intrude upon the free choice of widely varying schools, and any academic standard broad enough to fit both MIT and Ole Miss would have little force. From time to time, a scandal will expose extreme lapses. In 1989, Dexter Manley, by then the famous "Secretary of Defense" for the NFL’s Washington Redskins, teared up before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Education, Arts, and Humanities, when admitting that he had been functionally illiterate in college.

Within big-time college athletic departments, the financial pressure to disregard obvious academic shortcomings and shortcuts is just too strong. In the 1980s, Jan Kemp, an English instructor at the University of Georgia, publicly alleged that university officials had demoted and then fired her because she refused to inflate grades in her remedial English courses. Documents showed that administrators replaced the grades she’d given athletes with higher ones, providing fake passing grades on one notable occasion to nine Bulldog football players who otherwise would have been ineligible to compete in the 1982 Sugar Bowl. (Georgia lost anyway, 24–20, to a University of Pittsburgh team led by the future Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino.) When Kemp filed a lawsuit against the university, she was publicly vilified as a troublemaker, but she persisted bravely in her testimony. Once, Kemp said, a supervisor demanding that she fix a grade had bellowed, "Who do you think is more important to this university, you or Dominique Wilkins?" (Wilkins was a star on the basketball team.) Traumatized, Kemp twice attempted suicide.

In trying to defend themselves, Georgia officials portrayed Kemp as naive about sports. "We have to compete on a level playing field," said Fred Davison, the university president. During the Kemp civil trial, in 1986, Hale Almand, Georgia’s defense lawyer, explained the university’s patronizing aspirations for its typical less-than-scholarly athlete. "We may not make a university student out of him," Almand told the court, "but if we can teach him to read and write, maybe he can work at the post office rather than as a garbage man when he gets through with his athletic career." This argument backfired with the jurors: finding in favor of Kemp, they rejected her polite request for $100,000, and awarded her $2.6 million in damages instead. (This was later reduced to $1.08 million.) Jan Kemp embodied what is ostensibly the NCAA’s reason for being—to enforce standards fairly and put studies above sports—but no one from the organization ever spoke up on her behalf.

The NCAA body charged with identifying violations of any of the Division I league rules, the Committee on Infractions, operates in the shadows. Josephine Potuto, a professor of law at the University of Nebraska and a longtime committee member who was then serving as its vice chair, told Congress in 2004 that one reason her group worked in secret was that it hoped to avoid a "media circus." The committee preferred to deliberate in private, she said, guiding member schools to punish themselves. "The enforcement process is cooperative, not adversarial," Potuto testified. The committee consisted of an elite coterie of judges, athletic directors, and authors of legal treatises. "The committee also is savvy about intercollegiate athletics," she added. "They cannot be conned."

In 2009, a series of unlikely circumstances peeled back the veil of secrecy to reveal NCAA procedures so contorted that even victims marveled at their comical wonder. The saga began in March of 2007, shortly after the Florida State Seminoles basketball team was knocked out of the NIT basketball tournament, which each spring invites the best teams not selected for the March Madness tournament. At an athletic-department study hall, Al Thornton, a star forward for the team, completed a sports-psychology quiz but then abandoned it without posting his written answers electronically by computer. Brenda Monk, an academic tutor for the Seminoles, says she noticed the error and asked a teammate to finish entering Thornton’s answers onscreen and hit "submit," as required for credit. The teammate complied, steaming silently, and then complained at the athletic office about getting stuck with clean-up chores for the superstar Thornton (who was soon to be selected by the Los Angeles Clippers in the first round of the NBA draft). Monk promptly resigned when questioned by FSU officials, saying her fatigue at the time could not excuse her asking the teammate to submit the answers to another student’s completed test.

Monk’s act of guileless responsibility set off a chain reaction. First, FSU had to give the NCAA preliminary notice of a confessed academic fraud. Second, because this would be its seventh major infraction case since 1968, FSU mounted a vigorous self-investigation to demonstrate compliance with NCAA academic rules. Third, interviews with 129 Seminoles athletes unleashed a nightmare of matter-of-fact replies about absentee professors who allowed group consultations and unlimited retakes of open-computer assignments and tests. Fourth, FSU suspended 61 of its athletes in 10 sports. Fifth, the infractions committee applied the byzantine NCAA bylaws to FSU’s violations. Sixth, one of the penalties announced in March of 2009 caused a howl of protest across the sports universe.

Cruelly, but typically, the NCAA concentrated public censure on powerless scapegoats. A dreaded "show cause" order rendered Brenda Monk, the tutor, effectively unhirable at any college in the United States. Cloaking an old-fashioned blackball in the stately language of law, the order gave notice that any school hiring Monk before a specified date in 2013 "shall, pursuant to the provisions of Bylaw 19.5.2.2(l), show cause why it should not be penalized if it does not restrict the former learning specialist [Monk] from having any contact with student-athletes." Today she works as an education supervisor at a prison in Florida.

It may be sad that any university wishing to employ Ms. Monk is required to take extra special precaution to be sure she is not involved with athletes, it is entirely reasonable. She has a history of being involved with an academic scandal involving athletes in the past. It’s entirely analogous to using a person’s credit score (a past track record of credit behavior) when making decisions related to extending credit to that individual.

Everything stands on the implicit presumption that preserving amateurism is necessary for the well-being of college athletes. But while amateurism—and the free labor it provides— (“free” my ass) may be necessary to the preservation of the NCAA, and perhaps to the profit margins of various interested corporations and educational institutions, what if it doesn’t benefit the athletes? What if it hurts them?

Italics mine

Maybe he does understand the true purpose of the NCAA after all. Not the BS public purpose the NCAA touts.

In what world does an opportunity to participate in a sport and attend college with a scholarship NOT benefit the athletes?

"Let’s start with the basic question," he said, noting that the NCAA claims that student-athletes have no property rights in their own athletic accomplishments. Yet, in order to be eligible to play, college athletes have to waive their rights to proceeds from any sales based on their athletic performance.

The end of this statement omits a crucial phrase. The complete statement should have been; “Yet, in order to be eligible to play, college athletes have to waive their rights to proceeds from any sales based on their athletic performance while participating in NCAA sanctioned events.” Nothing prevents former players from going out and marketing themselves for their own purposes independent of the NCAA.

Hausfeld said, the defendants in the Ed O’Bannon case have said in court filings that college athletes thereby transferred their promotional rights forever. He paused. "That’s ludicrous," he said. "Nobody assigns rights like that. Nobody can assert rights like that."

Yes they do. Routinely. An engineer patents an innovative process and those rights are retained for that patent by the company that engineer works for. That patent, like the likeness and performance of the athletes during their time as NCAA athletes belong to who they assign their rights to, either employer in the case of the engineer or NCAA in the case of the athlete.

That in no way limits the engineer from boasting on their resume that they were responsible for that patent. Nor does it prohibit the athlete from pointing to their performance during their time participating in the NCAA sanctioned events as evidence of ability.

University administrators, already besieged from all sides, do not want to even think about such questions. Most cringe at the thought of bargaining with athletes as a general manager does in professional sports, with untold effects on the budgets for coaches and every other sports item. "I would not want to be part of it," North Carolina Athletic Director Dick Baddour told me flatly. After 44 years at UNC, he could scarcely contemplate a world without amateur rules. "We would have to think long and hard," Baddour added gravely, "about whether this university would continue those sports at all."

There’s a surprise…oh wait.

If a significant band of football schools were to demonstrate that they could orchestrate a true national playoff, without the NCAA’s assistance, the association would be terrified—and with good reason. Because if the big sports colleges don’t need the NCAA to administer a national playoff in football, then they don’t need it to do so in basketball.

The NCAA already does not administer a football championship. In the past the NCAA did not sponsor a national playoff in basketball (NIT).

For all our queasiness about what would happen if some athletes were to get paid, there is a successful precedent for the professionalization of an amateur sports system: the Olympics. For years, Walter Byers waged war with the NCAA’s older and more powerful nemesis, the Amateur Athletic Union, which since 1894 had overseen U.S. Olympic athletes. Run in high-handed fashion, the AAU had infamously banned Jesse Owens for life in 1936—weeks after his four heroic gold medals punctured the Nazi claim of Aryan supremacy—because instead of using his sudden fame to tour and make money for the AAU at track meets across Europe, he came home early. In the early 1960s, the fights between the NCAA and the AAU over who should manage Olympic athletes become so bitter that President Kennedy called in General Douglas MacArthur to try to mediate a truce before the Tokyo Olympic Games.

Ultimately, Byers prevailed and effectively neutered the AAU. In November 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed the bipartisan Amateur Sports Act. Amateurism in the Olympics soon dissolved—and the world did not end. Athletes, granted a 20 percent voting stake on every Olympic sport’s governing body, tipped balances in the United States and then inexorably around the world. First in marathon races, then in tennis tournaments, players soon were allowed to accept prize money and keep their Olympic eligibility. Athletes profited from sponsorships and endorsements. The International Olympic Committee expunged the word amateur from its charter in 1986. Olympic officials, who had once disdained the NCAA for offering scholarships in exchange for athletic performance, came to welcome millionaire athletes from every quarter, while the NCAA still refused to let the pro Olympian Michael Phelps swim for his college team at Michigan.

The Olympics do not have any relationship with an educational institution of any kind. The Olympics have no such desire to limit the benefits their athletes receive because their eligibility is based on citizenship rather than being involved in an academic pursuit at a particular institution.

"Scholarship athletes are already paid," declared the Knight Commission members, "in the most meaningful way poss-ible: with a free education." This evasion by prominent educators severed my last reluctant, emotional tie with imposed amateurism. I found it worse than self-serving. It echoes masters who once claimed that heavenly salvation would outweigh earthly injustice to slaves. In the era when our college sports first arose, colonial powers were turning the whole world upside down to define their own interests as all-inclusive and benevolent. Just so, the NCAA calls it heinous exploitation to pay college athletes a fair portion of what they earn.

Yes, the Knight Commission statement is over the top with the proclamation that a scholarship is definitively THE best possible compensation, however that does not change the fact that the athletes are compensated.

Oh good, we can close this drivel filled article with once again likening NCAA athletics to slavery.

More to come as I slog further through the piece. Really there’s only so much blatant one-sidedness and gross misrepresentation that one can take before throwing the towel in on a particular article.

If slogging through the rest is required by this debate so be it.