2020 College Football Thread

Mack's been on the forefront of getting players paid, his players almost universally love him (old man that he is), and I imagine they think this is hilarious.

Cringe?

 

Will UT finally be good. I mean we must have richer alumni than Alabama.

 

Schools in big markets are going to use this to their advantage it seems. UCLA, UH, USC, Miami etc all stand to benefit. Particularly at schools that are identified publicly really closely with the market they play within.

 

There's two types of programs that stand to benefit the most.

1) Bluebloods/national brands

2) Big schools in smaller conferences

As far as group 2 goes, it stands to reason this would boost schools like UH, Cinci, UCF, etc. The gap between those large metro schools and the smaller ones and privates should grow because of this.

 

It seems like a matter of time before Nike offers every 5* in the country $100,000 if they go to Oregon. Small schools are going to be completely left behind.

But beyond that huge issue, I think there's two other issues here. With pro leagues, you have unions providing financial advising services and their members have at least been away from home (playing in college or overseas or whatnot) for some period and developed adult life skills. Here, you're giving loads of money to people who've never even had to provide basics for themselves before let alone develop financial management skills, and they don't have a union helping them. A majority of lotto winners go broke and a decent share of pro athletes do (or did before these recent crazy salary bumps over the last decade) for these reasons. I can't imagine it's going to end well for these players.

Second issue - in the pros, players have agents handling their endorsements. Here, they are going to be managing themselves. So how much focus does that take and how much of these kids' time is going to become focused on generating publicity/attention to generate income instead of getting better at their sport? It just seems like we're dumping way more things on them consuming their time than we even do for pro athletes.

 

I agree with the premise of this but it's not like having 0 dollars instead of this is a great alternative.

I will agree there is gonna be some divisions among teammates when one starts doing better endorsement wise than the others so having a strong staff to nip some of this in the bud is gonna separate a lot of teams.

teens are already profiting off of branding so why should playing football at a high level mean you cannot?

I probably would have liked the players not being able to use the colleges in their branding to make it about them.

It's definitely gonna be messy and some teams are gonna be ripped apart by infighting due to jealousy and envy.

I can see some teams being knocked off the perch and some teams coming out of nowhere once they get a handle on all of this.

 

Oh absolutely - I'm not arguing against their ability to make money. And really, I believe people have the right to be stupid with their money too, so if they blow all their money, that's their right.

I just think it's going to be more harmful than helpful in the longrun, if someone isn't providing financial education/training/support along the way. I think these players may end up worse off in 5-10 years if they get a big windfall now, blow all of it, and then have to get regular jobs and can't adjust properly as a result. It's silly that it's true and it's pretty shitty to tell a kid "you'd be better off without that $50k", but we see it all the time with lottery winners whose lives end up going off a cliff.

My ideal solution would for schools to provide the proper guidance or force them to take financial management classes as part of their scholarship (no idea if this is even allowed). But barring some type of guidance, I just feel like the system is not designed to promote long-term success and you're going to have a lot of lives wrecked in the end.

 

You’re naive if you think this hasn’t been going on for awhile at big programs for the best players/recruits… just under the table.

When big-time college sports became a legitimate ‘professional’ league in terms of advertising dollars, merchandise revenue, TV deals, corporate sponsorship… the ‘student-athlete getting the value of an education’ concept would only go so far.

My guess is that the best players still manage to shine. The middle-tier guys (who would probably end up overseas for basketball or late round/UDFA for football) are the ones that may lose out on drive/motivation… but the corporate money-making machine of college sports helped spur these happenings.

 

i was thinking about this the other day. I’m unaware of any sort of collective bargaining process that would happen here. It seems really clunky with a ton of unintended consequences. I’m not saying the ruling was wrong by saying that.

 

This is where I'm at. Not saying it's wrong for them to make money, but...

 

I understand but I don't really thinking having money and then losing it will wreck lives, yes it will happen but I think those people where probably gonna have issues in life anyway.

I think it will be a consistent net positive with some outliers.

Now I do think it will negatively affect some players who will ruin there professional opportunities because they get caught up in trying to maximize the earning potential in college and will not buy into the team concept or not put the full energy in getting better.

 

This is what they wanted, let them sink or swim.

I could care less, I just hope the quality of college sports doesn't suffer. All that really has happened is the baseline for college sports has changed.

 

What happens if he sucks and get benched?

 

The same thing that happens when any other athlete sucks and gets benched.