Singla said that under Rascher’s model based off TV money, a Vanderbilt football player would receive $325,000 over five years, compared to $14,000 for a Memphis football player; and an Oregon State basketball player would get about $1 million, compared to $250,000 for an Idaho basketball player. Rascher said the conferences will pick a model that satisfies their needs, but also added he's uncertain what an injunction in this case would mean.
The NCAA’s argument: Better players will flock to the schools that pay more money.
You would have to be ignorant as fuck to believe that's not what goes on already. I'm not sure the NCAA has made a single good faith argument in this case so far.
I mean, you're telling me if they could, players would want to go to the biggest name school where they could get the best facilities and the most TV exposure?
I for one am shocked
This whole thing is about the NCAA not wanting to cut the players into the revenue pie, because that way more can go to athletic departments, or bowl 'executives' who draw middle six figures for overseeing one football game a year. The bigger schools/conferences are just realizing that giving the players a really tiny cut is preferable to totally destroying the current model.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Then Li proceeded to tear apart Staurowsky's qualifications.
Was she an economist? No. Was she a forensic accountant? No. Was she a lawyer? No. Had she ever negotiated a player contract in professional sports? No. Was she an expert on stadium financing? No. Had she ever run a Division I athletic department? No.
The diminutive Staurowsky, whose voice is even tinier than she is, shrank from the questions. She had struggled with the stage-managed queries asked by the plaintiff's side. Now her expertise was under attack by the opposition. Li kept pushing. For 40 solid minutes, Li made a case for why Staurowsky wasn't an expert without once challenging any of the alleged facts she had presented. The phone bit had to be coming soon. That had to be the hammer.
The jury would eat this stuff up. Except for one problem. There is no jury in O'Bannon v. NCAA. There is only Judge Claudia Wilken and the circuit court judges -- and possibly U.S. Supreme Court justices -- who will actually decide the case. And that's why, after the mouse roared, the NCAA's attorneys had to hang their heads. During another round of questions designed to batter her credentials, Staurowsky stopped Li and asked what any of this had to do with the case. Before Li could answer, Wilken chimed in to agree with Staurowsky. A jury might not have seen through the attempt to discredit the witness while leaving the facts unchallenged, but Wilken did.
That's the problem for Li and the other attorneys for the NCAA, who are presumably being paid far more than tuition, room and board to defend the business model of major college sports. They can only do so much. On Monday, the plaintiffs attacked the NCAA's very purpose, which sounds noble in theory but is rendered meaningless by lucrative TV deals, massive coaching contracts and luxurious facilities. Here is that purpose as outlined in the NCAA's Division I manual: "A basic purpose of this Association is to maintain intercollegiate athletics as an integral part of the educational program and the athlete as an integral part of the student body and, by so doing, retain a clear line of demarcation between intercollegiate athletics and professional sports." Li and his colleagues were tasked with defending the association from Staurowsky's attack because the interweaving of academics and athletics is essential to the NCAA's defense, even though no one on the NCAA side can explain exactly why allowing athletes to profit from their likenesses would harm their academic pursuits.
Isn't the NCAA bringing in a guy from Stanford to testify still? That one will be interesting cause Stanford is one of the few schools who''s academic standards (at least as far as I know) haven't been lowered and is graduating D1 players with bankable degrees.
Isn't the NCAA bringing in a guy from Stanford to testify still? That one will be interesting cause Stanford is one of the few schools who''s academic standards (at least as far as I know) haven't been lowered and is graduating D1 players with bankable degrees.
I've got a bridge to sell you. Every school lowers standards for football players. Some (including Stanford), actually try to make sure everyone graduates with degrees in a legitimate manner. But no, even Stanford looks the other way for questionable admits.
She wasn't done. Here's another passage: "I view these cases as a result of the entitlement attitude we've created in our revenue sports. We now have threatening s-a's (student athletes) -- many of whom, based on grad rates in the 80s and 90s, sucked a whole lot off the college athletics pipe -- and now want to buckle the system at the expense of today's s-a's."
What a horribly out of touch woman. Hope she realizes that every red cent of her 355k salary is covered by all those entitled jerks.
She wasn't done. Here's another passage: "I view these cases as a result of the entitlement attitude we've created in our revenue sports. We now have threatening s-a's (student athletes) -- many of whom, based on grad rates in the 80s and 90s, sucked a whole lot off the college athletics pipe -- and now want to buckle the system at the expense of today's s-a's."
What a horribly out of touch woman. Hope she realizes that every red cent of her 355k salary is covered by all those entitled jerks.
Honestly, she would have played decently well at a jury trial. There's a lot of prep work on the NCAA's side that was clearly geared for that. Again, Team O'Bannon getting a bench trial was a stroke of brilliance.
Still, the real damage wasn't her testimony itself, but that calling her as a witness opened Pandora's Email Inbox.
The trial is scheduled to end Friday, and Wilken told the players' and the NCAA's lawyers last week that she would issue her decision during the first few days of August. In any trial before a judge without a jury, it is difficult to determine which way the judge will go in her final decision, but Wilken did send a signal Friday during a discussion with lawyers.
Suggesting to the lawyers that she wished to hear final statements from them at the end of this week and written briefs by July 2, she said that she wanted them to address the issue known in antitrust trials as "less-restrictive alternatives."
Translation: The judge is hinting that she is not buying the NCAA's argument, and that they might want to start planning on figuring out how to pay players.
Also, Pierce has twopieces at Grantland worth reading.
In the end it doesn't even matter, since no matter how the judge rules, it's going to immediately be appealed.
In a legal sense, you're right - the NCAA will have an appeal to the Ninth before the ink is dry on the ruling.
But in a larger sense, the damage has been done - the emperor is clearly naked, and we all have gotten a glimpse of His Imperial Emmertness' scepter.
(Pardon me, I need to go bleach my brain.)
Up till now, the NCAA has been able to control the narrative to some degree. But for the first time, they had to stand before a court of law and make an actual argument defending their position.
And they made it clear that they had nothing.
That will have repercussions. The NCAA has been wounded. And people will not forget that.
I imagine that the sponsors are ambivalent as to who wins? Or are they clearly on one side or the other?
Their biggest concern is to get this settled. But I think that the NCAA model never made them all that terribly comfortable - EA has said that they would have much preferred a system where there was clear compensation on likeness, allowing them to use the players properly.
I imagine that the sponsors are ambivalent as to who wins? Or are they clearly on one side or the other?
Honestly they probably don't care they already are paying their money what happens to it once its paid they don't really have much care about. About the only thing they would care about is it would give them some added revenue streams of working directly with athletes so for them it probably would be a plus.
I imagine that the sponsors are ambivalent as to who wins? Or are they clearly on one side or the other?
Their biggest concern is to get this settled. But I think that the NCAA model never made them all that terribly comfortable - EA has said that they would have much preferred a system where there was clear compensation on likeness, allowing them to use the players properly.
Yup this whole thing was clearly built on a house of cards that made a lot of the sponsors very nervous. Once it finally shakes out all involved will probably be happier as it will allow them to more clearly market and make games.
I particularly love from today's testimonies, the NCAA trotted out their Director of Membership and Academic Affairs. In the cross, she was being asked about any investigation into UNC's fake classes was all "I don't know, that's not my department." How the flying fuck does a member school offering fake classes not fall under "Academic Affairs"?
• We must guarantee the four-year scholarships that we offer. If a student-athlete is no longer able to compete, for whatever reason, there should be zero impact on our commitment as universities to deliver an undergraduate education. We want our students to graduate.
• If a student-athlete leaves for a pro career before graduating, the guarantee of a scholarship remains firm. Whether a professional career materializes, and regardless of its length, we will honor a student's scholarship when his or her playing days are over. Again, we want students to graduate.
• We must review our rules and provide improved, consistent medical insurance for student-athletes. We have an obligation to protect their health and well-being in return for the physical demands placed upon them.
• We must do whatever it takes to ensure that student-athlete scholarships cover the full cost of a college education, as defined by the federal government. That definition is intended to cover what it actually costs to attend college.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
I wouldn't say that Delany is dumb. Yes, there are things he wants to do that are unpopular, but he is always honest about where he stands, which frankly is refreshing. He has a very strict idea about what a Student Athlete should be, believes that the emphasis should be on the student part, and that what they are today does not fit that definition. So, he's going to tell everyone exactly that, whether that screws over the NCAA or not.
Actually, he's probably happier if it does screw over the NCAA, because as the NCAA is today, he has no chance of pushing any of his ideas of what a Student Athlete should be through. If things get shaken up enough, he may be able to get his ideas implemented.
Maryland and Rutgers are in the Big Ten. I rest my case.
And Judge Wilken already ruled in my favor.
Except that's not dumb. By bringing those two schools in, he's able to force the Big Ten Network into cable packages across the Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Washington DC areas. That's going to be millions of dollars of additional revenue each year.
I wouldn't say that Delany is dumb. Yes, there are things he wants to do that are unpopular, but he is always honest about where he stands, which frankly is refreshing. He has a very strict idea about what a Student Athlete should be, believes that the emphasis should be on the student part, and that what they are today does not fit that definition. So, he's going to tell everyone exactly that, whether that screws over the NCAA or not.
Actually, he's probably happier if it does screw over the NCAA, because as the NCAA is today, he has no chance of pushing any of his ideas of what a Student Athlete should be through. If things get shaken up enough, he may be able to get his ideas implemented.
Except that the term "student athlete" is, was, and will forever be a con - it was created specifically to allow colleges to avoid any liability when athletes were injured on the field. So I could care less about his false piety (which seems to have appeared coincidentally with the threat of his conference being declared an illegal wage-fixing cartel.)
Maryland and Rutgers are in the Big Ten. I rest my case.
And Judge Wilken already ruled in my favor.
Except that's not dumb. By bringing those two schools in, he's able to force the Big Ten Network into cable packages across the Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Washington DC areas. That's going to be millions of dollars of additional revenue each year.
And contradicts your argument that he's looking out for the players. Delaney thinks that he can put on the table an offer of "well, we'll start using vasoline" now.
The bottom line is that, as successful as the University of Texas has been, as good as this baseball team is, we average less than one [new] Major League Baseball player a year,” Patterson said. “I’m talking about guys that just have a cup of coffee [in the major leagues]. We average less than four professional football players a year making their way into the NFL. So out of all those student athletes, we’re talking about five to 10 kids a year that would truly benefit the most [from an open-market system]. And we’re talking about professional careers that span four years or less [on average]. Then they’ve got a half-century of their life, at least, where they’ve got to figure out how to work in the world.
“So we spend all of this time worrying about a guy or two who thinks he’s losing all of this money over his likeness? It doesn’t make any sense.”
[...]
“We’re spending all of this time talking about one-half of 1 percent of our student athletes [who have the power to market their likeness]. Not the 99.5 percent of student athletes who are supported by these programs. What we’re giving our student athletes, in terms of academic, athletic, financial aid, support for room and board, training, mentoring, student services, tutoring, is more than the average household income. And for some of our teams, it’s pushing into $70,000 a year per student athlete, and pushes into the top third of household incomes. Tell me one guy whose likeness is worth more than the average household income. … There was one guy last year. [Patterson holds his hands up and rubs his fingers together like Johnny Manziel.]
“It’s absolutely agents and trial lawyers that are the whole reason we’re talking about this. You’ve got guys like Jay Bilas out there making the claim that scholarships aren’t worth anything, and nobody says anything to discredit that. … So who is saying with any rationality or any fact that student athletes on a full ride aren’t getting something? They’re just flat-out wrong and they’re liars. And they’re doing the bidding of agents and trial lawyers. The longer everybody waddles around acting like it’s not about agents and trial lawyers, the more silliness we’re going to have out there.”
[...]
“But the football coach generates the vast majority of the revenue. You’re compensating the coach based on the marketplace. Only football and men’s basketball, and just a few schools in baseball and ice hockey, can make money. Everything else operates at a deficit. So what is the model that’s going to replace that? If you take all of the money football generates and put it back into football, what’s going to pay for everything else?
“The point of paying a football coach based on the market is the hope that he generates enough revenue to support the rest of the athletic department. Now, people make mistakes on hires. But if you have a successful coach and a successful football program, you can support scores of teams. If you can’t, what happens? The same thing that happened at Arizona State before I got there. You start whacking sports. Same thing happened at Maryland. Same thing happened at Berkeley. Sports are getting whacked and that’s bad. The other way you balance the budget — you cut the number of football scholarships. You want to go down that road?"
Agents and trial lawyers! Agents and trial lawyers! Agents and trial lawyers! Agents and trial lawyers! Agents and trial lawyers! Agents and trial lawyers!
Ahem...
Just from the excerpts, he is saying:
1) Colleges have so few really good athletes who'll make any money so the rest can go screw.
2) If you're participating in one of their programs that ends up being used in a video game or some other extra-scholastic form to generate money for the school, your image/likeness ain't worth shit unless you're one of the good athletes anyway.
3) Coaches are the reason why schools make millions and millions. And not, say, huge TV network deals, exclusive equipment deals, licensing fees for sale of school branded gear, or any other number of things.
Got that? And the only reason why these shlubs they've bent over backwards to give that $70,000 scholarship want a piece of the pie when the schools profit on their face and efforts is agents and trial lawyers. No word on overall graduation rates or how many times they've cancelled scholarships because kids got injured or somehow didn't play well enough to be part of a 120+ member traveling squad.
Maryland and Rutgers are in the Big Ten. I rest my case.
And Judge Wilken already ruled in my favor.
Except that's not dumb. By bringing those two schools in, he's able to force the Big Ten Network into cable packages across the Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Washington DC areas. That's going to be millions of dollars of additional revenue each year.
Wooo revenue short term. Makes the product worse long term and increasingly indistinguishable from the NFL, except crappier. The traditions/regionalism IS THE PRODUCT.
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Yes, which is why I'm less interested. Also why Michigan's failing miserably to sell tickets this year, part of a national trend. Friggin' Alabama has tons of student no shows. There are too many shit games because of short term monetary gains.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Tradition died when they formed the BCS. The moment they did that, they killed all the minor/regional bowls. Now, more than ever, people insist they're crap and not worth watching anyway. We're edging closer and closer to super conferences. Teams that had longstanding rivals are jumping to conferences with zero regard to tradition. We've finally gotten a playoff, and there is simply no way a four team playoff will work any better.
And by doing so, they've even further harmed the so-called vaunted traditions of bowl games. And the Big'Un conference is one of the prime violators even before Maryland and Rutgers. They cling desperately to their increasingly inaccurate conference name. And tried so hard to make Michigan/Ohio State a viable result for a Conference Championship. To do so, they had to split the conference into non-geographic regions (admittedly not the worst thing) with the shittiest names they could think of. Then, abandoned it the moment they added two new teams because it was so ridiculous on the face of it.
And hey, the PAC-12 isn't innocent in any of this. They tried to raid the Big Not-12 of four of their teams and become the first super conference.
And in the end, we'll still shit on mid-majors for not being good enough except to raid the teams that have managed to improve and compete.
It was always about the money. It was never about fans, student or otherwise. And it got its start because people wanted a definitive national champion and the people in charge had no interest in a real playoff system. All the while, sports networks paid for the rights to televise it all. We cannot go back. Ever.
Yes, which is why I'm less interested. Also why Michigan's failing miserably to sell tickets this year, part of a national trend. Friggin' Alabama has tons of student no shows. There are too many shit games because of short term monetary gains.
Ticket sales are down because most schools have jacked the price up over the last 5 years by absurd amounts. Penn State took notice and lowered them across the board this year. Unsurprisingly, sales skyrocketed. Student no shows were a thing back in 2010 for Alabama too. In the week prior to the game, Saban specifically asked the student section to show up on time against PSU. Student apathy has always been a thing. It will continue to always be a thing. People generally forget it or don't notice, or in most stadiums it's not as apparently because most of the rest isn't sold out, but it's not some mythical problem that suddenly appeared.
1) Colleges have so few really good athletes who'll make any money so the rest can go screw.
And they keep serving up whoppers for the plaintiffs. If this is the best they can come up with, the NCAA is going to get burned at every court they drag this to.
The minor bowls were never worth anything. The ones that were useful were:
Rose, Cotton, Sugar, Orange. Some of the others were sometimes good games (Holiday, the New Year's Day Big Ten/SEC games) but only those four actually mattered. It's not the minor bowls that I'm sad we're losing.
It's games like Texas/A&M or Oklahoma/Nebraska or Michigan/Notre Dame.
As for ticket sales, yes it's partially price increases, but they're diluting the product. Totally random example:
Appalachian State
Miami (Ohio)
Utah (THE HEADLINER!)
Minnesota
PSU (OK, the actual headliner)
Indiana
Maryland
That's Michigan's home schedule. The best team on it is... I mean, maybe PSU is good, but expectations are moderately above average Big Ten team. No rivals at home at all.
We now play Wisconsin or Iowa every like six years. It's awful.
Anyway, the point remains that Delany sucks.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
They kind of have a point, though. If you're an athlete that's NOT a recognizable starter on the football or basketball teams? The value of your scholarship is probably a great deal in terms of compensation vs. the revenue you generate.
A handful of athletes get underpaid, and an even smaller subset get royally, royally fucked over. Honestly, I get of prefer that to the masses of athletes getting nothing while Johnny Football gets to do blow off a hooker's ass in his private limo on the way to practice.
Maybe, but even scrubs featured in a Madden game get compensated for their appearance.
And if part of the problem is too many worthless scholarships have been handed out, the answer might be 'give out fewer scholarships' rather than 'sucks to be you'. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily want to deprive somebody of a potential scholarship, but does a team really need 100+ members?
Maybe, but even scrubs featured in a Madden game get compensated for their appearance.
And if part of the problem is too many worthless scholarships have been handed out, the answer might be 'give out fewer scholarships' rather than 'sucks to be you'. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily want to deprive somebody of a potential scholarship, but does a team really need 100+ members?
I'd say it's about right, actually given specialization/rates of injury/attrition. Could maybe cut to 75 scholarships without it becoming too ridiculous.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Maybe, but even scrubs featured in a Madden game get compensated for their appearance.
And if part of the problem is too many worthless scholarships have been handed out, the answer might be 'give out fewer scholarships' rather than 'sucks to be you'. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily want to deprive somebody of a potential scholarship, but does a team really need 100+ members?
Actually, it's 85 scholarships for football, and it's pretty much the right amount. If anything, doing down to 75 might be a little too low. As PSU has learned, especially last season (where we clocked in at 72 I think, after awarding 8 walk on seniors scholarships), depth is important. There were games where we had all three linebackers (one of which was a hybrid safety) playing hurt because there just wasn't anyone else to play and it was a road game, so all of the walk ons didn't get to travel.
Posts
I mean, you're telling me if they could, players would want to go to the biggest name school where they could get the best facilities and the most TV exposure?
I for one am shocked
This whole thing is about the NCAA not wanting to cut the players into the revenue pie, because that way more can go to athletic departments, or bowl 'executives' who draw middle six figures for overseeing one football game a year. The bigger schools/conferences are just realizing that giving the players a really tiny cut is preferable to totally destroying the current model.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Because it's an all or nothing situation.
I've got a bridge to sell you. Every school lowers standards for football players. Some (including Stanford), actually try to make sure everyone graduates with degrees in a legitimate manner. But no, even Stanford looks the other way for questionable admits.
What a horribly out of touch woman. Hope she realizes that every red cent of her 355k salary is covered by all those entitled jerks.
Honestly, she would have played decently well at a jury trial. There's a lot of prep work on the NCAA's side that was clearly geared for that. Again, Team O'Bannon getting a bench trial was a stroke of brilliance.
Still, the real damage wasn't her testimony itself, but that calling her as a witness opened Pandora's Email Inbox.
Translation: The judge is hinting that she is not buying the NCAA's argument, and that they might want to start planning on figuring out how to pay players.
Also, Pierce has two pieces at Grantland worth reading.
In a legal sense, you're right - the NCAA will have an appeal to the Ninth before the ink is dry on the ruling.
But in a larger sense, the damage has been done - the emperor is clearly naked, and we all have gotten a glimpse of His Imperial Emmertness' scepter.
(Pardon me, I need to go bleach my brain.)
Up till now, the NCAA has been able to control the narrative to some degree. But for the first time, they had to stand before a court of law and make an actual argument defending their position.
And they made it clear that they had nothing.
That will have repercussions. The NCAA has been wounded. And people will not forget that.
Their biggest concern is to get this settled. But I think that the NCAA model never made them all that terribly comfortable - EA has said that they would have much preferred a system where there was clear compensation on likeness, allowing them to use the players properly.
Honestly they probably don't care they already are paying their money what happens to it once its paid they don't really have much care about. About the only thing they would care about is it would give them some added revenue streams of working directly with athletes so for them it probably would be a plus.
Yup this whole thing was clearly built on a house of cards that made a lot of the sponsors very nervous. Once it finally shakes out all involved will probably be happier as it will allow them to more clearly market and make games.
He's probably looking ahead to Kessler.
Actually, he's probably happier if it does screw over the NCAA, because as the NCAA is today, he has no chance of pushing any of his ideas of what a Student Athlete should be through. If things get shaken up enough, he may be able to get his ideas implemented.
Maryland and Rutgers are in the Big Ten. I rest my case.
And Judge Wilken already ruled in my favor.
Except that's not dumb. By bringing those two schools in, he's able to force the Big Ten Network into cable packages across the Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Washington DC areas. That's going to be millions of dollars of additional revenue each year.
Except that the term "student athlete" is, was, and will forever be a con - it was created specifically to allow colleges to avoid any liability when athletes were injured on the field. So I could care less about his false piety (which seems to have appeared coincidentally with the threat of his conference being declared an illegal wage-fixing cartel.)
And contradicts your argument that he's looking out for the players. Delaney thinks that he can put on the table an offer of "well, we'll start using vasoline" now.
It's much, much too late for that.
Agents and trial lawyers! Agents and trial lawyers! Agents and trial lawyers! Agents and trial lawyers! Agents and trial lawyers! Agents and trial lawyers!
Ahem...
Just from the excerpts, he is saying:
1) Colleges have so few really good athletes who'll make any money so the rest can go screw.
2) If you're participating in one of their programs that ends up being used in a video game or some other extra-scholastic form to generate money for the school, your image/likeness ain't worth shit unless you're one of the good athletes anyway.
3) Coaches are the reason why schools make millions and millions. And not, say, huge TV network deals, exclusive equipment deals, licensing fees for sale of school branded gear, or any other number of things.
Got that? And the only reason why these shlubs they've bent over backwards to give that $70,000 scholarship want a piece of the pie when the schools profit on their face and efforts is agents and trial lawyers. No word on overall graduation rates or how many times they've cancelled scholarships because kids got injured or somehow didn't play well enough to be part of a 120+ member traveling squad.
Hey, Steve... Fuck you!
Wooo revenue short term. Makes the product worse long term and increasingly indistinguishable from the NFL, except crappier. The traditions/regionalism IS THE PRODUCT.
Not anymore. Haven't you been paying attention?
Yes, which is why I'm less interested. Also why Michigan's failing miserably to sell tickets this year, part of a national trend. Friggin' Alabama has tons of student no shows. There are too many shit games because of short term monetary gains.
And by doing so, they've even further harmed the so-called vaunted traditions of bowl games. And the Big'Un conference is one of the prime violators even before Maryland and Rutgers. They cling desperately to their increasingly inaccurate conference name. And tried so hard to make Michigan/Ohio State a viable result for a Conference Championship. To do so, they had to split the conference into non-geographic regions (admittedly not the worst thing) with the shittiest names they could think of. Then, abandoned it the moment they added two new teams because it was so ridiculous on the face of it.
And hey, the PAC-12 isn't innocent in any of this. They tried to raid the Big Not-12 of four of their teams and become the first super conference.
And in the end, we'll still shit on mid-majors for not being good enough except to raid the teams that have managed to improve and compete.
It was always about the money. It was never about fans, student or otherwise. And it got its start because people wanted a definitive national champion and the people in charge had no interest in a real playoff system. All the while, sports networks paid for the rights to televise it all. We cannot go back. Ever.
Ticket sales are down because most schools have jacked the price up over the last 5 years by absurd amounts. Penn State took notice and lowered them across the board this year. Unsurprisingly, sales skyrocketed. Student no shows were a thing back in 2010 for Alabama too. In the week prior to the game, Saban specifically asked the student section to show up on time against PSU. Student apathy has always been a thing. It will continue to always be a thing. People generally forget it or don't notice, or in most stadiums it's not as apparently because most of the rest isn't sold out, but it's not some mythical problem that suddenly appeared.
And they keep serving up whoppers for the plaintiffs. If this is the best they can come up with, the NCAA is going to get burned at every court they drag this to.
Rose, Cotton, Sugar, Orange. Some of the others were sometimes good games (Holiday, the New Year's Day Big Ten/SEC games) but only those four actually mattered. It's not the minor bowls that I'm sad we're losing.
It's games like Texas/A&M or Oklahoma/Nebraska or Michigan/Notre Dame.
As for ticket sales, yes it's partially price increases, but they're diluting the product. Totally random example:
Appalachian State
Miami (Ohio)
Utah (THE HEADLINER!)
Minnesota
PSU (OK, the actual headliner)
Indiana
Maryland
That's Michigan's home schedule. The best team on it is... I mean, maybe PSU is good, but expectations are moderately above average Big Ten team. No rivals at home at all.
We now play Wisconsin or Iowa every like six years. It's awful.
Anyway, the point remains that Delany sucks.
A handful of athletes get underpaid, and an even smaller subset get royally, royally fucked over. Honestly, I get of prefer that to the masses of athletes getting nothing while Johnny Football gets to do blow off a hooker's ass in his private limo on the way to practice.
And if part of the problem is too many worthless scholarships have been handed out, the answer might be 'give out fewer scholarships' rather than 'sucks to be you'. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily want to deprive somebody of a potential scholarship, but does a team really need 100+ members?
I'd say it's about right, actually given specialization/rates of injury/attrition. Could maybe cut to 75 scholarships without it becoming too ridiculous.
Actually, it's 85 scholarships for football, and it's pretty much the right amount. If anything, doing down to 75 might be a little too low. As PSU has learned, especially last season (where we clocked in at 72 I think, after awarding 8 walk on seniors scholarships), depth is important. There were games where we had all three linebackers (one of which was a hybrid safety) playing hurt because there just wasn't anyone else to play and it was a road game, so all of the walk ons didn't get to travel.