Nacita, a backup who rushed for three touchdowns last season, walked on to the Baylor program in the summer of 2014 after being homeless for a year.
"A few months before enrolling, a close family friend approached me and said they didn't want me sleeping on floors and wondering how I was going to eat the next meal," Nacita wrote on his
@Salsa_Nacho Twitter account, "so they insisted on putting me in an apartment and helping out with those living expenses.
"Because I accepted that offer instead of choosing to be homeless, I am no longer eligible to play football and pursue my dream. I had no idea I was breaking any rules, but I respect the decision of the NCAA."
Nacita, a native of Bakersfield, California, had transferred from Cornell but was unable to enroll in 2013. He lived homeless for the next year and took online community college courses at a library while sleeping on the floor at friends' apartments. He earned first-team Academic All-Big 12 honors in his first year at Baylor.
Nacita did not participate in the Bears' first spring practice on Tuesday.
"Silas Nacita will not be a part of the football program moving forward due to rules violations that impact his eligibility," Baylor athletic director Ian McCaw said in a statement released by the school. "We appreciate his contributions to Baylor football and wish him well as he completes his studies."
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The folks at LGM also detail why defending the NCAA is a fool's errand. One excellent point gets made (and it explains why Kessler has the fuckers dead to rights):
FUCK YOU NCAA
FUCKITY FUCKING DICKMUNCHING FUCKS
Because I'm at that point now where anybody opposing actual compensation for players is a dipshit. It's just not a defensible position anymore.
Right. That's why it's a dipshit position. The amateur student-athlete is a myth, has been for a good long time (if it was ever a thing). So either you realize that, and don't want them to be paid anyway (which makes you a dipshit) or you fail to understand that (yet still want to speak out on the issue, so dipshit).
Like I said, triangulation is a better explanation, since he's basically saying "gee willickers I think money would totally ruin the game, but it's kinda odd that those coaches and NCAA suits and sponsors throw so much money around..." It's a nice middle of the road position where you totally think coaches and staff are overpaid, but players shouldn't be paid. But...that's absolutely irrelevant. Coach pay ain't going down.
And it's funny that he mentions a one-and-done athlete as some kind of example...yes, it would be totally sad if the bidding war had begun an entire year earlier, instead of forcing him to play for a single season uncompensated, and unprotected in case of injury. That would be awful, and totally undermine the integrity of the game. Or something. Fucking stupid.
The real fucking answer to one and done is make basketball and football like Hockey and baseball, where the draft is out of high school and doesn't kill their eligibility. But the NFL would never go for that so it won't happen.
This is a misleading version of what he said.
"Obama said in an interview released Saturday that what frustrates him, though, is college coaches, athletic directors and the NCAA making huge amounts of money while an athlete is banished for getting a tattoo or free use of a car.
"That's not fair," Obama told The Huffington Post in response to a question about whether college athletes should be compensated because they are money-makers for the NCAA, television stations and advertisers."
The second paragraph makes it sound like Obama is saying "That's not fair" in answer to the question of whether college athletes should be compensated. In actuality, the whole section of the interview is in response to that question, and the "That's not fair" refers to the sentence beforehand.
Better to go to the full transcript on these things:
At this point the interview switches to a different topic. So I would say that even if Obama isn't coming out for paying the athletes, he's still advocating for a better situation than they have now (guaranteed scholarships and medical coverage, relaxed rules about outside compensation).
he's basically agreed with 95% of critics' position there, stopping short only of saying that NCAA players ought to be able to draw a salary. While I don't think a 'bidding war' for anthony davis et al would 'ruin the sense of college sports,' it's hardly some retrograde position he's taking.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Kentucky's dorm scam is amazing.
So if a given football team has, say, five blue chip players and twenty people making grad-student money (25K a year subsidy), they'd be paying out $1MM/year, which would be more than 10% of even very profitable, competitive teams profits. Obviously, teams that aren't very competitive won't be paying nearly as much, but even paying their few scholarship players a grad-student stipend would put them much further into the red.
This is more of a practical issue with compensation than an argument against it in theory, I guess.
EDIT: The money given for compensation basically assumes that you can selectively compensate players (much like you can selectively offer scholarships), and teams won't be required to compensate all players, since there's obviously a big gap (legally and theoretically) between allowing you to pay college athletes and making college athlete a job with guaranteed payouts. I'm also probably lowballing the amount of pay a top tier university would be putting out simply because I'm assuming they only recruit like six compensatable prospects a year.
Despite that article's conclusions, I have the feeling being a non-athlete in that dorm would be a very mixed blessing.
Not even close
What would happen is that spending would shift from fancy dorms/facilities (like the above) and from crazy fucking expensive coaches to players. At the moment all the players salary essentially goes into coaches, facilities, and recruiting efforts. All that would change is that much of that money would shift to players
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It would have to be done the same way the pros do it - through a negotiated labor agreement. Which leads to one of the more hilarious aspects of this - state schools in states where state employee unions are illegal would very quickly find themselves at a disadvantage in recruiting because of this.
Would those student employees actually need to be unionized? Couldn't the CBA simply require all organizations participating in sanctioned competitons to abide by the cap?
I disagree, fancy-pants dorms and facilities probably wouldn't be subject to the cap, so what would probably happen is that the perks (and the insane coach salaries) would stay in place, and players' salaries would be an additional cost that's carved out of the money that should be going to that whole education thing that universities are supposed to be doing.
But every players union would if it could abolish caps.
And an industry wide union like the various players associations are the only reason caps are legal at all. Or in the NCAA case, some legal fiction built around the nobility of the cap being 0.
If players could receive direct compensation, the other perks would matter less though. They wouldn't go away entirely, but it would be better.
And direct salary to athletes wouldn't even need to be huge. Just eliminate the other regs. Let the boosters give them range rovers to drive around, let them get all the free tattoos they please, and most importantly let them cut their own licensing deals and get paid for appearances. It might actually reduce some salary pressure on the institution if a big name player can take in thousands or more from other sources. Sources (like apparel endorsements) that may exist regardless of where they play.
At least as long as they stay in a power conference. Which means it will create a divide of haves and have nots among schools. And by "create" I mean "change absolutely nothing" because is anybody still pretending that when West Podunk plays Alabama or whatever it's anything but the latter padding their stats? The line of competitiveness goes deeper in basketball, but not all the way down.
(Is Ball State a competitive school? I forget.)
Fucking Brady Hoke.
Or a school could allow boosters to build the dorm. Or allow third party advertisers or partners to build it. Or put them up in apartments. Once you remove all the silly restrictions in place now, all kinds of options open up. But that first requires us to admit that the major programs don't consist of students who happen to have a passion for sports, but rather that many are there specifically to compete. It's a semi-pro league loosely affiliated with schools.
And the school can save money on bogus Swahili programs, too.
Dear ESPN:
Please fire your sports business reporter. It's clear that he knows nothing of either aspect of his job.
Edit: ah, read the link. Said it better than I could. And this is again why I no longer see controversy here, merely right and stupid.
some level of 'perks' would always be involved in the recruiting process (I mean, would you rather go to school in a big city, somewhere with warm beaches, or in oklahoma?) but they would become a secondary concern compared to salary
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Yes clearly they have no value thus if they did not show up to play at all clearly their uniforms would go out and shoot the balls just as well with no players wearing them.
Athletic directors would just raise ticket prices and then blame fans when they hit the point where the market won't bear the cost.
Or maybe that's just Dave fucking Brandon.
Fixing the utterly criminal eligibility rules would destroy the "ol' ball coach" model so prevalent in the college game, yet non-existent in the pros.
It depends on whether there's someone else sitting on the bench who could easily replace you. To have significant value, you need to bring something to the field that no other available player can, or have no one else who is willing to work for fewer benefits than you.
And considering that there are approximately a fuck load of decent competitive basketball teams, this is probably accurate (kind of) there. It's probably perfectly accurate in, say, women's field hockey where the better player may give you a much better chance of winning but raises the dollar value of the entertainment your team provides by $0 since you don't get a TV deal either way.
That's the big problem, to me. For the vast majority of athletes, a free college education is probably overvaluing the worth of their skills. So if you want to have a 'pay for play' system, it can't be built entirely around the edge cases like a Tebow who misses out on millions in endorsements and salary packing a stadium.
Personally, I favor ending the eligibility fuckmuppetry and allowing transfers, endorsement deals and sponsorships, and full cost of living scholarships over pay for play. But the current system is transparently bullshit in a lot of ways.
So, here's the thing - McNair is what I would consider to be one of the three major legal threats to the NCAA currently (the other two being O'Bannon and Kessler.) And it is that much of a threat because of what he was demanding to be put in the public record, which would demonstrate that the NCAA basically started from the position of guilt, and then did everything to work backwards from there. With everything that was revealed (and the NCAA has been fighting for years to keep this under wraps) as well as the utter surrender to Penn State, the enforcement division is pretty much dead in the water when it comes to institutional enforcement.
I fully expect that USC will be demanding that the NCAA restore the vacated wins and championships at this point. I also have the suspicion that they will try to fight it, but will concede once the legal ramifications are pointed out (namely that USC could very well get some significant damages from a trial.)