And the Title IX folks will be on the colleges like white on rice, demanding that all players be paid the same amount. A lot of people are going to be either greatly overpaid or underpaid.
The answer is for the Power 5 conferences to form their own organization separate from the NCAA for the revenue sports. Schools with D2 or no football but good basketball like The Big East, Atlantic 10 and others could be a part of it for hoops only. For sports like golf, soccer, track and field or volleyball they would remain in the NCAA.
That's exactly what I'm suggesting. If the NBA wants to use the colleges for a developmental league, they need to pay for it. The only reason that won't fly is because the NCAA is a farce organization that only pretends to represent the best interests of the student athletes. Dale Brown was right when he called the NCAA a bunch of Gestapo bastards.
The NBA has it's D-league now, and that just simply needs to be expanded, much like baseball's minor league system. Any player who is the equivalent of a one and doner, who really isn't interested in an education or the perks of college ball, goes straight from HS to D-league. Any player who signs with a college then needs to honor a commitment to play there for a tenure, 2, 3, 4 years; whatever is agreed upon in their scholarship contract. College basketball would once again be an amateur sport with players truly giving it their all for their school and maturing as the years go by, and the players would truly get an education out of it, plus other perks mentioned above (quality coaching, uniforms, food, etc, etc). Every now and then a 7 footer may decide college before pros, and actually stick it out. It's actually silly this hasn't happened already. Many players (not the stars like BSimmons) currently go to college for one year, and either decide to leave due to inflated image of their ability, or can't cut it academically, get drafted late in 1st, or in 2nd round, or not at all, and end up starting out in the D-league. So, why did they go to college for 1 year in the first place? Just go straight from HS to D-league and you eliminate those who really don't want, or belong, in college to begin with. If I were the NBA, I would mandate that any 1st year player out of high school must start in D-league, but if they are truly a star and talented, like Lebron, Simmons, or Garnett, and the team wants to immediately pull them up, they don't have to wait a year to do that. If this were done, I think the talk of paying all college players would largely go away. Partly because the talent level in college would go down and therefore the astronomical TV contracts would reduce. In my opinion, this would be a good reduction. The type of players the college system would attract would want to be there for the perks mentioned, and wouldn't be complaining about getting paid for their likeness/brand, etc. And the argument about how much money college sports is bringing in as an example of why they should be paid would lessen because the talent level would reduce and commercial/private money would, too. While I believe in capitalism, it is not congruent to say colleges should be run in a capitalistic manner b/c they receive so much of their funding from state governments. College football TV contracts are the anomaly, but bring so much revenue, it's natural to connect that to a capitalistic example of paying the athletes. In my opinion, we need to go in the other direction. Having said that, for players from poor backgrounds who are agreeing to play for a college for a set period, I'm not opposed to paying them on some need-based scale, or something like that. Grad students get paid, so it could be set up based on the extracurricular time being put in beyond the academic demands, for example. Not sure how to do that part exactly, but I could see that being part of it for some players. What I do know is that right now the system is broke and needs fixing. I think the NBA D-league is the answer.
I wouldn't take advantage of the guy by making him work at McDonald's for free for 4 years first. Lol
