golden sloth said:
I used to support paying players, but with the NIL combined with scholarships, I kind of feel that is good enough for players. I dont see logic in the having scholarships, NIL payments, AND a paycheck from the school
No doubt the power conference universities concur because this way they get away with sharing only a small fraction of the football revenue with the players.
Through collective bargaining, NFL players get 48% of all football-related revenue the NFL teams gain which includes all media deals, ticket sales, concessions, sponsorships and even gambling revenue. That percentage is in line with what NBA players (50%) and MLB players (45%) receive.
From their media revenue alone, the P5 conferences distributed $3.3 billion in revenue to their members in 2022. A Cal scholarship is worth about $35,000 and that's probably a little higher than most flagship universities, much higher than most state schools, and maybe half of most private schools. There are 68 universities in the power conference, each with 85 scholarship players for a total of $202 million (taken Cal as a very conservative average). So before NIL is included, the players receive only about 6% of what the teams make from their conferences alone.
There are no official figures on total NIL money but NIL platform Opendorse estimated the total given to all athletes was $917 million with about 30%, or $275 million, going to football. Let's pretend that all of that $275 million went to power conference players; that would make their total compensation approximately $475 million which is 14.4% of what power conference universities made just from their media deals. Then factor in tickets, concessions and sponsorships and player compensation as a percentage of football-related revenue probably falls into the single digits for power conference teams.
All of the component figures -- media revenue, ticket/concession/sponsorship, scholarship value and NIL payments -- are much smaller for G5 teams, especially media revenue. I don't know exactly how it shakes out because I'm not going to go hunting for all of the data but though I'm sure the G5 football players receive a larger percentage of their school's revenue than P5 players, it is still a small percentage relative to the splits achieved by professional athletes.
Moreover, NIL is not actually football revenue, at least not in principle. Formally it is money paid to the players in exchange for the use of their name, image or likeness. It is theirs by commercial right without reference to the amateur or professional status of the player. Using NIL as the source of funding de facto football salaries is paying players with their own money -- that is, if NIL is taken at face value, as payment by private persons to football players for service not directly related to their play.
In actuality NIL is compensation for playing for football for a particular team, just indirectly delivered. By rule this commerce is supposed to take place completely independently of the university. In practice the NIL collectives are in step with their coaches. It's another sham.
College football players are professionals in everything except name and compensation. Every candid observer must admit that. I wish the student-athlete amateur paradigm was economically equitable but it is not. I wish we lived in a world where protecting each individual's right to profiteer was recognized as the mutilated form of social progress that it is, where the median NFL player didn't make more than 25x the median American income and a scholarship plus room and board could be fair compensation for power conference football players, but that is not the world we live in. It is obviously inequitable to split football players into these two classes -- college and NFL -- and allow only one of these groups to negotiate their compensation. It is inequitable both in principle and in outcome.
This is beside the point but formal professionalization need not be harmful to student-athletics. There's no reason a student can't be employed by their university. A league structure to college football can plug scholarships into the compensation model. It could bring about some desperately needed stability in roster turnover, putting an end to the annual unrestricted free agency that currently exists. A single league could also put an end to conference realignment and restore Cal to a conference that makes geographic sense.