slider643;842294281 said:

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You are entitled to your opinion too. But the fact is that these are amateur athletes. They choose to be amateur athletes. They are welcome to become professionals at any time. They choose to retain amateur status instead of seeking the market value of an uneducated 18-22 year old.

If they were professional athletes or employees, your opinion on labor practices would be valid. Just because you think they are professionals or employees doesn't make it so.

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The NFL says that for a player to be eligible to play professional football, players must have graduated from high school three years prior to their first NFL season.

The simple truth is that 18-, 19-, and 20-year olds do not have the option of NFL employment available to them.

If an 18-, 19-, or 20-year old wants to play NFL football, he must play in an NCAA program prior to gaining eligibility to play in the NFL. No NFL team is going to sign a player who has not played at the college level.

NCAA football is very much like an unpaid internship, scholarships notwithstanding. It's a practical necessity to eventual employment in the NFL. Thing is, the vast majority of such interns never are employed by the NFL.

KevBear;842294433 said:

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What it was formed as does not matter. Things change. It's what it is now that matters, and things are what their practical effects are, not what label they come with. Now that the amateur label no longer practically fitting, it is illegitimate. And efforts to justify perpetuating the label by perpetuating the consequences of the label and then using the consequences of the label to justify continued application of the label are circular.

Those are bureaucratic concerns. The NCAA would adapt. And frankly, if it ends up adapting poorly, well it sucks as a football regulatory body anyway, so c'est la vie.

You're dead wrong. Instead of limiting use of a scholarship as incentive in high school recruitment, imagine that schools had to offer the scholarship, but were also allowed to offer negotiated single year renewable contracts instead. The average scholarship is worth about $35,000/year. So that's where the bidding starts at. For 2* and most 3*, the price isn't going to change much. But for most 4* and all 5*, the price is going to skyrocket.

Now they're in the program. Every year the college wishes to retain the player, the must offer them the choice between the scholarship and a negotiated single year contract. Most players who are retained will simply accept the scholarship. But a significant minority (probably all starters at a good school and many starters at most school) will get contracts worth more than $35,000. And a small elite will get contracts in the hundreds of thousands. That's how the free market works, and that's what these players are being denied by the college cartel.

Finally, again, this has little to do with the NFL and NBA. It's the behavior of the colleges in relation to the college players that is the crux of the issue, not the NFL or NBA.

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They're amateurs. No amount of reasoning changes that. Even if you consider it "illegitimate". You may not agree with it, but it is a fact.

If you're so convinced of their "market value", why don't you get a bunch of investors together and start a minor league. You can pay the kids whatever you want and you'll be highly profitable. Everybody would be happy.

Nobody has the right to get paid to play football or basketball. They don't have to accept the scholarship. They don't have to go pro. They don't have to do anything. They choose to go the amateur route. They play by those rules until someone finds it profitable to pay them what you think they're worth.

You're letting the tail wag the dog here.

slider643;842294448 said:

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They're amateurs. No amount of reasoning changes that. Even if you consider it "illegitimate". You may not agree with it, but it is a fact.

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So declarations and not reason govern facts? Gotcha. Let me get you a subscription to Counter-Enlightenment monthly.

slider643 said:

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If you're so convinced of their "market value", why don't you get a bunch of investors together and start a minor league. You can pay the kids whatever you want and you'll be highly profitable. Everybody would be happy.

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I've already explained why that is not practicable. It does not affect the issue.

slider643 said:

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Nobody has the right to get paid to play football or basketball. They don't have to accept the scholarship. They don't have to go pro. They don't have to do anything. They choose to go the amateur route.

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This is the mentality that characterizes most of the people who oppose establishing a more equitable model in the revenue sports. It is not reasonable, but as you stated, you don't care about what's reasonable.

59bear;842294409 said:

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You define the scholarship as compensation but I don't know that that has ever been established in the courts. There have been a number of cases in which injured players sought to be awarded workers' compensation benefits on the premise that they were employed by their schools with the payment being the scholarship. I don't know that any of these have been successful but when I was working as a WC underwriter in California many years ago I was aware of several that were not. One such case, IIRC, involved the Cal Poly team that was involved in a plane crash while traveling for a game. I suspect most of us here would consider the scholarship "payment" although unlike most forms of payment it is not negotiable for goods and services beyond tuition, food, lodging and, perhaps, incidentals. Certainly, in California at least, WC cases have been decided in favor of workers on the basis of less obvious "payment" for services. Of course, employment may be more liberally construed in common law than in any workers' compensation law, most of which have a very specific definition of what constitutes employment as well as very structured recourse in the event of worker injury.

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Completely true. I don't know of any court ruling that establishes scholarships as compensation, nor am I familiar with scholarship case law.

In the case of these revenue sports players, I think it's a fairly easy logical sell that the scholarship is compensation for service rendered in a practical sense, but that doesn't always translate into a legal victory. I think jurists with a pragmatist bent will be easily convinced, but those with less practical legal philosophies will be more reluctant. If you're already so inclined, it's a very simple matter--especially in law--to say these two alike things are different merely by giving them different names.