NIL, what's the best course of action to remedy this?
- Thread starter Rutgers NJ
- Start date
Can’t believe it took this many posts here for the settlement be brought into the discussion.
Dumb. Lot’s of RU students at basketball and football games. Stop with the lazy narratives.
Last edited:
I think the solution to unregulated NIL monies further tipping the competitive balance lies in unionizing the players. Entities (NCAA or possibly conferences) then negotiate for rules regarding compensation regulation, transfers, etc.
Soon, the schools will be paying players directly. In my better world, the schools would include non-compete transfer provisions. Players sign four-year contracts and agree they cannot transfer to a list of other schools. Players would also be required to play in the post-season (barring injuries).
Soon, the schools will be paying players directly. In my better world, the schools would include non-compete transfer provisions. Players sign four-year contracts and agree they cannot transfer to a list of other schools. Players would also be required to play in the post-season (barring injuries).
Unless it's as many as are at the basketball and football games at the other Big 10 and SEC schools, then it isn't a lazy narrative.
Exactly. Is what I’m saying. I think @retired711 is also saying it. Probably some others as well.
People keep proposing other “solutions” that either cannot work legally, or make no sense competitively, or don’t actually solve any problems. I can’t say for sure that the player’s union approach will work. But it won’t be thrown out by the courts, has some hope of gaining support from the players, and at least has a shot at being an equitable arrangement for all stakeholders.
For fans who are disgusted by college players earning money, and seem to want to “solve” that, y’all either need to adapt or else find some other form of entertainment. Players are gonna get paid, some will get paid a lot, whether some fans like it or not. It’s a done deal, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
Us fans have no real standing in all this. We are not stakeholders. The “but I don’t like it” crowd’s wishes don’t matter.
Really? I'd hope it doesn't but come on now. One of the better public universities already got caught faking classes before NIL, and now it's something like 15-20% of rosters enter the portal every year. You think they're evaluating transfer credits?
That’s a separate thing from paying players or NIL. Nobody is forcing schools, or the NCAA, or anybody else involved from enforcing academic standards. Or from adopting new rules that seek to ensure players attend classes or achieve good grades.
Some schools push academics harder than others. That’s always been true and will continue to be true. For athletes who aren’t getting much, if any, NIL or players whose pay is insubstantial, or just players who realize they are unlikely to make a lifelong living playing sports, they will still be able to get an education and a degree.
We are in the middle of a paradigm shift that needs to complete ASAP. I’m annoyed with where we are at with NIL. I hate it. I’m a 45-yo purist who also admits the old system wasn’t all that fair or pure either.
One thing that NEEDs to be done is players need to be on teams for longer. I feel like CFB won’t be exactly like minor league baseball, but it needs to be as close to it as possible.
One thing that NEEDs to be done is players need to be on teams for longer. I feel like CFB won’t be exactly like minor league baseball, but it needs to be as close to it as possible.
One advantage of unionization is that a collective bargaining agreement between the schools and the union could include restrictions (like restrictions on transfer) that might otherwise violate the antitrust laws. Collective bargaining agreements can't be challenged under antitrust law.
Which is why I brought it up. I have posted several times before about the settlement, but no one seemed to want to listen. No one wants to believe that, to quote the song, "it's the end of the world as we know it."
As a faculty member, I heard this so much. Holloway once commented in a speech on how pervasive this feeling is -- not just among the students, but also among faculty and staff. As I once remarked to a dean, "there is a blessed equality here at Rutgers. Everyone, from the highest muckety-muck to the lowest whatever, has at some time or another been screwed by this university." (The Dean nodded -- he himself had been screwed -- badly -- when he was a young faculty member.)
McCormick brought in customer relations people to try to train the staff how to treat students. I don't know if it helped.
Speaking as someone who has taught and been a student other places, I completely agree that what happens at Rutgers does not happen to anywhere near the same degree elsewhere.
System is broken (NIL coupled with Transfer Portal) and needs to be fixed.
Some teams now have 25 players who enter the transfer portal. Many players decide not to play in Bowl Games.
You can have a player transfer every year if they want to.
The NFL would never tolerate a messed up system as we have now in college sports and not expect to lose fan support.
When the Alabama, Georgia, Florida State, Clemson, Michigan, USC etc. feel that their programs are being harmed by the system as it exists now, change will come.
I suspect some rules similar to some current NFL will be proposed and agreed to.
HAIL TO PITT!!!!
I never suggested he was right. Actually I flat out disagreed with him in my post.
If we as an organization decide not to compete , maybe we shouldn’t be in this conference.
In my industry we call that catastrophic legislation. LOL
Someone gets "burned"...changes are made.
It’s a ridiculous argument, heck we’re about to watch 4 programs in the semi’s all of whome’s fanbases are made up of majority NON alumni
Last edited:
“student-athletes” = latest laugh is my friend’s kid just transferred into UCF to play. He found out today that his kid does not have a single in-person class. Kid will sit in the dorm taking class on a computer all semester. He didn’t realize that was going to be the case but says it allows more time for training now. What a joke! I wonder how common this is.
Haven't you heard of distance learning? There have been lots of classes offered like this ever since the pandemic.
A “student-athlete” living in a dorm on campus taking every single class on a computer is “distance learning”?
It doesn’t matter. The fans aren’t consciously concerned about the academics per se but it’s the one and only understood differentiator from pro sports. It’s why college sports in the US are popular and the minor leagues don’t matter. College ball can coexist with the pros because the players are student athletes attending the schools they play for. The Olympics could move away from amateurism. It’s once every 4 year competition amongst the different nations and arguably sporting the best candidates possible to compete makes sense. If college sports is not about featuring players from the representative schools competing against each other it’s nothing.
Yep. Athletes aren't the only ones taking courses that way. Seriously. There are lots of classes that never meet in person.
Online school? It happens all the time these days. Rutgers offers several fully online degrees.
What if I told you K-12 could do the same thing?
It’s only been happening for the last roughly 20 years. Honestly the more surprising thing is that this is news to you
Way before the pandemic. I had online classes back in 2007 (along with in person)
It’s time for you to find a new hobby my guy. You are grasping for a world where NIL goes away. That’s never going to happen. You can debate the reasons why it’s bad until your head bleeds but it doesn’t matter.
We either embrace NIL as a fanbase or we watch Rutgers go back to Ash Era relevance.
There is no in between
Again - you have no idea either. NIL just started and every player on a college team is currently required to matriculate while they play. You have no evidence whatsoever to suggest that will definitely change and certainly beyond that no data to support a prediction that spectator following won’t diminish materially as a result.
As I said, even if you are right about the matriculation requirements getting dropped, then right again that college sports are still followed initially even when none of the students from the school play for the so called affiliated teams - just schools putchasing outside teams to sponsor… The final dagger is what I believe would be the nail in the coffin. Without the academic tie-in, the barriers to entry for other types of corporations would fall apart in our “free trade” focused country. Put another way, if it’s a viable market, other types of companies with a lot more money that non-profit universities will push to enter it too and there will be nothing the schools can do to stop it. I’m certain that would kill any and all interest because as I’ve now said multiple times, Americans don’t care about club sport. There have been many marketing attempts in different forms for different sports here and it just doesn’t draw.
Perhaps you can’t read - the kid is a sophomore and lives on UCF campus in the college dorm and doesn’t have a single in-person class. If the kid was living at home or somewhere other than the actual college campus the whole distance learning wouldn’t be a surprise.
Exactly. It doesn’t matter if the actual educational structure is a farce. So long as the athletes are technically a part of the student body all is well to carry on. Very few fans care about the actual nature of the academics for the athletes. There are some folks put off by the money involved but for the most part it’s a non-factor so long as the players are still students of the school and a part of its community. I’m not sure how folks don’t see how different it would be if that weren’t the case. Its no longer college athletics if the athletes playing are definitively not part of the college. The colleges basically just become Mark Cuban. They may as well purchase an NBA team and put the school logo on it. It won’t work in the long run. It won’t die out instantly but over time the students of most power schools would become less and less interested because history says so - sponsorship in the US does not equal connection or loyalty. Nobody gives a crap who a team’s sponsors are in our country. They never have.
I’ll add one other thought. This does not necessarily mean that athlete matriculation will continue on the way it has historically. Schools could, and probably should, start offering programs specific for a sports career - playing, coaching, training, reffing, etc. They could easily be certificate programs that don’t culminate in a BA or BS. That too, would be fine. They just have to be “students” attaining some form of educational accreditation for the university they represent.
Last edited:
“Americans don’t care about club sports”. You do realize that every single NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL team is a club right? You’re saying Americans don’t care? lol K
Yea I’m just going on the word of every single college football coach in the country including Greg Schiano who is going out PLEADING with fans for support for NIL outlining how they will not be able to compete without it. But her you live in such a bubble that you think the rest of the CFB world thinks along the same lines as you… THEY DON’T! And yes I do know this for a fact as again, every coach in the country is having the same conversations with their fans, boosters and donors
That was a wonderful soliloquy of the reasons why you believe NIL is bad for college football, no one’s disagreeing with you either, the point you are missing is IT DOESNT MATTER! NIL is here to stay, it will be here for the rest of our lives. The old version of college football is dead, if we wanted that quite honestly we never should have joined the Big 10. But since we’re here now you wanna compete? Or you wanna turn into the Vanderbilt of the Big 10? There’s no in between, we either support this or we fall back to Ash era relevance. I have no interest in going back there
Last edited:
Huh? I never said NIL was going away. Pay for play won’t end. You never saw a post from me stating otherwise. What I said was in my opinion, the NIL era could never go as far as what you predicted where college sports are relegated to sponsorships akin to European club soccer. So long as that remains true, there will still be other factors that weigh into decisions in addition to the money even though NIL may be the top priority. What the school has to offer only matters 0% if and when your European soccer prophecy becomes reality which I don’t think it ever will be.
You haven’t spent much time in the south have you?
College football is a religion to these people.
Simple solution = let fans attending games subsidize the player payments through ticket fees and charges. LOL - yeah it would never work because the very people saying RU fans need to start writing checks to players will balk when a Rutgers ticket price to sit in the upper deck end zone is $250. Attendance would plummet. This whole model is broken. I know its a bad analogy, but when I buy a ticket to see Coldplay do I then have to write a separate check to make sure Chris Martin will show up? Under the current NIL model I have to buy a football ticket and also pay the players to join or stay on the team.
Yep, and if don’t want RU to go back to Ash era irrelevance either open your checkbook or stop bitching. This is the world we live in now and it’s never going back.
“You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, cause times’ they are’a changin”
Sure - but the original catalyst that made it a draw in the first place was that it’s “college” football. The players are part of the town, the school, the community. Interest won’t become apathy in a flash. It’d be gradual but if the team has no connection to the school other than a logo, interest will ultimately dwindle in most places - you need more than a handful of universities participating to maintain college sports as a separate thing. Without any academic parameters the schools become in direct competition with NFL teams for the best players. It’d be all one big blob with no distinction - it might even merge.
I don’t see any of that happening because matriculation isn’t a problem barrier. It’s easy enough to maintain and if it was an obstacle could be still modified to make it even less so. There’s no reason for the superficial academic connections a requirement for athletes to get dropped completely because it’s serve nobody’s interest not to maintain it. Who is pushing to eliminate it in favor of your Europe structure and why? Definitely not the schools. They are getting all kinds of write offs on expenses from being non-profit. As said - that’s what allows college and NFL/NBA to co-exist in harmony.
I’m not bitching at all. I enjoy RU football and athletics in general from a hobby and entertainment perspective but I have a life outside of college football. And paying players so I can get a hard-on when RU wins a B1G game or brag to my buddies on a Monday morning isn’t my thing. RU sits in the middle of one of the richest areas in the country and has plenty of wealthy alumni - where are the donors? The answer is they have lives and are smart enough to know buying players is stupid proposition. The South and Mid-West have entire cities built on their local college football program - it’s religion to them. That will never be RU.
Mega donors subsidize the regular fans.
And now the ADs are hooked on the money because they had to be responsible before.
If you told the AD - no more donations.
If you want more money, raise ticket prices like every other sport.
They would lose their minds.
Because they would have to raise them to $250 like you point out and fans would revolt.
The alternative would be lower their spending which would never happen.
Be fiscally responsible? Never!
Similar threads
