The New York Times has an astonishing story today about the amount of money college football players are paid these days in NIL (name image and likeness) fees. Here are averages for the Power 4 conferences:
The SEC now pays its players three times more than any other conference. SEC quarterbacks are paid an average of $1 million per year.
It's unclear how any kind of competitive balance can be maintained with differences this big. There's still some attraction for kids to stay close to home and play for teams they grew up watching, but even that's been reduced by the transfer portal. Top players may still stay close to home as freshman commits, but by the time they're juniors and making serious contributions, the combination of the portal and big money will be too much to resist.
How does the rest of college football compete when the SEC can outbid them 3:1? Beats me.
Competitive balance will remain within the SEC, and since most games are between teams in the same coference, that's all that is needed. From the players' perspective, getting piad their actual value for a few years is a vast improvement over the prior situation.
They are amateur student athletes. They shouldn’t be paid anything.
Not anymore. They are professionals now.
Since they’re now professionals get them tf off campus. Want to play pro football? Be my guest. Go pro after high school on some minor league team. But leave college for folks there to get an education.
Most of these guys aren’t college students in any real sense. Have you heard some iv the pros interviewed? They often sound like they didn’t graduate high school, let alone from a major research union.
the pony excess piece.
Just as soon as everyone else involved in college football agrees to work for free.
I don't know how much competitive balance there will be in the SEC, since these rules also free the powerhouses within the SEC to pay a lot more than their weaker conference mates.
Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if the averaged is skewed by a few schools
The old system was certainly broken and unfair to the most talented college athletes, but the new system is just sh!++y in a way that clarifies the absurdity of what college football has become.
It’s just a very popular regional-based minor leagues with a few teams having broad national appeal.
We need to find a way to disaggregate the regional minor league team aspect from the academic component of college. It’s making a farce of everything and pretty soon every team is going to be in the SEC or Big 10
Hooray for higher education!
It's a paid business internship. I'd say they're learning a lot.
With ca. 140 team members on a typical college team, the SEC's $14million works out to roughly $100k per athlete. Obviously its more at the skill positions and less for the benchwarmers. But this still doesn't seem ridiculous to me, especially given the risk of serious injury. And even $1million for a quarterback is a small fraction of what the coach is making these days.
I think the more interesting question is why the pay is so lousy in the other conferences.
Cap is 85 scholarships. There may be 140 players but those outside of the 85 scholarships are walk-ons / non-scholarships. Doubtful the walk-ons are getting anything more than $1K.
i don't begrudge fairly paying the athletes, but it does seem like this will fundamentally hurt NCAA competition based purely on which teams have the most money. personally, i don't really care because i don't watch college football, but if i were a fan i would be concerned.
Why is the pay so lousy in the other conferences? Maybe because the SEC schools and their fans view football as the primary mission of a university. I've heard they have even been known to reward retired coaches by making them senators. Other conferences are stuck with schools that value education and research to varying but significant degrees.
Professional Football’s Minor League …
Kevin should know that averages in this case are telling, but also potentially misleading.
That's probably not accurate.
Two of the five largest NIL budgets are tied to Oregon and Ohio State. Ohio State said their 2024 budget was $20M. The Ducks are said to have a budget of $23M. USC is probably not quite there, but they're over $10M. I'd bet Michigan, Nebraska, and Penn State are also over $10M.
If the ACC loses its top
schoolsbrands, conferences are going to further diverge.Things will change again when the conferences settle on rules to pay players.
Name, image and likeness (NIL), different from pay. The athletes will still have rights to their NIL. The problem, of course, is in recruiting, NIL promises are made (directly or indirectly--not sure of the rules). Expect lawsuits when players try to transfer to get a better deal and/or if they get injured and can no longer pay...
Schools seem to believe that paying athletes directly will help put back NIL into actual NIL rather than the cash-in-a-bag incentive that some schools are doing right now.
The highest sports rev payout conference is B1G, followed by the SEC. This is where the gap really is. B1G schools will be earning almost 2x as much as the ACC.
It may be University of Oregon to you, it's Nike University to us.
But what happens after Uncle Phil passes on? Division Street will continue to exist but has Uncle Phil bequeathed a Trust to continue to fund the University in perpetuity?
i'm surprised whitekanda original phil knight hasn't put his donations onhold until the u. of oregon eliminates all woke dei.
There wasn't much competitive balance before when the players were serfs; the SEC has dominated for years as that has been the best opportunity for players to get noticed by the pro teams. The only real difference is that now the players are getting paid before they officially enter the NFL.
they were always getting paid.
sam gilbert was the nil of his day.
Basically, they looked at salary caps and revenue sharing in the NFL, which maintains balance, and the free-for-all of MLB, which means the Yankees are always able to pay more (our local Mariners are referred to by those with ice water in their veins as the “Yankees’ Farm Team”).
I expect they’ll move to the NFL model at some point. No one wants to watch only one or two teams dominate for years on end.
I'm pleasantly surprised the top college coaches are still down in the $10M/yr range. I figured we would have our first billionaire college coach by now.
Since the student athletes can hardly be considered students, I suggest getting rid of the scholarships. Also, since coaches cannot monetize their employees labor any longer, their salaries should be cut. Essentially, major college football should evolve to a NFL minor league which is affiliated with the university. Those programs that want to continue in a modified old system should develop their own conference.
dingdingding.
you look at other sports leagues, & mexican pro soccer has a team from unam (univesidad nacional autonoma de mexico), romanian pro soccer has universitatea craiova, multiple leagues have teams called estudiantes... no reason there can't be buckeye fc with a contract relationship to the ohio state or club de futbol northamericano uga with a rights deal with athens.
Be careful what you wish for or have wished for. Think of it as a minor league for the NFL. Education, really not the first or second or in many cases any priority. Will be fascinating to see how it evolves. Universities have sources of money and fans, when the donors figure out that they are being used, it will really get interesting.
All those SEC schools are in states that have or will shortly pass anti woke legislation and eliminate those female/transy/whathaveyous from playin' that manly sport.
God, Guns, and Gatorade dag nab it ......................../s
(Is Trump for or against this?)
This isn't college football. It's semi-pro wearing an academic fig leaf.
Time to shift all revenue sports out of the schools and have them be proper private clubs. Stop pretending and let the schools be schools.
Once profit became the target..
I guess academia was really just a profit center anyway.
So, basically, college football has become a weird professional league where you can only play for four years maximum. After that you are fired even if you have no chance of making it in the NFL but could easily continue very successfully in the “college” league.
I don't mean this in a mean way but . . . who cares?
I don't, really, except that I wonder to what extent these semi-pro teams attached in name only to universities are sucking up resources that those universities should be using for more worthwhile endeavors like, say, education.
Given how fluid the conference structures have been and the fact that these are no longer regional groupings.....analyzing whether or not competitive balance exists by looking at the average team spending in each conference doesnt really tell us much.
Division 1 football is also simply too large to have true balance across the 100+ teams.
The playoffs probably needs a rule tweak to ensure that the mostly arbitrary rankings/polls dont lead to one conference receiving too many playoff spots and other conferences being left out. There are too many good teams to end up with 3+ teams from the same conference in the playoffs.
Why are Purdue University's teams called the Boilermakers?
Back in the 1920's-30's, when college football was first becoming popular, Purdue used to recruit young men from the local community to play on the football team for a few bucks per game. These guys mostly weren't students at Purdue, they were mostly tradesmen from the area, some of whom were actual boilermakers. And a couple of those boilermakers became stars on the team.
I would like to see the NCAA return to that system:
1) Remove the misguided requirement that college football players be enrolled as students at the schools they play for; and
2) For gawd's sake, pay them already. If you don't want to pay the players, then you shouldn't pay the coaches, either.