I'll admit that many of these players don't get screwed:
- The nameless football and basketball players who sit the bench don't have a market value. Not screwed.
- Almost 100% of the non-revenue athletes also have no market value (those teams bring in less revenue than expenditure for a reason). They, also, are Not screwed.
- The all stars who stay healthy and go pro ... can end up with a market value that overwhelms the market value they had in college. Negligibly screwed.
- But the role players who are too small or slow to go Pro but are nevertheless *excellent* at this game we love and fuel our teams ... For many of *them*, this is the most market value they'll EVER be worth. Why do we "Correct that value to zero" so we can take it from them? So that Dave Brandon can hire 30 MBAs to give PPTs about "brand management." Puhlease. These are the ones it's all about. These guys are EPICALLY SCREWED.
And CFB is *nothing* without role players like that. For Michigan, this would be guys like Bryan Mone, Martavious Odoms, Vincent Smith, Tru Wilson, Ben Mason, Sean McKeon, Lawrence Marshall, maybe even Brandon Watson.
This is a great synopsis that pretty much nails the crux of the problem with the "we need to pay all college football players!"
I agree the NCAA should have no right to suppress a player going out and signing an endorsement deal and making money off their likeness, to me, allowing that is the clear solution here and we leave it at that. Yeah, that opens a recruiting Pandora's box, but at the end of the day, it's the lesser of two evils.
The VAST majority of college football players will never play professional ball, and from a "talent" standpoint, are nothing more than amateurs - their "market value" is likely no more than the value of the scholarship they receive. The thing that's ridiculous about players demanding payment is, there are hundreds of thousands of kids who would love the opportunity to play FBS ball for nothing more than the scholarship, so the "labor force" is adequately compensated or they wouldn't find people lining up to participate.
The money is available because of fan/alumni loyalty to the SCHOOLS, not the players. I realize you can't have fans without players, but this isn't the NFL, players don't stay for decades at a time. The really good players are usually gone in three years. The fact remains, if you removed those players and replaced them all with less talented players, people would still watch because it's their school, it would just be a lower level of football being played - think ivy league.
The other Pandora's box this opens is Title IX - you can't hold schools accountable for paying the revenue producing athletes, then expect them to subsidize a bunch of sports they lose money on. If the schools have to share revenue with the revenue producing athletes, then they should be able to do away with the sports that lose money (and thus take money away from the revenue producers the courts so badly want to see paid). This is why I'm a fan of allowing athletes to monetize their likeness - it largely avoids that whole mess.