Commission on College Basketball recommendations

Second and Chalmers said:

The NCAA would love that. At least the University presidents and conference commissioners who run the show. They never asked for one-and-done in the first place.

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I don’t think the NCAA would love it if an NBA minor league became the premiere place for 18- and 19-year-olds to get ready for the NBA.

If the NBA said, “this is how we’re going to do it now” and started annually peeling 80-100 college-aged kids out of the NCAA’s talent pool instead of the 30-40 they are now, that would be a major blow against the NCAA.

Illiini said:

Why not just do away with the "student-athlete" fig leaf anyway? Let the kids be pros, and if the pro teams want a farm team, the university can give the team naming rights.

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haasi said:

Some very simple bullets to fix the system:
1. Allow full free market compensation for players. Whatever the market will bear. And let players have agents.
2. Let players transfer freely without having to sit.

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I think there are a couple threshold issues that ought to be raised here:

1. The two big college revenue sports are unnatural. Nowhere else in the world are minor-league competitions that big and that popular. There is some gravity-defying special sauce to US college football and men's basketball.

2. The two big college revenue sports are good! This is a value judgment of course, but I would imagine everyone on this board would agree that emptying the stadiums and turning off the TV cameras would be an outcome worth avoiding.

Those two collide, in my mind, when we get into the more "it's always been a pro sport, just make it a pro sport" type proposals.

That is especially true when it comes to transfers. I don't claim to know the exact contours of the "secret sauce" that makes college football and basketball way, way more popular than any other minor league in the world, but there seem to be three key components.

1. It's traditional. The teams play old rivals in old building on old campuses just like they did 30, 50, 70 years ago. There's an unchangingness that appeals to us. Conference expansion, playoff systems, and things of that nature threaten this.

2. It's local. The biggest college programs by and large come from relatively populous places that were either historically untouched by pro sports or even remain so today. They're rooted to their institutions, they don't move. The neutral site epidemic in both football and basketball threatens this.

3. It's tribal. You only go to college once. For both fans and players, you can go on and do many different things in many different places in your life, but you can never change your connection to that institution and that team. The transfer epidemic threatens this.


You keep those components, traditional, local, and tribal, and college sports will survive whatever you throw at it. Get rid of them, and the devil magic that keeps college sports way more popular than they have any objective reason to be disappears.

Compensation flowing to players goes against tradition (making it legal anyway), fair, but not as much as codifying the constant movement of players from one school to another would destroy the tribal element of having "your" guys.

For me, rather than liberalizing transfer rules, I would try to go the other way, trying to force coaches to stick with and develop the guys they recruit, rather than just Creaning guys they don't want.

Second and Chalmers said:

Compensation flowing to players goes against tradition (making it legal anyway), fair, but not as much as codifying the constant movement of players from one school to another would destroy the tribal element of having "your" guys.

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The "your" guys thing is really important I think. In college, part of the magic was living in Scott Hall and seeing BP3, DJ, and Griffey walking around my floor, eating the same place I do, same bars I go to, etc. Seeing Griffey make that game winning shot against Indiana meant that much more to me cause he was one of us. A student just like us. Not some rented out major league player who is gonna flip to the next best school as soon as a better contract comes up. For me at least the "your" guy thing was the most important part. Hopefully that is what you meant. Would I still get that feeling with a player just just lives in Champaign/Urbana and plays under the Illinois name but for all intents and purposes is not an Illini like I am? Idk. That's the big question.

sacraig said:

IMO, the better option is to do the following:

• End one-and-done: the high-dollar players would end up going pro anyway, just like they used to, so there would be fewer true pros left in the NCAA just biding their time.
• Allow players to hire agents and be drafted without losing eligibility: MLB and NHL already do this with no detrimental effects, and it would let players test the market for what they are worth whenever. If they can get paid then they can just go pro and universities won't have to bear that burden.
• Allow players to profit off of their own names and likenesses: There's no reason why a player shouldn't be able to sell their own autographs or sign a deal that let's their name go on a jersey. Let them do that.

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Yup. Agree with this. I don't want to understate how seismic and disruptive this would be, especially point 3 (the lions share of donations to athletic departments would immediately cease and instead be fenced through sham endorsement deals for recruits. It will be dramatic, immediate, and kinda gross. Short term competitiveness with be immediately and dramatically shifted in favor of the coaches, programs, and fanbases able to best navigate that world. And lots of non-revenue teams, mainly sympathetic men's ones, would disappear), but college sports would survive largely intact.

And it would be one of the most morally positive thing to happen in a long time. I don't want to get too political, but the wealth transfer to young, dedicated, meritorious young men from underprivileged backgrounds would be unlike anything in American history, frankly.

Second and Chalmers said:

For me, rather than liberalizing transfer rules, I would try to go the other way, trying to force coaches to stick with and develop the guys they recruit, rather than just Creaning guys they don't want.

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I think a primary consideration ought to be the interests of the student athletes and their ability to choose where they play

I love the traditions of college ball, but to the extent that is rooted in unfairness to the athletes, i vote against it.


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Another major difference between college and pro basketball is that in the pros they have a million games, which waters things down terrifically. Regular season college basketball more watchable than regular season NBA, notwithstanding the gaping talent differential, because individual games matter in college. That’s not something that will change.


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Second and Chalmers said:

Yup. Agree with this. I don't want to understate how seismic and disruptive this would be, especially point 3 (the lions share of donations to athletic departments would immediately cease and instead be fenced through sham endorsement deals for recruits. It will be dramatic, immediate, and kinda gross.

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There would definitely have to be some careful consideration of how to handle this specific issue, and I don't honestly know how you go about that. However, something's got to give here. The current status quo is unsustainable. Maybe there would need to be some kind of rules about the sorts of endorsements that are allowed to avoid the problem of shell companies giving sham deals, but that seems like a slippery slope as well.

Second and Chalmers said:

And lots of non-revenue teams, mainly sympathetic men's ones, would disappear), but college sports would survive largely intact.

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I am not 100% convinced this would happen, but I can certainly see why it might. Perhaps individual universities could handle that. Certainly universities will still need direct donations for facilities, so they could individually make stipulations about certain percentages of any donation funding the non-revenue sports as well. It would be similar to how federal contracts work on the academic side of research university, where the school takes a certain percentage as overhead to fund staff and services.

Second and Chalmers said:

And it would be one of the most morally positive thing to happen in a long time. I don't want to get too political, but the wealth transfer to young, dedicated, meritorious young men from underprivileged backgrounds would be unlike anything in American history, frankly.

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I think this is the most important point. This is why it has to happen. It has to be worked out somehow, and I think it can be done without flat out paying student athletes a salary.

SeattleSlim said:

Yeah, there may or may not be Title 9 implications with your proposal, but you can bet that the "Equal Pay for Equal Work" gender discrimination rules will come into play.

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I assume people would raise it but I don’t find it credible. it’s simply not equal work if millions of people watch men’s sports with huge TV deals and few watch women’s sports. Also, what if it’s not the university paying but outside boosters?


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haasi said:

I think a primary consideration ought to be the interests of the student athletes and their ability to choose where they play

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Are the interests of the student-athletes actually to move around all that much though? In an academic, social, or basketball sense?

I'm certainly not proposing some draconian ban on transfers. The sit-a-year policy makes decent enough sense to me.

But if, say, basketball adopted a rule like football where you can only bring in so many guys in a year, or perhaps a two or three year period, that would totally change the incentives in terms of the way in which coaches deal with their roster.

They'd be more likely to try and keep and develop their existing players over looking for new recruits, and less likely to bring in players who have less than four years to contribute.

Subtle changes to incentive structures can have large effects.

KrushCow31 said:

I watch more college basketball when Illinois is more competitive. I personally am not watching because of the skill. I'm watching for the storyline of college basketball. I want competitive games of well executed plays. I think that happens with more 4 year players than 1 year. Watching Loyola execute their offense was college basketball dreamland. I'd watch more basketball like that. Less of the one man hero ball crap you get in the NBA.

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A thousand times yes. Return to scholar athletics and leave the pros for the pros.

I'm generally a free market guy (which makes sense given I work in the capital markets), so I've been a bit torn about this for a long time. But, I think before trying to form an opinion on how college sports should be structured, it's important to decide what principles one would want college sports to adhere to. Mine are below - some would consider this "purist", and I"m ok with that, but, ultimately, when you have intersections between non-capitalistic concepts (i.e. your college education) and capitalistic ones (the proftability of college sports), there's many ways to look at it depending on how your align your principles, and none of them are necessarily wrong.

1. I watch college sports to connect with my college. I don't really care who the players are, or who their names are. I care that they represent my university and all that it stands for.
2. Any monetary gains made through college sports should be fed back into the university (in some way shape or form), particularly in improving academics.
3. Players for college teams should do so only in cases where 1) they have a genuine desire to use the resources/opportunities at the university to improve their lives and 2) have a genuine goal of getting a degree. After all, those are the primary reasons why the school exists in the first place.

With those, my thoughts on how I would structure college sports:

1. I think it's under-appreciated how much the school's brand matters. Ultimately, I watch ILLINOIS sports. The brand of the school is really the only thing that matters to me. If you took all of Illinois' football team and transferred them to any other school (or made them a minor league team), i wouldn't watch them any more. In a free market system, that means the school is the entity where the value lies, less so the players. So I question the argument that the players add all the value and, thus, should be paid meaningfully more than they already are (through scholarships). IMO, they add relatively little.

2. Outsize revenue gained from college sports (i.e. power 5 football/bball) should be fed back to the university in some form. It's been well documented that this doesn't really happen currently. Instead it stays within the DIA where it eventually ends up subsidizing other sports (I'm fine with that), and ultimately, paying for coaches/AD's. Related to point 1, I think that's misplaced value. There are examples in other parts of universities where this happens (e.g. top tier MBA programs are profit generators for universities and feed $ into endowments instead of withdrawing from them).

3. Players should be able to go pro whenever they want. While at school, they should be able to profit off their likeness, but should be through a revenue-sharing agreement at the school (since the school is where the majority of the value lies). But the university shouldn't be paying the kids directly.

Just my take. Probably plenty who disagree - but hey - internet board armchair quarterbacking disagreements are fun!

I'm still unsure how anything is going to affect, at least what I thought, was the real problem, which is money exchanging hands to steer a player to a particular (favored) school. So, if players are allowed to sign with an agent, sell some jerseys, etc., which is all great - then they still take 100k on the side and decide to go to the same 5 schools we've all grown extremely tired of...

SeattleSlim said:

Well, they'd be "working" for the same organization, essentially doing the same "work", regardless of how much revenue they bring in.

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call it "commission" then

Royalty for athletes would be great but as always, corruption rears it's ugly head. They are having conversation, it's a step. Better than no ideas, hopefully this grows without someone figuring out a way to ruinit by getting there cut.

Right. Players can go to the D-League out of high school right now. They don't because even excluding anything under the table, AND excluding the value of an education, AND excluding the future marketing value added by playing in widely watched college games, just in terms of sheer gear and travel and room and board and whatnot, college is higher-paying.

sbillini said:

1. I watch college sports to connect with my college. I don't really care who the players are, or who their names are.

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Sure you do. I can't imagine you would say, "I really like that number 15!"
Oh, and that would be the end of the recruiting message boards.

NScale said:

Sure you do. I can't imagine you would say, "I really like that number 15!"
Oh, and that would be the end of the recruiting message boards.

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I care about them to the extent that they represent my school, yes. In the broader sense, I would care about them beyond them leaving school as they are an alum who represented the school well, and I'd like to support them like i would other alums.

But I'm no more likely to watch a GCU or UW-Milwaukee game just because Finke the TJL transferred there. Nor am I any more likely to watch a San Antonio Spurs game cuz BP3 went there. I wish them all the best and will support them how I can. But the value lies in what I'm spending my time/$ on, and I won't be spending any appreciable time/$ on them relative to what I do to Illinois sports.

I really should read the full report before commenting, but the portions I've scanned make me realize what a joke this report is, so I'm not inclined to bother.

I see some people supporting this pile of poo to varying degrees, and I can't tell you what a crock of horse!@#$ it is.

I also heard an interview of the ND president on the radio last night, and he side-stepped everything to do with how the system was built to be corrupt, and based on the untenable formula of $billions in revenue with free labor. He also couldn't acknowledge the awful past, and ever increasing breadth and depth of scandals. Finally, he was completely sold on the solution being more of the same, with some added tweaks.

Do you really think the NCAA can control the AAU market? The whole idea of sanctioning events is yet another money grab. And saying they don't need to change, but the NBA does? What a laugh that is.

I could go on, but clearly there's no point. The NCAA wants to squeeze more money out of the system, not less, and they want to take it from whoever they can. There is less than zero willpower for foregoing the rules that invite corruption. Indeed, they will apply even more in the name of fixing the mess they've created, with the intention of making more. That's the NCAA for ya.

An assessment worth reading.

http://www.espn.com/mens-college-ba...not-addressing-ncaa-rules-player-compensation

KevinC said:

An assessment worth reading.

http://www.espn.com/mens-college-ba...not-addressing-ncaa-rules-player-compensation

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Thanks for posting.
Bilas continues to speak with the clearest voice.

KevinC said:

An assessment worth reading.

http://www.espn.com/mens-college-ba...not-addressing-ncaa-rules-player-compensation

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2. Allowing players to have certified agents in high school and college

So the most crooked colleges can pay the agents (or maybe their shoe company or someone else pays the agent) to secure their best players. The agent pays the player to go to the crooked school, then gets it back a hundred times when the NBA contract is signed.

What the heck, isn't this the fox in the hen house?

Ferd said:

2. Allowing players to have certified agents in high school and college

So the most crooked colleges can pay the agents (or maybe their shoe company or someone else pays the agent) to secure their best players. The agent pays the player to go to the crooked school, then gets it back a hundred times when the NBA contract is signed.

What the heck, isn't this the fox in the hen house?

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Isn't this how it is now anyway?

Pat Forde@YahooForde
News story: Maryland subpoenaed in federal investigation of college basketball, summoned to appear before grand jury on Tuesday
https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/sport...tion-150157164.html?__twitter_impression=true

U of Maryland, "The University has cooperated and will continue to cooperate fully with the ongoing federal investigation.”

I read that as they fully expect to get off the hook for any wrongdoing by their coaches, and it's between the FBI and the individual(s)

Meanwhile.. Maryland 2018 recruiting class: #1 in the Big Ten, #7 Nationally