This is where the timeline splits ladies and gentlemen.
Sydney Brown, Devon Witherspoon will not play in bowl game
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Never undersell the rich history and tradition of the Roofclaim.com Boca Raton Bowl, formerly known as the Cheribundi Tart Cherry Boca Raton Bowl.
Don’t you dare mock the prestige of my glorious Marmot Boca Raton Bowl, good Sir!
If they want to sit out of a football game they should have to give back NIL money or scholarship benefits should be suspended Until the season is over they should have to play regardless They are being paid as employees and they have responsibilities to the rest of the team
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
It's hard to disagree with this too vociferously, just due to the San Diego County Credit Union of it all. (Or the fact that there have now been two entirely separate Cheez It Bowls on opposite ends of the country, the current one better known to Illini fans as the former MicronPC.com Bowl. Yes, I am a bowl stan)
My reason for saying bowls won't exist in 10 years is that while the marketplace for selling tickets and broadcast rights for the Union Home Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl remains viable (just), the marketplace for having two rosters of football players and coaching staffs on non-playoff teams in late December is pretty rapidly collapsing. NIL may ride to the rescue, but there are legal hurdles in the way and it needs to happen quickly.
Vintage bowl brands will of course be attached to the playoff until the last one of us who remembers what the Rose Bowl was is dead, but obviously that's an homage and not the real thing.
The NFL-ization of college football is proceeding ever more rapidly now, I would think both those who loathe that outcome and those who cheer it would agree on that fact. What bowls stand in for in that framework is the dying notion that D1 football schools are all different entities with different regional contexts and different goals and aspirations, a lumpy and weird patchwork in every nook and cranny of the country that lazily unfurls itself from the beginning of September to the new year.
A college football that's a mini-NFL in lesser markets with worse players is going to be a smaller, weaker entity than what we've grown up with. People look at the NFL as this perfect sports ideal, but everything about it is a haphazard detente between billionaires that's in violation of every antitrust law ever written. The NFL succeeds DESPITE the way it's set up, not because of it. The perfect sports ideal is football itself. So long as they don't break that the show will go on for college and pro, but with the junior partner getting more junior all the time.
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No they aren't. Paying them as employees is the obvious solution if players opting out of Bowls is a problem the NCAA wants to solve (also a potential solution to the excessive transfers people complain about), but they steadfastly refuse to do so, so here we are.
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
If the powers that be had known in 2003 (or even better 1985) that the forces they were holding back against were inevitable, they never would have let it unfold the way it has.
For player compensation, transfers, conference realignment, everything. At every step it's been deny deny deny then just give up and let the forces of chaos burst through the wall like the Kool Aid Man.
Yes they are Better players get more NIL just like higher up employees at any job. You can slice this pie any way you want still not changing my opinion Sitting out any game when you are able to play is quitting and allowing it without penalties is unacceptable
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
Yeah but the point is an NFL contract says you get $X for each game and if you choose to sit out you don't get paid. An NIL contract is explicitly forbidden from being constructed that way, even though you and I and everyone knows it is intended as a player salary in exactly the same way.
That's the gap we're all living in.
NIL is not paid by the school, and by NCAA rule can't be conditioned on playing.
Furthermore employee is a legal concept that opens the door on a number of rights and protections college athletes don't currently have. It's not as simple as "someone is paying this guy because he plays football so he's an employee." Trust me, the school, athletic department, and NCAA, DO NOT want these players to be considered employees.
mattcoldagelli
- The Transfer Portal with Do Not Contact Tag
I think bowls maybe used to stand for that, but haven't since the BCS started in the 90s and maybe before.
I will disagree that "finding a way to crown a champion on the field" is a uniquely NFL thing. An American sports thing? Definitely. Which is why even before the BCS I remember my dad trying to explain the bowl "system" to me when I was a kid and having the general reaction of "wait, that can't be it, can it?"
The Sprouting Divot
Invisible and Bulletproof
- Miracle Mile
Your efforts at punctuation and grammar have quit.
Which is exactly why the new system is a bigger back room game than the old one. The schools are absolutely shadow-administering NIL and using it as a recruiting tool, the players are, in effect, paid for doing gig work, and certainly the players and the schools do not want them considered employees so they can avoid the added expense (scholarships taxed as imputed income, payroll taxes on the NIL and scholarship dollars, OSHA implications, etc.). The whole thing is a tangled web that is becoming massively more complex every year.
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
Yeah, this kind of conversation tends to come up more in soccer where Europe and elsewhere have their own very different traditions and rhythms around these sorts of things. Which are not quite the same as the weird, decentralized past of college football either.
A closed league with a fixed set of teams playing a lengthy regular season followed by a double-digit team playoffs tacked on at the end in which much weaker regular season teams get a free shot to end the title aspirations of a much stronger team and quite frequently do is something we all grew up with and are used to, but it's really quite uncommon elsewhere.
There are advantages of doing it that way, most of them financial, but there are also big, big disadvantages in a way Americans tend to be blind to.
We're no more than a year or two from the first Ohio State-Michigan game that everybody knows ahead of time is just a late season tune-up for two teams whose playoff status is assured and whose real season starts in an antiseptic indoor NFL palace on New Year's Eve. Maybe people won't notice or care and I'll have just been a weirdo shouting with a "The End Is Near" sandwich board on the sidewalk all these years. But I doubt it.
Ransom Stoddard
Ordained Dudeist Priest
- Bloomington, IL
None of this is correct.
NIL isn't pay for play, it's literally pay for their Name, Image, or Likeness. In other words, endorsements.
Should a player give back their schollys if they have to miss game(s) due to personal issues, injury, etc.? If the answer to that is "no", tell me how sitting out a bowl game is materially any different.
College football players are not paid as employees.
I don't see how you can say that about the NIL contract. Yes, the intent of the NIL lawsuit and subsequent laws are being totally evaded. But it seems clear that an entity could easily put a time frame on the contracts. X amount through the end of the regular season. Y amount for participation in the bowl game. Or put it all together.
Same age but with my friend’s parents. A lot of fun until the rain.
Looking it up, found this.
The star quarterback for the College All-Stars, Steeler draft pick Mike Kruczek of Boston College, left ten minutes into the first quarter after pulling his left thigh, with backup quarterback Craig Penrose of San Diego State suffering two broken fingers in the second quarter.
Ransom Stoddard
Ordained Dudeist Priest
- Bloomington, IL
I'd be very surprised if the higher-level NIL deals (the ones that are actually commercial endorsement deals) aren't structured this way. Likely with similar clauses and the same sorts of protections that go into endorsement deals for pro athletes. If they don't shame on whoever constructed the deal.
But I think most of us are in agreement that this isn't a university or DIA issue.
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
This is the part you can't say.
It both IS pay for play, but also CAN'T BE pay for play. So it's all wink wink nudge nudge.
We are excelling in this space thanks to our leadership and the Guardians. It's a much, much more favorable environment for Illinois relative to our competition than the old one, particularly in basketball.
But until the big NCAA case comes down where the borders of these things get fought out in court, we have to exist in this weird kabuki fiction that local car dealers are paying millions to have transfer left tackles do commercials for them.
There was something more wholesome about the way SMU did it, wouldn't you say?
(All of which is not to say you couldn't get into some funny business around payment timing that circumvents these rules in the manner in which you suggest. A will + enough lawyers = A way)
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mattcoldagelli
- The Transfer Portal with Do Not Contact Tag
Certainly true, although the old system of "play a scattershot round of neutral-site matchups, some of which are bound by conference affiliation, and then have writers vote on who the overall champion is" was, as far as I know, a singular arrangement. It's not like we had a well-oiled league table setup consistently rewarding the best teams that's going by the wayside.
I get your point, but I'm talking about timing. The NIL deals all have time on them. Clearly, they all end at some point and I'd have to think that they all could include language, like any other endorsement deal might have, that requires a person to be who they were when they signed the deal.
I think we're both splitting lots of hairs here, of course. But bottom line I think it's pretty easy to structure NIL under current laws that would cease payment if there was no bowl participation by the athlete.
mattcoldagelli
- The Transfer Portal with Do Not Contact Tag
Which would be a quick way to put yourself at an NIL disadvantage against schools who didn't do that.
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