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Comment by dhd415 | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it's definitely a distortion of the market that college athletics bring in significant revenue and none of it beyond scholarships accrues to the athletes themselves. On the other hand, this is essentially the legalization of paying college athletes because wealthy college alumni/boosters can easily guarantee promising athletic prospects a certain amount of money in endorsements even if those endorsements don't make financial sense. E.g., a $1MM endorsement for Alumni Bob's Radiology Practice. That's certainly not going to improve the broken state of post-secondary education in the US.

Edit: It's going to have lots of interstate ramifications, too. If this goes through, why would you ever go to Notre Dame if you could also go to USC?

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Depth charts in college sports already work to even out the teams. The reason a top QB recruit would go to Notre Dame instead of USC is because USC already has 3 top ranked QBs and you wouldn't get any playing time until your senior year. Whereas at a lower tier school that same recruit might be able to start much earlier and therefore be able to enter the league draft earlier. Obviously this doesn't solve the problem 100% but you already see recruits taking this into account when signing and in some cases even transferring.

Yeah, I agree. This basically means paid college players. It will be far too easy for the boosters to funnel money in via "endorsements".

But I'm not convinced that's a bad thing.

> But I'm not convinced that's a bad thing.

It's hard to predict, but one could expect larger disparity than even exists today amongst schools (arguably the disparity today is based on coach and facility costs, and will grow when it includes players). That disparity is not only one school compared to another, it's also the programs within a school itself and the ability for NCAA and conference funds to be redistributed. So much legislation was focused on equality of services across sports programs and universities, this is clearly a step towards inequality (even if it is a good step).

At the same time - there are a lot of wealthy alumni from schools without a noteworthy program that would be more than happy to directly play some players to come put their alma matter on TV for a couple seasons.

Athletes are a tiny fraction of most schools' student body, so whatever is broken in higher education probably has nothing to do with them.

It's absurd that anyone pretends they're truly students, but it doesn't change the quality of the education for other students.

>>That's certainly not going to improve the broken state of post-secondary education in the US.

Tangential. This isn't about fixing public education, this is about worker's rights.

As for "Wealthy schools get best athletes" that's already what happens. Also, why is that any worse than the Yankees being perennial WS contenders while the Royals have to get lucky with player development to field an elite team? That's just the nature of sports. Pretending that there's a level playing field now (go look at some of the articles about LSU's new 28 million dollar football facilities) is laughable. Besides you're never going to get there, and it doesn't really have to be a goal for the school.

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