What difference does filing paperwork make?
You’re missing my entire point.
Sports make money because people watch them. Pro leagues create an intricate set of rules (and immunize those rules from antitrust laws through collective bargaining agreements) to make their leagues as competitive as possible.
If you want to compensate college players, then let’s do it like they do it in the pros. The top recruits don’t get to pick where they go to school. Instead, Rutgers gets the #1 draft pick, followed by Washington State, Vanderbilt, etc. The players sign 3-4 year deals, and they’ll get a signing bonus which will be prorated, so if they leave early, they have to pay some of it back.
We’ll have revenue sharing among all teams, and a salary cap, with real monitoring and consequences for violations (see the 1994 49ers).
That’s how pro leagues actually work.
To me, “silly season” is claiming these guys are akin to slaves, and that to remedy the problem, we should just open up the floodgates to paying players without giving strong consideration to making sure the product is just as strong.
Tell me how my plan - a generous stipend every semester (in addition to the free education the players receive), and profit sharing per sport, is exploitation?
It’s no more exploitation than tech company engineers who, in exchange for a $200,000 annual salary, assign to their company the rights to every patent they obtain, some of which are commercially worth billions. Or a law firm paying an associate $200,000 a year and making $800,000 from that person’s work.
If we said every college had to take its profits and invest them in facilities, and academic scholarships, instead of paying athletic department employees, would that make people feel better?