College Basketball Open Discussion

College Basketball
3903

That’s fair. But there would still be scholarship limits so they’d still have had access to the same players. So we don’t know they wouldn’t have been able to rise up.

The idea of paying players is taking under the table money and bringing it above board so the players can more directly benefit instead of their handlers. And funnel the absurd amount of money going to coaches and facilities. I personally don’t know that paying players is feasible because of Title IX but I don’t think an uneven playing field is a legitimate argument against it. The field is pretty dang uneven already. Football especially. Basketball is evened out by a more variable game and a single elimination tournament with auto bids

2 Likes
3904

It’s the same argument against letting players transfer. Like the big programs will just take the best players, but completely ignore there will be players who transfer down too. Basically a nonsensical argument.

1 Like
3905

I think this is the easiest implementation-wise, but in practice, it’s no different than the school paying directly if someone is a person who wants to make arguments about the structure of the sport falling apart or whatever.

Once NLI is passed, athletic departments are going to get A LOT fewer donations and players are going to get a lot more car dealership sponsorships guaranteed during the recruiting process. The money is just going to get funneled in a slightly different way even though it’s not technically directly coming from the school.

3906

I’m 100% fine with this though! Paying players isn’t going to even the field or make it more uneven than it is now. It’ll never be even. Never. So if this allows the players who deserve their money to actually see it then it is successful, even if it’s a car dealership sponsor or whatever. Way fewer hoops to jump through legally and I trust the open market to get players their money WAAAYYYYY more than I trust whatever system the NCAA would come up with.

5 Likes
3907

UNC is still losing despite have an 18-0 FTA advantage lol.

2 Likes
3908

Football is more uneven because players have to stay for 3 years. The top recruiting powers always have experienced top talent. The one and done rule helps schools that can’t recruit elite players.

4 Likes
3909

Agreed. Basketball presents a much more intriguing balance between hyper talented teams and hyper experienced ones. Probably why I gravitate towards it so much more.

3 Likes
3910

Yeah I didn’t really go into detail but that’s biggest thing for sure. It’s more like women’s bball

3911

Yeah, there is a lot more parity in college basketball in this modern era where players leave college much sooner. In football, it is the same 3 teams every year in the playoff it seems (Bama, Clemson and OSU) and then a battle for the 4th team. Occasionally, that 4th team wins the title like LSU did last year. This will be the 7th year of the playoff and Oklahoma, OSU, Bama and Clemson will each have made the final four at least 4 times in those years. Bama and Clemson will have made it 6 times.

1 Like
3912

Question for those who strongly prefer “Teams/NCAA pay players directly” over “Just drop all claims over NIL”: How does this actually work in your mind? Do all players get the same amount, a specific portion of the league revenue? Are teams allotted different amounts based on their own revenue to distribute how they see fit? Are teams given total control over what their budget for paying is and they use their own money to do it? If yes, same question as before (all players get the same or scaled by money brought in). If the latter, how is it decided how to evaluate money generated? I can’t get an answer to these questions despite asking in good faith, which is partly why I have trouble being super passionate about that specific aspect of this.

The reason I ask is because for 10/13 players (obviously an arbitrary number, but stick with me) on most teams it’s kinda hard for me to say that the value of their education, housing, food, plus the monthly stipends isn’t completely fair. For people who don’t intend to play professionally and want to use a degree, that’s a pretty sweet deal IMO. Which is why NIL reform appeals to me the most. You don’t have to deal with the questions above (what better way to deal with difficult questions than to ignore them!) and the players who actually have an argument that their image is valuable to the university more than the inverse (the university’s offerings being more valuable to the player than what they bring) can be free to use that image to get the sweet, sweet cash.

And again I must bring up the point that the NCAA seems like an organization that is very unlikely to answer those questions in a satisfactory manner. They’re clueless. With them, a simpler solution has a less likely chance of being totally broken.

3913

UNC winds up victorious over Kenpom #286 NC Central 73-67.

3914

The way I would envision it is that current scholarship benefits are mandated as a “minimum wage” and then after that it’s a free market where universities/teams can make any sort of salary offer pretty much (and I’m fine with this working the same way for any sport). I would agree that a lot of players (particularly in football) would get the minimum wage.

Title IX is definitely an impedement, so it’s maybe not possible because of that. But I was mostly responding to people who were very enthusiastic about the NLI approach when they also somehow think that direct payments will destroy the game somehow in a different way.

Concerns about legal implementation are completely reasonable.

1 Like
3915

EDIT: This is in response to EOG24’s comment way up thread mentioning Alma College. A lot of traffic on here today so that comment was probably 30-40 posts earlier! Sorry I didn’t embed the quote!

Let me just say that athletes at Alma College, and all of the MIAA schools, are true scholar athletes. There are no athletic scholarships, though most/all are on some form of academic financial aid. They do not make money for the college, certainly not in the sense that football and basketball players at high D1 schools make literally hundreds of millions of dollars for their universities.

One of the aspects of the MIAA schools that I love so much is that scholar/athlete component of their sports programs. When I coached in the MIAA, if a player had a Chem lab that occurred at the same time as practice, and if it couldn’t be made up at another time, that player was going to be at that Chem lab even if it meant missing part of practice.

As one who has always been a proponent of scholastic athletics with an emphasis on the scholastic part, I’ve always appreciated that level of college sports, D3. It has taken me a long time to come over to the camp of paying athletes at the high D1 level, but I am there now.

B1G football and basketball players provide a lot of value to the university, not just as representatives of the university playing their sport for themselves and the fans, but also, sadly in my opinion, for the tremendous amount of revenue they bring into the university’s athletic program, though I will say that that revenue supports essentially all or most of the other sports at the University. That, in itself, seperates the MIAA and the B1G by a big way.

In the MIAA, students/athletes are afforded the olportunity to continue playing a sport they love while getting a great education, but school, the scholar part of the scholar/athlete concept. comes first. Because they are in SCHOOL at that MIAA institution they they have the privilege of playing their sport, not the other way around. I love the purity of that.

1 Like
3916

I’d be fine with that. Similar to you, just not sure how it ends up working out legally.

Yeah, don’t get me wrong here (and to be fair, you’re clearly not misinterpreting what I’m saying So just take this as a general comment). I don’t think paying players destroys college sports or whatever. I just see an easier to implement solution and think “Hey, this seems much more likely to happen so I’d prefer to push this.”

Agreed on the hypocrisy of this. Based on that notion, college sports is already ruined with how many are getting under the table payments.

3917

We ignoring UNC’s Maui results then? They acquitted themselves nicely in a two point loss to kenpom #4 and a win against kenpom #31.

I assume if Iowa somehow finds a way to upset Gonzaga this place will spin into “Gonzaga’s overrated and they don’t play defense” narratives.

1 Like
3918

I just don’t think they’re a top 25 team. They’re not going to be in the efficiency metrics after today either. 21 before this game, likely going towards 30. 26 pre-game on Torvik.

I don’t trust a team with wings as bad as UNC. Barring a Love breakthrough, their rotation of Love, Black, Walton and Platek is insanely bad for a place like UNC that I thought had found the perfect balance with recruiting.

You’re right about them not being garbage (total hyperbole on my end, probably a reaction to the notion that Iowa had defeated an elite opponent). So yeah, my bad on that.

1 Like
3920

Love their bigs though Brooks/Sharpe/Bacot/Kessler(underwhelming but early). Michigan could use another big like that.

3921

I think allowing athletes to be able to profit off of their NIL rights is certainly the first, easiest to implement, and most common sense step to take. But it doesn’t (and in my mind shouldn’t) preclude direct compensation from universities that rake in many millions of dollars in revenue that are redirected to absurd facilities upgrades and staffing. Some of that benefits the players but only indirectly and with a great deal of waste.

The hypothetical questions you pose aren’t reasons such a system can’t work but relatively minor issues to iron out, ideally between student athletes themselves (through a bargaining apparatus) and the universities/NCAA. And there are plenty of models to draw from out in the world that can be used to answer your questions. As far as I know, the players in every professional sports league receive some share of the revenue generated (via gates, merchandising, tv deals, etc.). Why wouldn’t that be the same here? As a graduate student at UM, I worked as a teacher for two years and was directly employed by the university. The terms of my compensation were collectively bargained over several decades. Again, why wouldn’t that work the same here?

There’s a lot more to say here, but I guess I’ll finish by cautioning that the NCAA looking clueless and disorganized is a feature, not a bug of this system. It exists in part to provide cover for the universities who would stand to lose a significant amount of money if the players of revenue-generating sports captured anything approaching the full value of what they produce.

3922

I’ll be following Kessler pretty closely. I’ve said it before, but I preferred him pretty heavily over Dickinson as a big fan of the “5 shooters” approach. Not only has he not looked like a shooter, he hardly looks ready for big time college ball at all. I’m pretty dang happy with how it ended up shaking out, particularly with how much we needed a college ready center.

6 Likes
3923

Totally agree, I have been extremely confused by Kessler’s deployment on offense. I don’t think he has a single 3pt attempt all season.

1 Like