Holy ****balls. Here comes the long avoided detailed explanation as to why this won't ever work:
So,
Years ago there were certain "standards" the NCAA put into place to try and maintain the viability and appearance of amateur athletics. Before that, coaches would fly over football players houses and drop bags full of money into the kids back yard. (yes this happened)
There were no scholarship limitations, especially for football. Darrell royal handed out as many as they could afford. Heck, he'd offer a kid a scholly that he knew wasn't good enough to play, but was just good enough to help the help the other team, then the kid would be benched for four years. It was the wild west. As the 70s approached, a couple of little known congress folks got together and raised a concern:
"How come we have so many boys on scholarship for sports, and so few girls?"
The reply was: "girls don't play sports. Those that play, mostly suck at it compared to boys, and nobody watches chicks play sports anyway.... so they don't make any money or get any TV time..." <<---- All of which were completely valid arguments at the time.
Well, this little japanese lady born in this little village on a US territory, who was a fledgling congresswoman from Hawaii named Matsu
Mink wasn't hearing that noise.
"This isn't fair. Education is supposed to be fair."
So, she gets together with this senator from Indiana named Birch Bayh and gets Birch behind this bill because birch had a couple of little girls that were his kids and he was already championing things for women. So MAtsu ad Birch work together to get this bill written and introduced to congress..... in this bill it basically says, "for every dollar spent and every opportunity afford" to male athletes, any university that takes a dime of federal funding in any form has to spend the exact same amount and afford the exact same opporunity to female athletes. Period. Public school scrambled to rebudget. Private schools figured they could find a loop hole. They tried, but all failed.
Now, fast forward a few months. Instead of having 165 football schollies out there, Darrell was going to have to be a bit more picky about how many he handed out. Schools scrambled to create women's sports. Many of them turning to fed to help them with funding to do so. The law was allowed to be phased in because some schools simply didn't have the money. Texas, had zero problem. We were rich. But many schools had to drop sports and some had to drop their entire athletic department. Money shortfall.
Fast forward some more. Scholarships to football teams are cut to 85. Why? Because of money AND the rich continuing to get richer. Michigan, Texas, Oklahoma, Notre Dame, alabama-- were dominating the ncaa's most popular sport: football. Why? They're rich. They can afford to offer MORE schollies than Tulane. So they have an advantage. So, NCAA decides that if they cut the number to 85, there will be more athletes spread around to even the talent gap.
However, the rich (see above) still continued to get rich while the west virginia's, maryland's, Oregon states of the world struggled to rub two nickels together. So, another round of cuts were made at many schools to salvage their only money maker.... football. Men's wrestling, swimming, lacrosse were cut so they could make the same cuts to the women's side..... to save money. While down the road in College station, Jackie sherrell is giving jobs to kids that pay $400 an hour and Switzer is paying bosworth $500 a day to make sure the sprinklers turn on at the right time on the astroturf practice field............. Eric dickerson actually took a pay cut when he left SMU for the nfl.....
The NCAA gets serious, hands SMU the death penalty and then shakes the bloody knife at the rest of the schools and says "no more monkey business" and then fully ratchets down the title 9 laws.
(exhail)
So now we have the "haves and the have nots". The haves CAN afford to pay their athletes, all of them, if they wanted. The have nots, can't. It's that simple. You want all the kids only going to the schools that can pay their kids? That's what will happen.
It's easier to understand it like this:
The NCAA sports revenues are annually around 7 billion dollars. All in.... 7 bil.
There are 460,000 NCAA athletes at any given moment. This means that if you paid each athlete at each school in each sport those gross revenues they would each make a whopping $15,200 a year in salary.....
$15,200.............. now, can we once and for all please put this discussion to bed?
I know the rules. I'm saying it's outdated. I'm asking what the issue would be to allow this to happen? If Title IX is interpreted as to affect what a college athlete can and can't do in their free time then it isn't interpreted in a rightful way.
When I see that the NCAA surpasses the billion $ mark, conference commissioners have seen a 600-700% increase in salaries, and the likes of Jim Delaney getting a $20MM bonus -- something needs to change.
