Miscellaneous
From "Pay Me w/ John Holden" Should Top College Athletes Earn $800,000 A Year? Some Believe So For Martin Jenkins and other members of the 2014 Clemson Tigers football team, it was a simple rallying cry, but others saw a financial opportunity. The three-word phrase, “We Too Deep”, began as an internal mantra, chanted by players in the locker room and on the sidelines, but it took on a life of its own when Martin transformed it into a song and coaxed his teammates to help produce a music video. The song became an anthem for the team and the video went viral. It didn’t take long for retailers to cash in on the popularity and soon “We Too Deep” shirts flooded the Clemson campus. After trying to sell his own line of shirts, Martin was quickly shut down by Clemson’s compliance officers, who told him that the sales would be a violation of NCAA rules, which prohibit college athletes from earning money during their playing careers. For more than a century the NCAA has served as the chief governing body of college sports in the United States. Comprised of three divisions, the organization regulates more than 1,000 institutions nationwide and has swelled into a multibillion dollar outfit, as media companies have paid ever-increasing sums for the broadcast rights to marquee competitions like the College Football Playoffs and the NCAA basketball tournament (better known as March Madness). In 2014, while still a junior at Clemson, Martin turned his newfound interest into advocacy, signing on as a plaintiff in what was described by ESPN as “the most direct challenge yet to the NCAA’s long standing economic model”. The antitrust claim pushed for student athletes to be paid according to their value on the open market, asserting that the NCAA has illegally limited a player’s compensation to their athletic scholarship. It was consolidated with a separate, narrower lawsuit filed around the same time on behalf of former West Virginia running back Shawne Alston, whose lawsuit focused on targeting the NCAA for it's caps on education-related benefits. Martin Jenkins and Alston’s battle culminated in June, when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the former athletes. A week after the decision, the NCAA bowed to mounting pressure by announcing rules that would allow student athletes to make money off their name, image and likeness (commonly known by the abbreviation “NIL”); a policy that would have enabled Martin to capitalize off of the success of his music video and the phrase “We Too Deep”. Even with these watershed developments, which upended the NCAA’s stringent rules against compensating student athletes; the model has not been completely dismantled. Student athletes won’t start collecting salaries from their universities and the NCAA remains adamant that they should not be considered employees. That change, should it ever arrive, is certainly years away. Richard Borghesi, a business professor at the University of South Florida, modeled a scenario in 2016 wherein players in college football, by far the most lucrative sport in the NCAA (from 2003 to 2014 college football brought in $2.28 billion per year), would receive a cut of NCAA revenue similar to the cut, 47%, received by NFL players. His ultimate goal was to estimate how much money players would earn if the NCAA allowed them to be paid. He calculates the very best players would be due around $800,000 a year due to the staggering amounts of money they generate for their schools and smaller school players would be due around $21,000 a year. Borghesi wrote a similar scenario within college basketball and estimated that the best players would earn about $613,000 while the least heralded recruits would earn about $50,000. During oral arguments in March about the case, supreme court justices were unimpressed by the NCAA’s attorneys insistence that student athletes retain their “amateur” status. While the revenues generated by big time programs are used to subsidize the often-enormous salaries of coaches (Clemson coach Dabo Swinney has a $8.3 million annual salary) and the world-class training facilities on campus, supreme court justice Samuel Alito stated: “...the athletes themselves have a pretty hard life”. For his part, Martin Jenkins said that although he came from an upper-middle class family, many of his teammates struggled financially during their time at Clemson. Martin stated: “They face training requirements that leave little time or energy for study, constant pressure to put sports above study, pressure to drop out of hard majors and hard classes, really shockingly low graduation rates. Only a tiny percentage ever go on to make any money in professional sports (fewer than 2% go on to play professionally). So the argument is they are recruited, they’re used up and then they’re cast aside without even a college degree...how can this be defended in the name of amateurism?” "Pay Me" Full Episode Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3zI7FYI Apple: https://apple.co/39M8VzA PodBean: https://bit.ly/3kPn0lO