Show Them the Money

Today, NCAA President, Mark Emmert, came out and said he will be asking the NCAA Division I Board of Directors to okay a $2,000 hike for NCAA Division I student-athletes. Well, hmmmm, I wonder why the NCAA Prez has all of a sudden come to this conclusion. Stating that student-athletes do not have the opportunities to work outside of the classroom and playing field, he believes this will help "to more closely approach" the cost of attending college. This is just more proof that the NCAA really has no idea what is going on here.

The arguments for (and against) paying college athletes really has little to do with "more closely approaching the cost of college." It has a lot to do with the fact that universities are banking mega-millions on the athletes that bear their colors. Everyone buys their favorite players number, without the name on the back, and that is just one way schools are banking on a players' likeness. CNBC Sports Business guru Darren Rovell @darrenrovell has come up with an interesting proposition that seems to make sense to me:
On Sunday, Rovell tweeted: "On my NCAA jersey proposal player would get 4% of gross = $1.20/jersey. Gross price is what retailer pays, not what you pay." Therefore, with that proposal and his estimation of the number of Tim Tebow jerseys sold during his career at the University of Florida, Tebow would have made roughly $40,000 dollars. But remember, that is only 4% of what the school is actually making.

But, let's be honest, the schools are not really making the big bucks on jersey and merchandise sales, the real money is in the TV deals. And, there is no better example of this than the 2011 Sugar Bowl between Ohio State and Arkansas. Everyone knows, Ohio State is currently waiting to hear from the NCAA Infractions Committee about what punishment it will receive for the "tattoo" scandal. And, most know that Ohio State, as a school, has already given up its wins from that entire season. However, I would argue that Ohio State should have given up all of the wins, EXCEPT, the Sugar Bowl win. Before the teams played in that game, the NCAA ruled all of the players listed in the scandal ELIGIBLE to play. Regardless of what the NCAA did, and did not know at that time, they said those players could play, and the main reason why they decided that was TV.

Nobody outside of the respective schools fans was going to tune in to watch the Sugar Bowl if three of Ohio State's top players, and most marketable ones at that, were not going to be on the field. It was a BCS game ($$$), between two top-ten ranked teams ($$$), on prime time TV ($$$), and the NCAA was not going to cost FOX any ratings.

The BCS distributed $174 million to conferences last bowl season. The Big10 and SEC made $27.2 million each for sending multiple teams to BCS Bowls. And, for some unknown reason, Notre Dame received $1.7 million from the BCS?!? Notre Dame hasn't been to a BCS bowl game since 2006, why they are receiving money each year from the BCS despite not making it to a BCS bowl game seems deficient. But, you have to realize, its all about the TV deals, and yet, nobody seems to realize that without the players, nobody would watch the games. Without the players, FOX, ESPN, and CBS wouldn't pay huge sums of money to broadcast the games, because nobody would watch.

I understand that scholarships that these athletes get pay their tuition to a higher education institution. But the price of the scholarship compared to the amount of money that schools make on the athletes (especially football and basketball players) doesn't add up. I am just not sure if 2,000 extra dollars is going to make up the difference either.