Big Men in Portal

So we get to hear you whine about it incessantly for the next decade? It’s not going away.

I probably will be, so get ready.

I wish Iowa could compete on a level playing field with the $EC. My fear is this NIL shit will bring Nebraska back out of the shithole in football and puts even more distance between Ohio State and the rest of the Big Ten, probably Pedo State too. My fear is this is where Iowa being in Iowa City is going to hurt them. I really don't want to see my favorite Hawkeye players pimping Game Day Ron's baby oil while a Clown player is pimping Principal Financial.
 
The problem with NIL is there is no solution absent Congress stepping in and giving the NCAA or the conferences some relief from antitrust laws. Most rational people on this board and in the college landscape want two things:

1. College athletes to get a reasonable share of the financial pie
2. Some sort of rules in place that regulate the process so that competition is fair.

As things currently sit, the NCAA is powerless to place guardrails in place. The conferences can't do it either. And even if the Power 60 break away from the NCAA in football, they can't regulate it either. In antitrust terms, all member schools are competitors for college athlete's talents, and they cannot collude to temper the earning capacities of their workers.

Look, college athletics have now become a pro sport, for better or worse. It either needs an antitrust exemption like MLB, or the college players need to unionize for collective bargaining purposes. The latter seems unlikely. Frankly, why would these kids want to unionize? Right now, its the wild wild west and they are benefitting from that. There are solutions here, but the stank of this thing will have to get really bad before Washington will get its hands dirty here.
 
The problem with NIL is there is no solution absent Congress stepping in and giving the NCAA or the conferences some relief from antitrust laws. Most rational people on this board and in the college landscape want two things:

1. College athletes to get a reasonable share of the financial pie
2. Some sort of rules in place that regulate the process so that competition is fair.

As things currently sit, the NCAA is powerless to place guardrails in place. The conferences can't do it either. And even if the Power 60 break away from the NCAA in football, they can't regulate it either. In antitrust terms, all member schools are competitors for college athlete's talents, and they cannot collude to temper the earning capacities of their workers.

Look, college athletics have now become a pro sport, for better or worse. It either needs an antitrust exemption like MLB, or the college players need to unionize for collective bargaining purposes. The latter seems unlikely. Frankly, why would these kids want to unionize? Right now, its the wild wild west and they are benefitting from that. There are solutions here, but the stank of this thing will have to get really bad before Washington will get its hands dirty here.

Looking back on it now, when those Northwestern football players were trying to unionize we laughed it off or poo poo'd it. Things would be SO MUCH better with players having a union at this point. Scholarships are great, but in an era of billion dollar TV deals for conferences, and 10 million dollar contracts for coaches, the idea that players aren't entitled to some actual cash is a little insulting IMO.
 
Looking back on it now, when those Northwestern football players were trying to unionize we laughed it off or poo poo'd it. Things would be SO MUCH better with players having a union at this point. Scholarships are great, but in an era of billion dollar TV deals for conferences, and 10 million dollar contracts for coaches, the idea that players aren't entitled to some actual cash is a little insulting IMO.

A union wouldn't help. The P5 and G5 combined are 130 teams strong. If we rank programs on popularity and revenue, Iowa is probably an exemplar median P5 program, sitting pretty close to the middle. Most P5 schools below Iowa do not have any excess revenue with which to pay players. None of the G5 schools have excess revenue with which to pay players. So you would have about 100 programs out in the cold on this stuff.

The problem is if you pay the football team you have to pay the women's teams as well. There are only two conferences with significant juice on media rights and decent prospects going forward, the SEC and Big Ten. And even the Big Ten has a bunch of shitbag teams like Illinois, Northwestern, Indiana, Rutgers and Maryland who can't generate any appreciable amount of revenue from football tickets because they suck or don't have any fans. So if you have a union and they want $20k a kid, maybe Iowa can stretch and get it and cover the women's teams, but those listed programs above and places like KState or Iowa State would be totally fucked because they couldn't pay it over an appreciable period of time.

The huge schools, like Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, Florida, Texas, etc. would have no problem coming up with the funds. But once you get past the top 15-ish the situation would get shaky and once you got past the top 30-ish, it would be downright untenable.

The reality of the situation is that if you could jettison Title IX and then siphon off the Title IX subsidy there would be plenty of money to pay football and basketball players, but the bill trying to accomplish would be dead before it hit the floor of Congress.

Note that my inclusion of ISU isn't to bash them or you, it's the opposite. I want them to have a viable program, but with the changing conference landscape I seriously think they would be totally hosed if they had to stroke another few million bucks of checks annually to fund player salaries. And Iowa would be in the same boat if Ohio, Michigan and UPennState moved to the SEC.
 
Well great. Now, of every 100 players busting their asses for four years with no shot at the NFL, a chosen few will make some $$ with NIL. Oh well. Sound familiar? Go team!
 
As long as you remember that Iowa is making the choice not to be competitive with NIL money. “Small market NBA teams” don’t make that choice.

Iowa has the money and ability to be competitive.
I didn't know the schools could pay money. I thought it was all boosters and NIL deals with businesses. Am I wrong on that?
 
I didn't know the schools could pay money. I thought it was all boosters and NIL deals with businesses. Am I wrong on that?
The collectives are being organized with the schools I believe. I mean, there is no direct link and it's not being funded by the schools but they are the ones behind them. Instead of taking the booster money and investing it in new facilities, it appears the new way of life will be buying players. This is some straight bullshit, but we'll see what happens.
 
The collectives are being organized with the schools I believe. I mean, there is no direct link and it's not being funded by the schools but they are the ones behind them. Instead of taking the booster money and investing it in new facilities, it appears the new way of life will be buying players. This is some straight bullshit, but we'll see what happens.
Ok that's what I thought.
 
A union wouldn't help. The P5 and G5 combined are 130 teams strong. If we rank programs on popularity and revenue, Iowa is probably an exemplar median P5 program, sitting pretty close to the middle. Most P5 schools below Iowa do not have any excess revenue with which to pay players. None of the G5 schools have excess revenue with which to pay players. So you would have about 100 programs out in the cold on this stuff.

The problem is if you pay the football team you have to pay the women's teams as well. There are only two conferences with significant juice on media rights and decent prospects going forward, the SEC and Big Ten. And even the Big Ten has a bunch of shitbag teams like Illinois, Northwestern, Indiana, Rutgers and Maryland who can't generate any appreciable amount of revenue from football tickets because they suck or don't have any fans. So if you have a union and they want $20k a kid, maybe Iowa can stretch and get it and cover the women's teams, but those listed programs above and places like KState or Iowa State would be totally fucked because they couldn't pay it over an appreciable period of time.

The huge schools, like Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, Florida, Texas, etc. would have no problem coming up with the funds. But once you get past the top 15-ish the situation would get shaky and once you got past the top 30-ish, it would be downright untenable.

The reality of the situation is that if you could jettison Title IX and then siphon off the Title IX subsidy there would be plenty of money to pay football and basketball players, but the bill trying to accomplish would be dead before it hit the floor of Congress.

Note that my inclusion of ISU isn't to bash them or you, it's the opposite. I want them to have a viable program, but with the changing conference landscape I seriously think they would be totally hosed if they had to stroke another few million bucks of checks annually to fund player salaries. And Iowa would be in the same boat if Ohio, Michigan and UPennState moved to the SEC.
You are probably correct that unionization won't fix this. A union could negotiate some direct payments and benefits to the players I suppose, but no union in their right mind is going to agree to limit what the union members can make from other sources. It would be like the NFLPA agreeing that its players can only get 50k a year from Nike. They would never do that and I am not even sure that is something that could be bargained away in collective bargaining.

So, really the only solution is Congress giving someone the authority to regulate NIL payments. Congress is great at fixing problems. LOL

The other solution, that I have stated in other posts is to return the transfer portal to the old rule and make everyone sit out a year. That would slow down the poaching of talent. But, if the reason the NCAA does that it to limit NIL payments to players, again, potential antitrust liability.
 

Interesting article, and I think we will see more of these repercussions in days to come. Makes me wonder on our situation given our failure to land a post player despite our recent track record of elevating players to NBA careers.
 
A union wouldn't help. The P5 and G5 combined are 130 teams strong. If we rank programs on popularity and revenue, Iowa is probably an exemplar median P5 program, sitting pretty close to the middle. Most P5 schools below Iowa do not have any excess revenue with which to pay players. None of the G5 schools have excess revenue with which to pay players. So you would have about 100 programs out in the cold on this stuff.

The problem is if you pay the football team you have to pay the women's teams as well. There are only two conferences with significant juice on media rights and decent prospects going forward, the SEC and Big Ten. And even the Big Ten has a bunch of shitbag teams like Illinois, Northwestern, Indiana, Rutgers and Maryland who can't generate any appreciable amount of revenue from football tickets because they suck or don't have any fans. So if you have a union and they want $20k a kid, maybe Iowa can stretch and get it and cover the women's teams, but those listed programs above and places like KState or Iowa State would be totally fucked because they couldn't pay it over an appreciable period of time.

The huge schools, like Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, Florida, Texas, etc. would have no problem coming up with the funds. But once you get past the top 15-ish the situation would get shaky and once you got past the top 30-ish, it would be downright untenable.

The reality of the situation is that if you could jettison Title IX and then siphon off the Title IX subsidy there would be plenty of money to pay football and basketball players, but the bill trying to accomplish would be dead before it hit the floor of Congress.

Note that my inclusion of ISU isn't to bash them or you, it's the opposite. I want them to have a viable program, but with the changing conference landscape I seriously think they would be totally hosed if they had to stroke another few million bucks of checks annually to fund player salaries. And Iowa would be in the same boat if Ohio, Michigan and UPennState moved to the SEC.

ISU has 541 student athletes. 10k per kid on top of the scholarship is basically about 5.5 million a year. If they had to, they could have figured it out and gave up some projects and stuff like that.

Let's be honest - Iowa is going to double their TV revenue. That's probably another 30-40 million a year. Iowa could easily pay 25k to each athlete on campus for that and still have more than they know what to do with.
 
I guess you could ban me for having a different opinion than you. Seems about your speed.....
Haven't banned a single person for anything other than spamming and breaking the OT rules repeatedly. For christ's sake @HawkGold has explicitly asked me to ban him on multiple occasions and I haven't. So keep the "ruthless moderator" card in your pocket.
 
The problem with NIL is there is no solution absent Congress stepping in and giving the NCAA or the conferences some relief from antitrust laws. Most rational people on this board and in the college landscape want two things:

1. College athletes to get a reasonable share of the financial pie
2. Some sort of rules in place that regulate the process so that competition is fair.

As things currently sit, the NCAA is powerless to place guardrails in place. The conferences can't do it either. And even if the Power 60 break away from the NCAA in football, they can't regulate it either. In antitrust terms, all member schools are competitors for college athlete's talents, and they cannot collude to temper the earning capacities of their workers.

Look, college athletics have now become a pro sport, for better or worse. It either needs an antitrust exemption like MLB, or the college players need to unionize for collective bargaining purposes. The latter seems unlikely. Frankly, why would these kids want to unionize? Right now, its the wild wild west and they are benefitting from that. There are solutions here, but the stank of this thing will have to get really bad before Washington will get its hands dirty here.
This is the NCAA's fault, 100%, full stop. There is not a more clear cut instance of self-inflicted disaster.

Don't act like the NCAA is some sort of sacrosanct moral compass and a martyr going down in flames in the name of amateurism. The NCAA is a bunch of rich old men who want to get richer and not allow kids to make money. They offer them a pittance in relation to their real earning power, and not only do they rob them of that earning power, they take the money for themselves.

When this whole movement started years ago, all kids wanted was a chance to sign some autographs for spare cash, or a portion of the jersey revenue that had their own name on it, or the ability to do some commercials for a local car dealership and not get their eligibility permanently revoked. But...the NCAA said, "Nope. You make one dime off your name while you're in college and we'll destroy your ass. We'll yank your eligibility so fast it'll make your head spin and your chances of being a pro athlete are over." Not one red fucking dime were you allowed to make, no exceptions, if you don't like it take your ball and go home. Meanwhile a bunch of already rich geriatric F sticks were making billions.

The NCAA had multiple chances to compromise and multiple chances over several decades to settle on a system that would be fair to athletes and the NCAA itself. They refused to even give a millimeter, and now that they have to give a mile, F 'em. You wanna blame someone? Blame Emmert and his ridiculous cronies. It's their fault. Not the athlete's fault, not the conferences' fault, and not "society's fault."

You don't get to tell a bunch of 19 year olds that they can't make money just because you're a 60 year old dude who wants to sit on his couch and watch them play for free to satisfy your sense of nostalgia. Does not compute.

And if you still can't see the logic in any of what I wrote, then understand this. Iowa has one of the biggest athletic budgets, donor systems, and athletic revenue streams in all of college sports. They can compete. They choose not to (or at least they have so far). If you can't accept that it's on you.
 
I didn't know the schools could pay money. I thought it was all boosters and NIL deals with businesses. Am I wrong on that?
Six of one, half dozen of the other. Whether it's donors or school's paying the money it goes to the same place.
 
The problem with NIL is there is no solution absent Congress stepping in and giving the NCAA or the conferences some relief from antitrust laws. Most rational people on this board and in the college landscape want two things:

1. College athletes to get a reasonable share of the financial pie
2. Some sort of rules in place that regulate the process so that competition is fair.

As things currently sit, the NCAA is powerless to place guardrails in place. The conferences can't do it either. And even if the Power 60 break away from the NCAA in football, they can't regulate it either. In antitrust terms, all member schools are competitors for college athlete's talents, and they cannot collude to temper the earning capacities of their workers.

Look, college athletics have now become a pro sport, for better or worse. It either needs an antitrust exemption like MLB, or the college players need to unionize for collective bargaining purposes. The latter seems unlikely. Frankly, why would these kids want to unionize? Right now, its the wild wild west and they are benefitting from that. There are solutions here, but the stank of this thing will have to get really bad before Washington will get its hands dirty here.
The share is whatever is offered/agreed upon either individually or as a group. Such as some boosters are offering a flat amount to be spread evenly to all players on a team. But that doesn't have to be done. And players can go above and beyond that individually for themselves. Caitlyn Clark doesn't have to share her HyVee $. Nobody even knows how much that is because they don't have to disclose it. That's just how it is

Fair to who exactly? NIL isn't about some Bernie Sanders social justice way of spreading $ evenly idea. It's about every individual being in charge of their own NIL to do with it what they want. Like we all are. Nobody is banging down my door to do an Insurance commercial but they could and can offer the same thing to student athletes that they could any of us.

What the NCAA can do is exclude who they go into business with. I'm sure they don't want em going into business with porn makers, beer, tobacco, pot, and obviously gambling... So if a kid wanted to challenge that the NCAA would probably win that argument. Although the beer one I'm not as sure about I'd be curious if a kid that's 21 and over wanted to how that'd go.

I'd mentioned on another thread that I don't view the NIL ruling by the supreme court as a regulatable thing the NCAA, schools or coaches can have any control of. That's literally the whole point of it. And by regulate they mean limit. Which can't happen. So long as the athletes aren't employees of the schools with some kind of non-compete in the contracts then any 3rd party that wants to pay them can do so.

That was where the NCAA went sideways if they wanted to get ahead of this then they could have went that route. But that's a whole different rabbit hole with all kinds of ACLU labor laws and most likely unions getting involved. It's easy to see why the NCAA all these years fought against that route. But this NIL ruling was inevitable. Hell it shouldn't have taken this long which just goes to show you how powerful the NCAA was with the lobbyists they have had to keep the Ed Obanon case dragging out. My God I was a kid when this all kinda got started.

What the NCAA can do is set guidelines to the portal. Slap dates to it for when you can get in and still be eligible to play for the following season. Nobody can transfer in season obviously. I would think that's already thing. Maybe limit how often you can get in it in a career?? But I don't think they can really do that. So far dudes can transfer just about unlimited times which is nuts but whatever
 
Last edited:
Haven't banned a single person for anything other than spamming and breaking the OT rules repeatedly. For christ's sake @HawkGold has explicitly asked me to ban him on multiple occasions and I haven't. So keep the "ruthless moderator" card in your pocket.
I don't think you are ruthless, I just think you make things personal when they don't need to be. You also fancy yourself as a pretend bully. This Board could be a lot more civil, but the tone is set from the top.
 
This is the NCAA's fault, 100%, full stop. There is not a more clear cut instance of self-inflicted disaster.

Don't act like the NCAA is some sort of sacrosanct moral compass and a martyr going down in flames in the name of amateurism. The NCAA is a bunch of rich old men who want to get richer and not allow kids to make money. They offer them a pittance in relation to their real earning power, and not only do they rob them of that earning power, they take the money for themselves.

When this whole movement started years ago, all kids wanted was a chance to sign some autographs for spare cash, or a portion of the jersey revenue that had their own name on it, or the ability to do some commercials for a local car dealership and not get their eligibility permanently revoked. But...the NCAA said, "Nope. You make one dime off your name while you're in college and we'll destroy your ass. We'll yank your eligibility so fast it'll make your head spin and your chances of being a pro athlete are over." Not one red fucking dime were you allowed to make, no exceptions, if you don't like it take your ball and go home. Meanwhile a bunch of already rich geriatric F sticks were making billions.

The NCAA had multiple chances to compromise and multiple chances over several decades to settle on a system that would be fair to athletes and the NCAA itself. They refused to even give a millimeter, and now that they have to give a mile, F 'em. You wanna blame someone? Blame Emmert and his ridiculous cronies. It's their fault. Not the athlete's fault, not the conferences' fault, and not "society's fault."

You don't get to tell a bunch of 19 year olds that they can't make money just because you're a 60 year old dude who wants to sit on his couch and watch them play for free to satisfy your sense of nostalgia. Does not compute.

And if you still can't see the logic in any of what I wrote, then understand this. Iowa has one of the biggest athletic budgets, donor systems, and athletic revenue streams in all of college sports. They can compete. They choose not to (or at least they have so far). If you can't accept that it's on you.
I do get why the NCAA didn't give an inch all these years. Because there's no real way to limit that leak in the damn if they had. It would have burst faster had they done that. You can't give lawyers an inch with that kind of $ on the line they'd have kept pushing. This was inevitable so long as it got to the Supreme Court like it did. NCAA and their high paid lawyers and lobbyists all these yrs did a great job of delaying it all these years but that's all they could do.
 
I do get why the NCAA didn't give an inch all these years. Because there's no real way to limit that leak in the damn if they had. It would have burst faster had they done that. You can't give lawyers an inch with that kind of $ on the line they'd have kept pushing. This was inevitable so long as it got to the Supreme Court like it did. NCAA and their high paid lawyers and lobbyists all these yrs did a great job of delaying it all these years but that's all they could do.

The NCAA tried to hang on to an antiquated system and hoped Congress would bail them out...not sure that was the best move. You could be right; however, delaying the inevitable was their only move.
 
I probably will be, so get ready.

I wish Iowa could compete on a level playing field with the $EC. My fear is this NIL shit will bring Nebraska back out of the shithole in football and puts even more distance between Ohio State and the rest of the Big Ten, probably Pedo State too. My fear is this is where Iowa being in Iowa City is going to hurt them. I really don't want to see my favorite Hawkeye players pimping Game Day Ron's baby oil while a Clown player is pimping Principal Financial.
Nebby is almost out of the hole on BB. Football, they still have Frosty.
 
Top