I recall many years ago and playing NCAA College Football on I think it was the Playstation and kind of being in awe about how the people who had made that game had the real rosters of every single college football team, including pictures of most of their faces and this really made the game seem a lot more lifelike even if the graphics were a bit dated.
I wondered at the time how this was even possible because I had heard stories about how athletes get paid a silly amount of money for advertisements that they were in so how on earth could any game possible afford to pay what would have been around 100,000 people to use their likeness in a game?
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That's quite the blowout!
Well as it turns out two thing were true: 1, the players weren't being compensated in any way, and 2, it was a lot more complicated than what I thought.
The rule has always been that athletics in universities in the United States were at that time, something that the young people could not be compensated for in any way other than receiving their tuition and room and board given for free. There was not to be any other sort of incentive for the players. Obviously some of the colleges cheated on this and rewarded the best players with certain perks and I'm sure that just like in the movie Blue Chips - which is a great film that you should check out - there were some shady deals involving envelopes filled with cash being distributed as well.
College Football and Basketball in particular are huge moneymakers and for most of my life the people that were playing it were not compensated for their work at all. Well, other than getting a degree in whatever they want without really needing to work for it and the ability to go pro for big bucks.
I don't know exactly when it happened because I guess I wasn't really paying attention but in the recent past this all changed. Now student athletes are able to be compensated for NIL (name, image, and likeness) in all manner of things and this includes in video games but extends well beyond that. These days the top players likely have agents and scouts that are shopping for sponsorship and raking in millions of dollars for teenage boys (and some girls I guess) for all manner of things.
Considering the amount of money involved in the larger universities' teams, this would be a very easy system to be exploited. While the universities themselves cannot compensate players, their "boosters" or other organizations with loose ties to the university wouldn't have any trouble organizing said sponsors to the point where it is basically the same thing as going into a price war for a salary.
There are plenty of people complaining about this already that are on the boards of the smaller or less well-known universities who are making claims that the larger and better established universities are going to end up creating dynasties that cannot be dethroned because the athletes who go there are guaranteed very large NIL payouts even though this information will not be written on any contract because it is illegal to offer it. There are a lot of things that can be conveyed without a piece of paper to back it up though.
We are already seeing some college athletes that are getting paid salaries that would make many of their professional counterparts a bit jealous. You no doubt recognize all of the college logos up there if you are a US sport fan, because they are all some of the most well-known sport universities.
I agree, that this creates a sort of unofficial "big boy club" that the smaller colleges would struggle to participate in or to just straight up find it impossible to compete with.
This can end up being a bad thing because even though it is kind of like that anyway, we will likely start to see the same 12 teams or so always perform a lot better than the other several thousand teams that are out there.
There has already been talk about adjusting the NIL system, a kind of nipping it in the bud before places get used to it and I don't have any idea how it is going to pan out. I mean, if the richest teams ended up having the most success in college football and basketball, that's just kind of a reflection of what the real world of sports is all about anyway and it probably cannot be prevented. They will find a way around it and they likely always have. There are "booster clubs" for basically all university athletic programs and while I don't have any first-hand knowledge, I would imagine that the sole purpose of these organizations is to corrupt the system as much as possible.
But the people who are saying that payment to college athletes should be illegal I kind of think that they have a point. There are some seriously wealthy athletic programs in existence out there and the smaller schools have zero chance of being able to compete with that.
I read a little bit about the President of the US making some sort of executive order to change this, but just like anything that guy does, it will probably be fought in court just because of who he is.
In the end I think that college sports are a lot more exciting that pro sports or at least, they were. If it becomes a question of whoever has the most money wins, it kind of loses a lot of its allure.