Musicians rarely own their own music (but somehow I’m “stealing from artists” according to the RIAA whenever I download a song off the internet or listen on YouTube).

Almost nobody owns their own work.

Fair enough.

These revenues come from TV money, Ticket sales/allumni “gifts”, and licensing revenue. You drive all of those by having people want to buy your brand, just like any other business. And just like any other business, if you want to make the most money, you’re going to have to pay for the best people.

Kevin Garnett make $25M a year at 18 coming out of high school for playing basketball IN MINNESOTA. Yes, what we as Americans place value on is f*cked up, but why does everyone feel the need to point college coaches out as special for some reason? They work for businesses that need to make money to support the part of the business (the actual educational institution) that is seriously lacking in money.

C’mon — I want to see a post on compact theory as applied to D-IA (or, as it’s now called, the Football Bowl Subdivision) conferences.

JohnWA, you’re no doubt right about the overhead costs of a football player being higher than that of a graduate student. However, both of them have some potential economic value to the university, and a successful football program probably yields direct and indirect returns over the investment cost.

Most PhD students wouldn’t bother if there wasn’t some form of tuition remission because the career economics don’t support it – in other words, only a very few would put themselves into that degree of debt to earn less than $40k / year to start in the humanities.

So, the university is giving up very little by not charging the apprentice academics, because they don’t represent much in the way of lost revenue. What they do represent is cheap labor in the form of people who are willingly taking a pittance to be an apprentice because they hope to join the guild.

But there’s variation in grad student pay rates depending on the popularity and outside funding support of their field. The only semester I broke into making a fourth figure a month (before the decimal) was when I was working a second teaching job. My friends in physics and applied math earned something closer to a living wage, partly because they brought grants money to the university that could be skimmed to cover “overhead.”

By that standard, you could argue that apprentice athletes, which is what football players mostly are at larger universities, are entitled to a decent stipend, possibly greater than they make now, even if it’s not pro-levels of compensation. There’s already market variations in salaries on the academic side based on revenue for the university, so it’s not like it would be grossly unfair to do the same thing for student athletes.

If you accept the notion that certain athletes can get stipends while others do not, then you’ve already accepted that they can get paid, which makes them semi-professional in my book. From there, it’s more of an ethical or aesthetic argument about how much they get paid.

Brand’s fretting over salaries strikes us as hypocritical a.) because of the huge salary he pulls down, and b.) the NCAA’s very professional sale and sponsorship of basketball’s big playoff.

He then has the gall to fret over the money boosters happily put up from their own pockets to fund these semipro teams.

Again, don’t put us there with the academic integrity protesters. It’s well past that point now.

I agree, and that sucks, but somewhere in there, Brand is making a decent point. I love college football, something just isn’t right about it. As you guys say all the time, recruiting is creepy, but so is the vast quantities of money changing hands in an ostensibly amateur operation.

I would also say that supporting a top athlete on a full scholarship costs a lot more than the $28K or so you get in tuition as a grad student. Even taking away the coaching staff salaries, between equipment, food, travel ,and tutors, a university is well beyond the cost of tuition.

It’s okay when Oklahoma and ND pay a coach over three million a year, but as soon as Bama pays four a year there’s a problem.

thanks EDSBS for exposing their ridiculous hypocrisy as it relates to basketball.

I’m more than ready to secede from the NCAA.

Just saw on another site that “Tim Tebow and two other big guys decked out in UF stuff” were spotted on the UGA campus in Athens. Better hope nobody gets the urge to take a less than private tinkle or whip out a fake ID…