You said you were in the military. You couldn't even quit during your enlistment period. Heck, my brother got recalled when he was working on his degree. Someone could have showed up with a bag of cash and said alright here's how much I will pay you to come work for me, and you probably couldn't take it! A lot of arrangements come with requirements and stipulations.
In this case, the college athletes only have their scholarships and eligibility to lose! They can quit at anytime (unlike you when you were making less than 20K per year), they can seek any endorsement they wish, they are absolutely 100% free to make choices regarding their future. They simply have to meet certain obligations if they wish to continue being on scholarship and playing college sports. No one is going to send military police to track them down if they don't show up for practice or turn pro. If they want the benefits of being a college athlete they have to follow the rules. I'd add that there are also a lot of rules that make things really student athlete friendly, far more so than the world of professional sports and we're not spending our time discussing those here.
Having said that, your position seems rather intractable. It's like a prosecutor saying I'm open to any plea deal that involves the death penalty. That doesn't really leave much to discuss does it?
You said and I quote: "everyone but the players". You are now qualifying that down to a rather small group of people. Take a look at the stadium during gameday, look at all the people on the sidelines, the cheerleaders, the band, etc... You're talking about a very small fraction of the people. Do the cheerleaders, band members, etc... not deserve their cut to?
Secondly, no the schools don't make millions. Of the schools with publicly accessible information, around 1% of the schools have profitable athletic departments. The rest? Most are subsidized. That's one part of this that I think many people really don't get. College athletics generally speaking are not profitable. Even many college football teams lose money. So no, the schools aren't making millions. Truth is they're paying millions. Millions are being spent on the players.
You bring up Saban but he's an interesting point. There's data to show he's helped his athletes make millions and millions of dollars. His recruits have more professional success relative to their star ratings. So, what is college for if not to help provide future success? How much is the best ever worth as a teacher? If a law professor could help his students make millions more in their professional careers how much would he be worth? That's another part that's overlooked, college is about preparing the players for their future career. People act like the education part of meaningless, but even if it is, the preparation for a career in football is certainly quite valuable!
Having said all that, yes of course there's room for improvement. It just shouldn't be destructive to the sport. Saban is worth that, but is Pruitt worth 4 million? I doubt it. To that end, I'd be fine with something that said an athletic department can only spend X of their expenditures on coaches. That's a pretty strong restriction, but if it was done properly it would be fine and would not only curtail out of control spending, but also would make sure that the schools that aren't investing as heavily in their student athletes wouldn't be able to spend heavily on coaches instead. There's not just one solution to these issues.
I agree with that to, but it's really not college sports responsibility. I've been discussing this for a while here, and most my suggestions fall on deaf ears. I'm ok with putting X amount of NCAA proceeds into a college athlete retirement fund. People complain about what the NCAA makes but are floating this sponsorship thing as the only solution. I'm ok with a semi-pro alternative out of high school. I'm ok with limited use of likeness tied to things like loss of future earnings insurance. I made another suggestion above. I was for a stipend.
I just don't see why a lot of people are selling this as, the only way to serve the interest of (some) student athletes is to mandate that college sports are forcibly turned professional. No, that's not the only possible solution and it's a rather dangerous one at that.
One of my major concerns is that some people are approaching this from an idealistic standpoint. Whether it is to preserve some notion of purity, or the idea that these players have to be professionals. I don't see how we can really claim to care about what is best for the athletes when we only care the method and not the results.
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