Re: [gatortalk] Re: [gatornews] [SUN]: With UF contract extension in back pocket, Grantham turns down NFL’s Bengals

On Feb 15, 2019, at 12:44 PM, Foley Santamaria <foleysantamaria@gmail.com> wrote:

Billions of dollars of revenue being generated. Give the players a flat percentage of all revenues generated like they do in the NBA or NFL say 40 or 50% and everything is fair. Everyone wins. Theses players are out here risking serious injury and getting pennies. Completely unfair. 

I've never really seen it as an issue of right or wrong or what players deserve.

UF can afford to pay our players something decent. Let's day that a player needs about $15,000 a year above room and board to be normal student. Our daughter was pre-paid at Florida, and that's about what we spent each year on top of tuition and housing. 

My issues are twofold.

1. UF and a handful of colleges can afford this. Most can not. Most athletic departments lose money. If only a handful of colleges could afford this type of payment, then competition for those scholarships would be insane. The top twenty classes would never change, it would be the same schools that can spend 1.2 million on the players without blinking.

2. Title IX. Colleges need to keep matters relatively balanced between men's and women's sports. Whether a sport is revenue neutral, positive or loses money is not relevant. How much the school spends on each sport is the criteria. Very quickly, all athletes would need to be paid the same stipend. This may not be a bad thing, and - again - UF could afford it. But, that 1.2 million just turned into 5 million. Now the top athletes in all sports will be going to the same 20 or schools that can afford it. We will have just killed Vanderbilt's athletics, I would wager.

So, for this to work, we would need a mechanism for all athletes to receive an equal and significant stipend. It can't be a percentage of revenue generated without violating Title IX, given that football produces significantly more than any other sport.

Who to administer this stipend? The NCAA? Thats seems logical, but a bit scary to give it that much additional power.

-Zeb