[slg]

No, that is a poor conclusion. Athletes are not distributed in the nature you are suggesting. There are profitable players who exist on unprofitable teams and there are profitable teams that exist in unprofitable athletic departments. The reverse is also true.

Honestly the biggest stumbling block for me to be in support of paying college athletes are all these details on deciding who gets paid and how much since they don't all provide uniform value. There are situations in which one person might be worth millions and their teammate might be worth absolutely nothing. That is one of the reasons why I think allowing players to profit of their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights seems like the first step. That allows the free market to better assess their value and reward them for it. Roughly half the states have already passed, are currently debating, or have recently debated laws allowing college players to profit of their NIL rights.

[chadash]

> No, that is a poor conclusion. Athletes are not distributed in the nature you are suggesting. There are profitable players who exist on unprofitable teams and there are profitable teams that exist in unprofitable athletic departments. The reverse is also true.

Fair, but a few schools would be disproportionately affected by paid athletes. Ohio State and Alabama would probably pony up a lot, just as they spend tons on their athletic departments right now. Northwestern probably wouldn't, except maybe in rare cases.

> That is one of the reasons why I think allowing players to profit of their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights seems like the first step.

Agree this sounds like a good first step. It's utterly ridiculous that they can't.

> That allows the free market to better assess their value and reward them for it.

Why is this better than schools bidding on player contracts? Would you argue that when Patrick Mahomes got a $150 million contract, that wasn't the free market making an assessment of his value?

[slg]

>Why is this better than schools bidding on player contracts? Would you argue that when Patrick Mahomes got a $150 million contract, that wasn't the free market making an assessment of his value?

I think completely open bidding on players will cause more problems. Like I said, you can have teammates in which one is worth millions and the other is worth nothing. They would both be putting in the same amount of work and ostensibly be doing the same job, but one is just drastically better than the other. That might be worse for public perception than them all getting nothing.

I imagine any system of paying players would probably come with both a floor and ceiling for how much a school can compensate a player.

Also this isn't really the point of your comment, but like many athletes Mahomes has never and potentially will never sign a true free market contract with a team. He was drafted by the Chiefs so they had exclusive rights to negotiate with him. His huge extension was negotiated with the Chiefs during his initial contract which means he couldn't field offers from other teams. If he was a true free agent, he would have received even more money. He was willing to take a discount on that value for the added security of signing the contract now and guaranteeing some portion of that money. It is endorsements where someone like Mahomes can see his true free market rate because he can have the Nikes, Adidas, Gatorades, etc of the world competing against each other. Giving college players NIL rights gives them the opportunity to cash in on those free market endorsement deals.

[Zimahl]

Just to add, the NFL is even more closed-market in that each team has a salary cap. So giving Mahomes more means someone else on the team gets less.

[slg]

True and superstars like him are often guilted into taking less than their true value so the team still has enough to pay other high quality players.