Sports for Pay
 

Now we are going to pay High School kids to play sports. Most States, including Florida, will allow High School athletes to get paid for “their name, image and likeness”. Professional players can make as much as 700 million playing baseball. Some get over 100 million for batting 250/260. 400 million if you are a reasonable good golfer and play for LIV. College level sports will allow you to get payed and the best players are gravitating to the Big Conferences with the best players. The Olympics, the epitome of amateur sports, are professionals now. Well, I could go on but you get the picture. Is a “sports bubble” being created? Are sports more important than education?

NIL resulted from the NCAA monopolization of its student athletes. The fact is....college sports are the economic engine for most D1 colleges/universities.....not the Sci Tech, Biology and History buildings on said campuses. You can make an argument that that is the wrong priority...but you can’t argue the fact. Because NIL was a result of court action....it’s implementation and roll out was pretty unrestricted. I think it needs to be scaled at some point. As far as HS athletes...there simply isn’t that much of an NIL marketplace unless you were some sort of generational talent or Lebrons kid! In either case, if someone is making money off of your name, image or likeness....I definitely have no problem with anyone....regardless of age, ‘copyrighting’ their brand from these ‘pirates’!

A typical baseball game (America’s pastime) Me, wife, son, wife and two grandsons in decent seats at the ol’ballgame with hotel rooms, hot dogs, soda’s and adult beverages and dinner, etc. Wow! I guess it best to watch the game on our 65” television and invite the gang over to the house. Two tickets to the Cubs World Series in 2016 (resold tickets) 4K a piece. Middle class almost locked out of going in person to world Series, Super Bowl or Final four. Somebody has to pay for these outrageous salaries.

There are 20K packages to tonight’s C’s Finals. The corporate suits or entitled ‘celebrities’....or pink hats as we call them...are the ones that drive up those numbers. The best you can do nowadays, if you want to take a family, is the preseason!

Personally, I believe in capitalism and competition for business. So, are sports more important than education? Yes. Do I think a teacher is worth millions per year? No. Schools would be a lot better if they were allowed to compete.

Confused about the last sentence in your post.
Compete how? They already compete athletically and as someone with kids, I remember going through the college selection process as to who is gonna receive my 100K -250K in tuition. That competition has existed for generations

Our education system is bad because schools cannot compete against each other.

Some people will says that teachers are underpaid, but they don't want to fire bad teachers or close bad schools. Sports doesn't work that way.

I think there is little doubt education would be improved if a voucher system was put in place , public Ed competing with private, but getting that past the NEA would be just about impossible, they have a large and very effective lobbying arm that protects the public school teachers

I agree, but paying teachers more money, as the OP implied, would not improve education either.

Agreed , private schools have a higher SAT result at a lower cost, from my experience this has much to do with parental involvement as well as many private schools are run by church and other religious organizations . The teacher see it as a calling, the bureaucracies of private schools much smaller and more responsive. I did not read the entire article but a there was a Washington newspaper story how GPA were going up and SAT scores going down . Does that sound like public bureaucrats at work?

Sports are important but not as important as education. Without education many of the breakthroughs in science and medicine would not happen.

If you understand how admissions works at colleges and universities, you would know how insignificant SAT scores are in today’s acceptances. Most have abandoned its requirement as there are many more metrics out there that are not standardized in nature.... to judge the merits of a prospective student. AP level course load an example! The SAT only intended benefit was to barcode tests to pinpoint problem teachers....fair enough. But that is public bureaucracy at its finest....and it failed.
Your take on private schools clearly is a regional observation, as the majority of private schools have no religious affiliations.....what you’re talking about is parochial school. To say that ’parental involvement’ is higher with parents of private or parochial students vs those of public school parents.....on its face is an ignorant statement.

I don't disagree, but your original post was about paying athletes who play well, and comparing that to education. Throwing money at education will not improve it unless you hold the teachers and the schools accountable for what they do for the money. We are spending plenty of money for education and not getting an adequate return on the investment. You can pay a lousy teacher $10 million per year but that will not make them teach any better.

NCAA sports, which have a professional league to play in after school, turns those colleges and universities athletic programs into trade schools, nothing more.

I wonder if you would care to document your "fact"? You know, real numbers. I will go first. Ohio State leads the nation in income from sports In 2023 it received about 280 million income and spent 275 million on athletics so the University pocketed about 5 million in profit to use for non athletic purposes. Don't believe me... here is the report summary


Now that is pretty meaningless unless you know the total non-sports budget of OSU. If it is 10 million then the 5 million sports profit is huge. But the real fact, the truth is that for 2024 the budget for OSU is over 9 billion dollars. The 2024 and 2025 budget is here.

So tell me again about how sports income is the economic engine for D1 schools when the biggest receiver of sports income gets almost no net income from its sports program.

OSU running a profit at all is not the usual. Here is the key quote from a PBS review of the issue
"expenditures by college athletics departments are such that, with the exception of a small number of schools, athletic expenses surpass revenues at the overwhelming majority of Division I programs"

So your fact is not holding up very well to the light of actual information. Opinions based on false beliefs are a big thing in the country right now. See my tag line.