https://sports.yahoo.com/article/michigan-legend-tom-brady-current-134935461.html
“The commercialization of what’s happened in college sports, I wonder whether many kids these days will learn those sustainable traits that I think are invaluable to their life and life experience,” he said. “Are we doing them a disservice because we’re tempting them with some money in their pocket?
“My college experience was very challenging. It was very competitive. The lessons I learned in college — and certainly about competition — those traits transformed my life as a professional. I was ready to compete against anybody, because the competition in college toughened me up so much that I had a self-belief and self-confidence that whatever I was faced with, I could overcome that.
“If we take that away from a young student athlete to say, ‘You know what? I know it’s tough to compete. But you know what we’re gonna do: Before you have to compete, we’re actually going to put you somewhere else so that you don’t have to compete.’ That is absolutely the wrong thing to do to a young child.
I don't disagree. College sports is going to eat itself, especially NCAA football. It feels like a runaway train at this point.
College football is now officially a professional sport. I'm okay with players getting a stipend for their participation. With NIL and the transfer portal, it's difficult for smaller programs to maintain a team at all - period. The NFL has long used the NCAA for its minor league program. maybe that's a different topic. I use to get letters from my college asking for donations for scholarships for STUDENTS. Now I get letters asking me to donate to NIL programs. What does this do to tuition costs for students who want to study? Worse yet - NIL is now reaching down into high schoos and middle schools. An Alabama high school qb was recently offered a 6 figure NIL deal. This has got to be a disruption of education at that level!
@rusty: I hear you. I started going to UTEP (U. of Texas @ El Paso) basketball games last year and really saw a lot of great Division I basketball, so I bought a season ticket for this year. Now occasionally I get an email asking me to donate to their NIL program. I can't afford to do that. I wonder how a comparitively low budget program like UTEP is going to remain competitive at all at the Division I level. Side note: My season ticket was $215, and considering that they play about 15 home games, it's a great deal, $14.33 per game. You can't get a better value for some high level college basketball than that. And it may only be $215, but fact is I AM contributing to their NIL fund. The place almost never sells out, so that's $215 they wouldn't have had. Also, I like that fact that I am watching guys who are playing for the love of the game and to get an education. Who knows, maybe those kind of players will pull off some upsets this year. And to top if off, they've got a really beautiful state of the art arena, capacity 12,000.
No civilian should be donating to an NIL fund, that's absurd. I'd sooner sponsor an art student. Athletics should be funding research and academics to keep tuition affordable. If college athletics eats itself, fine, because that is extracurricular. People go into debt to get an education, not to pay for an amateur athlete's new car.
The more college leagues expand nationally and chase the network broadcast money the more they are going to hurt their own education institutions. Not great at a time when the Federal government is extorting money from them, and remote learning is thinning campus student populations. Universities are going to have to pivot and update the way they operate in the coming years if things keep going in the same direction.
Don't get me wrong, I like sports too, but not at the expense of affordable higher ed. Especially publicly funded universities - education funding in Alabama gets cut but no one ever complained that Nick Saban was the highest paid state employee for years (which in most states is the case with college head coach).
