StrangeSox

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 04:43 PM) Nor do most people generate income comiserate to the value they generate for their company. But the other side of it is that it isn't their capital at risk. If the NBA fails the only thing the players lose is future salary. I'm talking about the NCAA here. But losing your future salary i.e. how to feed, clothe and house yourself is a pretty big deal whereas an NBA owner whose team folds is still going to have a bunch of money elsewhere.

That 30-for-30 on broke athletes was interesting edit: but if I'm remembering it correctly plenty of the broke athletes were NFL players. "Going to college" for 3-4 years of usually meaningless classes when you're really just there to play sports isn't going to educate all that much on personal finance.

QUOTE (ZoomSlowik @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 04:35 PM) I suck at dual quotes, responding to Balta and Strange :re the cap floor... The problem is that they're doing it in unison with gang-raping the teams that spend over the luxury tax, so they're dragging everyone to the middle. The Lakers can't spend $100 million anymore unless they want to subsidize the rest of the league. So basically the teams that make money and are trying to compete are sending money to the s***ty teams so they can pay Tyrus Thomas $8 million a year. Huh? That's fine if it's like football and there are a ton of different positions where you can spend money and you can maybe make up the difference on the field by paying two good defensive players the same money the Patriots are paying Tom Brady. However, spending $16 million on Lebron and spending $16 million on Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva are very different things. I don't disagree that it provides bad incentives/requirements for GM's to work around, but it guarantees that the players as a whole will receive, at a minimum, at least 85% of the combined cap space. Maybe there are better ways to ensure they get that same minimum amount of revenue, but that's why it's there.

f*** Reid.

QUOTE (ZoomSlowik @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 04:26 PM) This is another thing I don't get: why is the salary floor like 85% of the salary cap? You're basically forcing teams that are rebuilding to sign stupid, cap-clogging contracts on mediocre players, and then they wonder why these teams are losing money. Make the salary floor something more reasonable (maybe like $25 million) and then lay off some of the crazy luxury tax penalties so teams that are actually trying to compete aren't forced to let good players go. Are we really going to see a substanial difference in the caliber of the team if the Kings or Bobcats only have a $20 million payroll? To drive up the overall compensation/revenue share going to the players. If the owners wanted a lower floor, they'd have to give up something else.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 04:24 PM) Hell to the No. I would take the money, and if I want to be a college pimp, Id go rent an apartment in a college town and use my celebrity to be the king anyways. But that sweet money is going to be in my bank yesterday. Yeah I don't think multi-millionaire superstar professional athletes have a harder time enjoying life than some college kids.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 04:23 PM) I love that people are forgetting the INSANE f***ing perks these lottery picks get. If I were one of them, and I was amply covered by insurance (i.e., going from dirt poor to being insured by a few million even if I could never play another game in my life) I would stay for 4 years. f*** the money. You are a king of an entire student body of 35,000 people. You are a friggin' star. And if you win big, you're a hero for life to an entire fanbase. You go to the NBA and yeah, you get paid. But you also work your ass off. You're traveling/playing games constantly for 3/4 of the year. Who's having more fun in life - Cody Zeller or Kyrie Irving? I'm guessing Zeller. (Edit: and yes, I realize that this is a much more difficult choice to make when confronted with the REAL option of making tens of millions. But I'd like to think having a ball in college would be worth the 1-2 year wait) If you were dirt-poor and couldn't receive any compensation during that 4 years of college play, you wouldn't be living the high life. You'd be dirt-poor, but with a roof over your head and regular meals. Unless you're relying on corruption to undermine the NCAA rules, which means we're right back to asking why those payments shouldn't just be above-board in the first place. Your rep, fame and fortunes as a professional athlete are going to be much, much greater than as a college athlete. I don't think Lebron missed out on much by skipping college.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 04:12 PM) Do you honestly need a summary of how bad at winning championships NBA GM's are? You can write an article like this every year, and then every year we gawk at how much money got handed out by some GM who had cap space to spend and found a guy whose sole talent was being tall. The NBA GM's are actually in a terrible position. The best way for an NBA Team to suddenly become a title contender is to hit the lottery, but that means, for most GM's, building the worst team you possibly can. One way to do taht would be the Marlins route...but the NBA Has a salary floor so you can't just sell everything off. The end result of this is a lot of GM's waste enormous amounts of money on guys who they hope will make them good enough to keep their jobs for one more year. The NBA GM's can't stop themselves from spending $8 million a year on Tyrus Thomas (while giving up a draft pick to boot!). A workable system for the NBA Basically requires the owners to protect their franchises from their GM's, because the GM's best method for success means risking his job on a 25% (at best) lottery chance. Ok, so that's a good example of how dumb NBA GM's are. How the owners and the commissioner negotiated with the NBAPA recently isn't.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 04:04 PM) No, but their Owners do, and I am sure the owners dont like seeing picks and money being wasted on the Leon Smiths of the world yeah but talking about the latest labor negotiations doesn't really tell me anything about how dumb GM's are

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 04:00 PM) Given the last labor negotiations....yes. NBA GM's don't negotiate with the NBAPA.

Let's open up the free market to student athletes and see if you're right. What's the harm? It's not like major NCAA sports isn't already incredibly corrupt.

US map re-drawn with 50 states of equal population http://fakeisthenewreal.org/reform/ thought it was kind of an interesting map, didn't read the accompanying page

QUOTE (ZoomSlowik @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 02:46 PM) Um, that's pretty much what they did. Do you think David Stern just randomly pulled this out of his ass at the negotiating table? The owners, which make up the league, wanted it. Are NBA GM's so bad that they need a hard rule to prevent them from being bad at their jobs and prevent the occasional pro-ready HS grad from playing, though?

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 02:35 PM) Nobody said these attorneys and agents will work for free. THey will work under the premise that their star client will get drafted and paid well, and THEN they will get paid, which is why the previous post said delay payment. There are players that come from a poor background, and of course they cannot afford good representation at first, but the people that want to represent them know that it is a gravy train if they have a great athlete as a client. Its not like they are going to ask for all their payment up front before the draft happens. otoh this works well for big-name, super-star athletes but probably not so well for late-round or UDFA level players.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 02:29 PM) The real difficulty in showing a specific benefit is the "Red Queen" phenomenon. Everyone is running as fast as they can just to stay where they are. If Tennessee, for example (where I'm at), just decided that they were going to get rid of their football program, do you think it would impact their students? Guarantee it would. They'd rapidly start attracting fewer, worse students. They'd sell less merchandise. They'd have fewer families with connections to the university. Businesses nearby would be hurt and that would hurt student life. The counterexample right now is Alabama, which has seen a significant improvement in student quality and quantity (according to people I've spoken to there) over the last 3-4 years...which just happened to correlate with a fairly successful football team. Every single team that works this way is generating a whole lot of uncounted things for their university that don't get put on paper. Great, so if we accept that as a true net benefit for most NCAA teams (and not just those with big-name programs), we're still stuck with the second part: why does that benefit go away if these student athletes are allowed to receive compensation or outside endorsement deals?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 02:28 PM) They are getting a free education. Even at face value that is a lot of money. It's value is a lot less than the revenues super-star athletes generate for their schools. What else do we need to know if we want to determine if multi-million dollar sports franchises athletic departments could afford to compensate their employees students?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 02:28 PM) The kids are getting a 20k or more a year free education. Would it be different if they paid them $25,000 a year and then charged them full price for their education? The value of their scholarship does not come near to the value they generate for the team or the value of the external contracts they're forbidden from signing.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 02:26 PM) Is that really the case though? A whole lot of places have unpaid internships that people are willing to accept because it opens opportunities for them in the future. That's not an inherent flaw...that's the natural response to an extremely competitive industry. A league with 500 total highly paid jobs per year can set enormous entry barriers and still be able to come up with people who are willing to attempt to get through that barrier. If people are truly unhappy with the restrictions of their internship...they can go find a different line of work, right? That they can and do do these things isn't justification for them. I'm pretty surprised to see you making this argument.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 02:25 PM) I'm telling you revenue by itself is a meaningless number, much like net worth. Ok, so what else do we need to know to determine if schools could afford to compensate athletes?

Well, if your business model is reliant on the bulk of your labor force going unpaid (and, on top of that, actively forbidding them from getting outside revenue streams), something's inherently flawed. If you could show me that there's a net benefit for NCAA colleges on the academic side (don't a lot of athletics programs lose money?), that would be a point in the NCAA's favor. But you'd still need to explain why you would lose that benefit if student-athletes were compensated.

If that attorney is working on a contingency, sure. If a college superstar came to you with a contract to revue, you wouldn't be willing to delay payment until after their contract was signed?

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 02:15 PM) I dont think you understand how bargaining power works. If I am a rich person, I can hire any agent, lawyer I want, I have the money. If I am a poor person, I may be able to hire any agent, lawyer I want, it depends on if I have the right case/talent etc. People with money are almost always likely to be better represented than people without money. Just because they have an "agent" doesnt mean they have a good one. Ricky Williams hired Masta P. Im pretty sure if Ricky had some money already and could hire outside counsel, they would have told him that was a very very stupid idea. And I have explained why the NBA doesnt want to deal with people coming in who are already rich and entitled. Its always easier to control someone who has very little. If they dont have the money to lord over their heads, theyd have even more trouble keeping these guys in line. Eh, any star athlete can sign with a big-name agent before they get their first contract. The agent understands when that payday is coming.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 02:05 PM) The protection of the overall product and business is a legitimate justification. There is no reason the NBA should have to suffer just because a 15 year old wants to strike it rich. You're missing the part where someone in the NBA still has to decide to draft and pay that 15 year old.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 14, 2013 -> 02:03 PM) Revenue is a garbage number. It means nothing. You might as well use net worth Revenue means how much the team brings in. If some of that revenue is diverted towards student-athletes, then it comes from somewhere else. Maybe the seven-figure salaries of the coaches and administrators. Or do you want to cry poor on behalf of the NCAA colleges now and tell me that, despite being a multi-billion dollar entity, they couldn't possible afford to actually pay the athletes?

Illinois senate is currently debating a SSM bill (expected to pass) http://new.livestream.com/blueroomstream/events/1862836 It passed!