The NCAA Is Gaslighting You
In last month’s antitrust case in Oakland challenging the artificial caps on athlete compensation, the NCAA’s defense included the restatement of an imaginary economic principle that is fundamental to its existence: College athletes shouldn’t make money, the NCAA argued, because if players were paid...
No, Paying NCAA Athletes Won't Cost Them Money
Few things get me as angry as seeing people oppose a reform because of unrealistic concerns about imaginary unforeseen consequences. Pick a problem and propose some way to make it better, and some concern troll will immediately pop out from behind a curtain to say that there is some remote chance of...
Why Daily Fantasy Is Such A Problem For The NCAA
Of course it makes sense for the NCAA and its major college football conferences to oppose having their athletes participate in Daily Fantasy contests like those hosted by FanDuel or DraftKings. The ten conferences that make up the NCAA’s Football Bowl Division (FBS) are major sports leagues, sellin...
The NCAA Has Always Paid Players; Now It's Just Harder To Pretend They Don't
Contrary to popular belief, the NCAA has only ever truly enforced a nationwide prohibition on payments to athletes for three years—from 1948 to 1951. Prior to that, there was no NCAA-wide rule on scholarships at all, meaning that the full flowering of the popularity of college football prior to Worl...
How Title IX Actually <i>Makes </i>Money For Some Schools
It’s pretty common to hear that Title IX creates a huge financial burden on colleges such that even if a school is lucky enough to be making millions on football or basketball, federal law mandates that a certain amount be spent on women’s sports. Leaving aside how this story implies schools are bei...
Exciting NCAA Tourney Upsets: Not Brought To You By Enforced Amateurism
Over the next week, a relatively unheralded team from a small conference will probably defeat a blue blood program from a major conference. This will be surprising because we will have expected the more powerful team to win, what with their larger budget, better-paid coach, etc....
Gender Equity Is Not A Zero-Sum Game
The world of college sports reform can be divided into three camps. The first is the NCAA itself, which seems to want to change just enough to have everyone stop bashing it just for a little while. Then there are two opposing camps, both of which see the NCAA's centralized control of college sport...
Wait, The NCAA Can Pay Players' Parents Now?
The day before yesterday, if a school reached the Final Four or the College Football Playoff and anyone—the NCAA, the CFP, the school, a booster, President Obama, etc.—agreed to pay for a parent of one of the athletes to travel to the game, it was unethical conduct, an extra benefit, and punishabl...
Michigan's Problem Isn't Commercialism; Michigan's Problem Is It Stinks
Recently, I've been reading about Michigan's attendance woes (which only really count as "woes" if you consider a college selling out 95 percent of a 100,000-seat stadium at $75+, plus an unspecified donation per ticket, woeful), and it occurs to me that lay people and economists think very differen...
Don’t Let Anyone Tell You The O’Bannon Ruling Conflicts With Title IX
I'm already starting to see rumblings out there that the recent ruling by Judge Claudia Wilken (of which I present a broader, preliminary analysis here) is somehow incompatible with the existing obligation of universities to comply with Title IX. That's simply false, and it's important to understan...
In The O'Bannon Decision, Truth Wins Out Over Rhetoric
Let me start by apologizing. Because of my own involvement in the Ed O'Bannon case, and because of past situations in which the NCAA has misquoted my own personal statements as if they represent the official opinions of the plaintiffs in the case, I can't be quite as analytical here as I might like,...
How Not To Reform The NCAA
There will be no new release of an EA NCAA Football game this year. The man most frequently blamed for this is a former UCLA basketball star named Ed O’Bannon, who had the temerity to sue the NCAA and EA for using his image without asking permission and without negotiating to pay for it. ...
What's Karl Marx Doing In These Arguments Against College Athlete Pay?
Bob Bowlsby is a man with a very influential job. He is the commissioner of the Big 12 conference, one of the so-called power conferences that helps set policy for major college football. He also harbors a belief that is most commonly associated with pre-20th-century economics, and has really on...
The Competitive-Balance Argument Against Paying Athletes Is Bullshit
High on the list of myths thrown out as excuses to delay or prevent the advent of pay-for-play is that the price-fixing engaged in by the 351 schools in Division 1, and especially the now 128 schools in FBS who play football, is necessary to ensure competitive balance across the sport. ...
How Athletic Departments (And The Media) Fudge The Cost Of Scholarships
Paula Lavigne has an insightful piece on ESPN.com about how college sports thrived even as the rest of America suffered through a terrible economic downturn starting in late 2008. Paula is one of the best people writing in the mainstream sports press on money issues, and this piece is no exception. ...
Iowa AD: Paying Players Is Too Complicated For Me And My $450K Salary
From a piece on the Iowa and Iowa State ADs' opposition to athlete unionization comes this doozy from Iowa's Gary Barta:...
Teams In The Orange Bowl Don't Make Any Money, And Other Lies
Originally published on Sportsgeekonomics....