Yeah, I know nothing about the NCAA and how it is supposed to work.
I was a Div. I athlete. You?
Yes, before I learned about the
real business of the NCAA. I was not a scholarship athlete.
Back then, we were just fighting for larger stipends in order to cover basics and for the right for athletes on scholarship to be able to earn as much as they could in the summertime.
It was - and still is - a myth (perpetrated by the NCAA though their mouthpiece, ESPN) that thousands and thousands of college athletes are receiving all sorts of unreasonable pay and benefits while in school. Reality is that most kids on a typical D1 football team are barely scraping by, even those with full scholarships. In other words, they're pretty much like everyone else on a work-study program at the university, only they have to work more.
It's complete and total bullshit that the kids can be franchised, marketed, and sold in whole or in part as a condition of their
non-guaranteed scholarships and that the sale can continue
in perpetuity without any further rights or compensation granted to the subject(s) thereof....while at the same time telling these athlete-students that they themselves do NOT have the right to do the same, in or out of the school's uniform, lest they be in violation of NCAA rules.
Meanwhile, non-athlete students are NOT limited in any form as to how they may market themselves. The NCAA is not some objective, 3rd-party institution whose sole purpose is to maintain 'integrity' and amateurism in college athletics. No, it's a collection of college presidents whose job it is to make money, period. And the less control the athletes have of their own images, then the more the NCAA gets to make without having to share it with the athletes.
