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“The top 50 schools break away, come up with a system of paying athletes and determining a national champion; of negotiating new multibillion-dollar television deals and divisions of 10 teams each; of eliminating all pretense of playing by the rules and playing for the common good of a common goal. No more recruiting rules, no more bowl games. No more eligibility standards, no more college degrees.”

Matt Hayes, of Sporting News, correctly anticipates that stories about Donna Shalala’s professional football team bring the NCAA that much closer to extinction.

Why the hell should the multimillionaires running college football and basketball have to deal with some dipshit organization run by college presidents who put fine businessmen like John Junker out of business? Junker is our business, and the NCAA doesn’t seem to get that.

Sure, the organization is basically toothless; but it’s forced us to come up with all sorts of fake coursework for our team members… Sometimes it forces us to take important players off the field just when we need them… It takes our wins away… Shit like that…

Secession is the only way. Places like Auburn and Clemson and Miami and Alabama know exactly what they are, and they’ll thank us for finally allowing them to be what they are.

And don’t forget: With the NCAA and its financial penalties out of the way, there’s that much more to go around.

Margaret Soltan, August 17, 2011 2:29PM
Posted in: sport

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4 Responses to ““The top 50 schools break away, come up with a system of paying athletes and determining a national champion; of negotiating new multibillion-dollar television deals and divisions of 10 teams each; of eliminating all pretense of playing by the rules and playing for the common good of a common goal. No more recruiting rules, no more bowl games. No more eligibility standards, no more college degrees.””

  1. theprofessor Says:

    God, please let it be so. This is Gilligan’s ticket out of D-I right into D-III.

  2. jim Says:

    It won’t happen. There aren’t 50 schools with profitable football operations. I’d be surprised if there are 20. And many of those 20 will have hidden costs picked up by the university in general. Perhaps even Alabama football would be unprofitable under GAAP. Basketball is a bit better. Its costs are lower and there are more revenue events, but even so I’d doubt there are 50 schools where basketball makes money.

    The truth is that minor league football requires the cover of non-profit universities and subsidies from them to continue to exist.

    It would, of course, be a good thing if it did happen. Not least because its impact on other university sports would be amazingly positive. But it won’t.

  3. Mr Punch Says:

    Jim is in fact wrong. In effect, all the football programs at AQ conferences, plus a couple of others, make money (and all the rest lose) — though there are hidden costs, mainly for facilities, being picked up. It’s the overall intercollegiate athletics programs that lose money in all but a few cases. That is, football is a huge loss center for hundreds of schools but break-even or better (sometimes much better)for 75 or so. Three 16-team conferences plus Notre Dame and BYU gives the 50, and they’ll do much better without the 20-25 programs that will be left behind this time.

    I don’t foresee secession from the NCAA in basketball – just football.

  4. econprof Says:

    First of all, UD, could you please (pretty please) be a bit more careful with the headlines: “50 best universities” is a bit misleading. Most of the people reading your blog will think of Harvard, Yale, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, CalTech and others – and not Texas Tech. So it gave me a bit of shock – even the institution I work is proud to be a top 50: So the headline did give me a shock.

    Anyway, I think this is a positive development: Everything will be more honest from now on. At least the mingling of the finances between university and football team will end. So: let them go, and wish them luck.

    There will not be any more hypocrisy about “student athletes”. Football players have short careers. So one model to help them would be financing their studies after they stop playing for the university (and could not break into NFL). Maybe there was some selection bias (econprof is rather mathematical), but I did not have any problems with “athletes”: One even wrote his undergraduate thesis with me, and he was very motivated..

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