How’s everyone’s weekend going?
Thanks for spending a portion of your Sunday with the Six.
Let’s get right to it.
THE ILLUSION OF AMATEURISM IS DEAD
It took one hundred years for college athletics to enter an era of inevitability, that sports on campus could no longer abstain from compensating its work force.
But the process of going from acceptance to facing the cold hard truth—that colleges have to start writing checks directly to athletes—feels like its happened almost overnight. The Manhatten Project took approximately three years from conception to dropping the bomb on Japan. The timeline for the decimation of amateurism has not been all that dissimilar.
On May 23, representatives of the NCAA and Power 5 conferences (Big 10, Big 12, ACC, SEC and what’s left of the Pac 12) reached a settlement over a series of class action lawsuits filed by former athletes asking for restitution for services rendered (throwing a football, pitching a softball, etc). As part of the agreement, the defendants agreed to a pay out of $2.8 billion in damages and back pay to the athletes named in the suit.
They agreed to the settlement for reasons most litigants do—a verdict would not go in their favor. The $3B pay out would be chump change to a trial loss. Think three or four times that amount. The Power 5 would be bled dry in settlement pay outs and legal fees. Even with the settlement, estimates predict payouts to be between $20-25 million per school.
It will likely take the rest of the year to figure out the details of who gets what. The courts and lawyers will hash that out. But there’s more to the particulars of how this particular case shakes out than maybe others.
We are three years removed now from the courts rubber stamping Name, Image, and Likeness income. This allowed college athletes (and high school in some cases) to make money in commercials, autograph signings, party appearances and other events. It was marketplace driven, mostly designated to the private sector. The schools were largely out of that business, preferring to leverage NIL as a recruiting tool. With any marketplace driven initiative, there were winners (Caleb Williams, Caitlin Clark) and losers (third string running back for Western Michigan). But the model could not sustain itself as long as the education class remained stubborn to the “student-athlete” label for its uncompensated work force.
For years, the NCAA has spent millions in congressional lobbying fees with the sole purpose of protecting one rule: the restriction on schools being able to directly pay athletes. While the litany of lawsuits worked its way through the courts, the NCAA begged for legislation that gave it anti-trust protection. But Congress showed little interest in creating guardrails, preoccupied with more pressing domestic and global concerns (and election season). Unable to get organized and invent their own framework, the Power 5 schools were at the mercy of the court. Now they will have to pay up and it’s going to be costly.
What we don’t know yet is how the money will be apportioned. What I think the schools hope to gain from the settlement is the structure moving forward they were unable to figure out on their own.
Such as: if the initial payouts are in the 20-$25M range as reported, will that serve as a pseudo salary cap? Will athletes be signed to contracts? (there doesn’t appear to be much momentum for wide spread unionization. But that type of organization could be attempted in certain pockets of the country). How will the contracts be structured? Will football players get more than the track athletes? Do athletes even have to pretend they are students and attend classes? All questions with no clear answer as of yet, although with the public sector now involved, expect pleas for “equity” to be loud and boisterous.
All parties involved all culpable, with plenty of blame to go around. NCAA has operated as a cartel for the better part of a century, running a billion dollar business on college campuses. Its labor force, 18-22 year old students, have been underpaid for a long time, a market inefficiency bound to be corrected. The concept of student-athlete in the traditional sense is nothing more than melancholy nostalgia, like $2 gas and Bon Jovi mixtapes.
The professionalization of college athletics has been a talking point in our culture seemingly forever. Now it’s here. We’re never going back.
At least we still got the games.
Let’s proceed with the Six.
1. Trump Trial Verdict: 5 Questions Explained.
The Trump Trial verdict is in: guilty. How we feel about the verdict depends on our personal view of the former president. If someone feels he is the biggest threat to democracy since Khrushchev, the ruling validates that belief. If a person is on the Trump-is-aggrieved side of the ledger, the conviction validates that belief. This article via The Conversation answers five key questions about the trial and how the jury came to the conclusion it did. Buckle up, it’s going to be a wild summer and fall leading up to November.
2. Generational Theft: Public Superintendent Pensions Valued at $8M.
An excellent report via Wirepoints on public education pensions. The Superintendent of New Trier District 203, Paul Sally, is set to retire next year. What a retirement package he will be walking into, with lifetime benefits totaling nearly $8 million. Sally’s current compensation—totaling around $350k per year—is funded by taxpayers in his district. If buying a home in that school district, you contribute. But pensions are a different calculation. According to Wirepoints: “Teacher pensions are paid for by state income taxes, so when Paul Sally gets a multimillion lifetime pension, all Illinois taxpayers have to chip in, from Carbondale to Rockford and from Quincy to Danville.” And it’s not just one district as “the state’s top TRS pensioners, meanwhile, can all expect to collect more than $9 million in benefits.” The numbers are not sustainable and provide the latest reminder why people move out of Illinois to states with less hands in pockets. Taxpayer-funded public pensions to this degree may be the law, but how is it good for residents of the state?
3. Bill Walton: One Of One And Now He’s Gone.
There are few athletes who transcend sports, their magnetism so larger than life as to impact the populace at large. Bill Walton was one of those figures. The basketball start turned broadcaster died earlier this week at the age of 71. Many tributes on Walton are posted on the internet, this one I found very touching and poignant. It’s from a longtime west coast writer who got to know Walton at a very young age and the two became friends through late adulthood, bonding over basketball, books and the Grateful Dead. RIP Bill Walton, one of the most unique sports—and cultural— figures of the last 50 years.
4. Why Did This Successful Novelist Stop Writing?
Colleen Hoover, a formerly self-published author who has sold over 50 million books, has an extreme case of writer's block. "She has been ritually telling her editors she’ll get them something 'in three months”. She is egregiously behind on every deadline. Her editors are kind, but Hoover is terrified. Why? It's an "issue of scale". She is a lightning rod for all criticism of "lowbrow" genre fiction writing. A good profile from Texas Monthly on the symptoms of writer’s block and how it can strike even the most prolific of authors.
5. What A Viral Story Looked Like, 1940s Edition.
In 1947, a boy named Richard Allen disappeared for a week, with $20 in his pocket, to indulge in non-stop movies-watching (16), comic books-buying (15) and candy bars-consuming (150). The UPI/San Francisco Examiner clip detailing the boy’s wild week went viral in recent years. A writer from the San Francisco Gazette spent months searching for Allen and what he discovered in this entertaining read will likely move and delight.
6. The Youth Sports Industrial Complex, In Satire.
A hilarious take up on the current state of youth sports. Ecuador and Mumbai get shout outs as do kids’ names with the letter ‘x’ in them. There probably isn’t a travel baseball roster in American that doesn’t include a Jaxon or Braxton. More house leagues, please!
Thanks for reading everybody and have a great rest of your weekend.
Have a suggestion for The Sunday Six? Send email to jonjkerr@gmail.com.