The August 2018 edition of college athletes being punished for selling their property: 13 UNC football players getting suspended up to four games for selling team-issued Jordan Brand sneakers. There are many previous editions.
If we’re gonna prevent some people in college athletics from selling their own stuff, why not everybody?
Pay NCAA admins in tuition and Jordans.
NCAA rules forbid athletes from making any money by any means not obviously available to regular students.
In a fun twist, that’s pretty much the flip side of the logic the NCAA used in deciding not to punish UNC for shuffling athletes through a fraud-y class: it was available to regular students. It’d be easy to conclude from those two stories that the NCAA actually cares more about amateurism than education, if one were so inclined.
I’ve always just proposed we make the same rules for coaches and admins that we have for the student-athletes: pay everyone in room, board, books, and tuition, plus team merch they can’t sell until they leave.
A doctorate for Nick Saban should be exactly as valuable as a bachelor’s degree for a future No. 1 draft pick, yes?
Like Jimbo Fisher wouldn’t wear the cowboy-boot version of these shoes, the ones those Tar Heels sold for money:
How much money, by the way? Several eBay listings that’ve been floating around on the ACC internet have indicated selling prices in the $600s and up. I and every college student I ever knew would’ve sprinted to sell these things for that kind of money, and I like sneakers!
For some of these players, grossing $525 for some shoes might literally have more value than suiting up for a game against the shambles of East Carolina. (The NFL, which has happily drafted several players caught up in similar stuff before, evidently doesn’t view dorm room capitalism as a character concern.)
Picture a very fulfilled Mark Emmert trading Bahamas Bowl commemorative parkas for pizza so that he can power through his statistics mid-term. Why are we depriving him of this experience?
(And, as always, when one criticizes the NCAA, the real culprits are the schools themselves, but luckily, your school’s president is close to some classrooms that can “cash in” — so to speak — all this tuition anyway.)
More college football
- Jimbo Fisher’s Aggies might be good by 2019, but HOO WEE that 2018 schedule.
- Bama is actually interesting this year, because of its totally rebuilt secondary.
- Will Muschamp is awesome at being an underdog, but kind of bad at being a favorite. Well, South Carolina’s no longer an underdog, soooo ...
- How the College GameDay spotlight makes this an even bigger game for Notre Dame.
- A history of suspended coaches shows this Urban Meyer thing could go all sorts of ways.
- Here’s one pretty well-argued prediction that Meyer is out, but we’ll see.
- A rally at Ohio State in support of Meyer included some really silly signs bashing ESPN, which fired the reporter who broke all this.
- A Memphis linebacker describes his mullet in all the ways you’d ever want a mullet to be described.
- Here are the 25 correct reactions to your team being ranked (or even not ranked) in the preseason polls.
- It’s always a good time to read about Randy Moss.
- The Shutdown Fullcast is playing a live show in Atlanta on Aug. 31. If you’re nearby, do come through. We’ll have giveaways, guests, and all sorts of dumb fun.
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