The Game Is About To Change - III

    
Sophistry: the use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving.

I love each and every opportunity that presents itself to expand my lexicon of the English language.  I heard this word used the other day in a discussion about the Federal Reserve and I had to look it up.

What a great word…and is there a better situation to apply that word to than the term “Amateurism” and how the NCAA wants to portray it to the common masses?

I think not.

In fact, I think Mark Emmert could be described as a “Sophist Extraordinaire”.  He (and others  - College AD’s, etc.) wants everyone to believe that each of the 420,000 athletes that plays at any level in a college setting is of amateur status.  And while I believe that’s the case for 95% to 99% of the athletes that compete at the college level, it certainly CANNOT be applied to every athlete out there competing.  Not when there is over $10.6 Billion (that’s with a “B”) of revenue generated by collegiate sports annually (There was $1Billion in ad revenue from the NCAA tournament alone!) that everyone in the pipeline, Television execs, University AD’s, coaches, etc. gets to enjoy and profit from…with the exception of the actual revenue generators.  Want Proof? Here’s a Great link to Statistic Brain that runs it all down…

 

As I watched the NFL draft unfold this year, I was wondering exactly WHEN does a player, in the NCAA’s eyes, lose their “Amateur” status and become a “Professional”?  Clearly, it’s when there is an exchange of money or value for a given performance.  Again, I had to look up “professional” just to be sure of the definition:

“Professional - engaged in a specified activity as one's main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.”

Huh….That sounds a LOT LIKE what some (but not all) Division I and II college football players are doing on fall Saturdays and college basketball players spend the winter doing…And if you don’t believe that, what do you call a scholarship???  Is that or can it be defined as payment in exchange for services rendered or in this case, a future occupation?

The NCAA is in trouble and they know it when it comes to getting this under control.  They are too slow to react and are not nearly as pro-active as they need to be as the college ahtletics landscape changes around them.  Now it’s just a matter of time to figure out how to make it all work and the NCAA is lagging in that regard as well.  And even though the NCAA is an organization “By the People, For the People”, I’m beginning to think that the “People”, the large D1 schools, are probably going to thumb their collective noses at the organization that was created as an oversight institution and more or less agree to self-govern with respect to College Football and Basketball.  And that will include looking at collegiate athletes generating their own revenue in the form of endorsement deals or other endeavors.

And that will be a good thing.

In yet another front the NCAA is fighting:

The plaintiffs in the O’Bannon lawsuit at the last minutehave chosen to forego individual damages/claims against the NCAA and agreed togo together as a class.  Why is this important?  It would remove the jury from the equation and allow a judge to rule on the anti-trust portion of the case.

And the NCAA is filing a motion against the plaintiffs forming a class because they know they’ll lose. 

Again, why doesn’t the NCAA just recognize that they are in a losing fight?  They’ve already made the fatal mistake of separating from EA sports.   They have admitted (unofficially) that they MADE MONEY off of former athletes by receiving money from EA.  Why fight it?  What can possibly come of this but a ruling against the NCAA?