CA Governor Signs Bill Allowing College Athletes to Profit from Endorsements

The NCAA has an interesting choice to make here.<p>Option 1, they remove the California teams from the NCAA. The Power 5 have been talking about a &quot;division 0&quot; league for a long time. Chances are that would push them all to leave the NCAA and create their own organization.<p>Option 2, allow California to be the exception. This would be great for California, because if you&#x27;re a top high school athlete, would you rather play in California where you could potentially make millions, or anywhere else? Presumably a bunch of other states would pass similar laws and demand the same exception, until the NCAA was forced to allow paid players everywhere.<p>Or Option 3, just change the NCAA rules to match California, and let players get paid.<p>If sounds like the only winning move here is for the NCAA to allow paying players. I think California just forced their hand.

<i>Southpark</i> nailed why this needed to happen in their episode &quot;Crack Baby Athletic Association&quot; [1], where Cartman essentially poses as a Slavery-era plantation owner, and wants to ask the University of Colorado for &quot;business advice&quot; on how to make people work without paying them - like their college athletes (&quot;slavery&quot;):<p>&gt;&gt; <i>&quot;Now when we sell their likeness for video games, how do we get around paying our slaves…erm - student-athletes then?&quot;</i> - Cartman<p><i></i> NSFW &#x2F; Trigger warning etc: I realize Southpark isn&#x27;t for everyone. But on this issue I feel like they nailed it by showing just how ludicrous the NCAA really is.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;the-crack-baby-athletic-association-cbaa-2011-6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;the-crack-baby-athletic-asso...</a>

This was long overdue. Thank you. College coaches get paid millions of dollars a year, yet when a poor athlete gets rent money for his dad, all hell breaks loose. Let&#x27;s stop pretending that college sports is anything but a glamorized professional sporting franchise, and pay the people who make it happen. Actually, this bill doesn&#x27;t even ask the colleges to pay the athletes their fair market value. It simply allows athletes to make money from their own brand. Not sure how anyone can be against this. If someone is making money off me, in a free society, I sure should be able to make money off myself as well.

The players should be paid a salary, full stop. If you&#x27;re an athlete at a D1 school in the primary money making sports of men&#x27;s basketball or football you&#x27;re hardly a student -- most days are spent training or preparing for a game, the athletes notoriously take cupcake classes and majors; and we&#x27;ve seen enough academic scandals to know that &#x27;student-athlete&#x27; is a misnomer. The NCAA is another case of cartel like behavior in the American economy and I&#x27;ll be glad when this phony amateurism is put to rest.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it&#x27;s definitely a distortion of the market that college athletics bring in significant revenue and none of it beyond scholarships accrues to the athletes themselves. On the other hand, this is essentially the legalization of paying college athletes because wealthy college alumni&#x2F;boosters can easily guarantee promising athletic prospects a certain amount of money in endorsements even if those endorsements don&#x27;t make financial sense. E.g., a $1MM endorsement for Alumni Bob&#x27;s Radiology Practice. That&#x27;s certainly not going to improve the broken state of post-secondary education in the US.<p>Edit: It&#x27;s going to have lots of interstate ramifications, too. If this goes through, why would you ever go to Notre Dame if you could also go to USC?

Seems fair. Non-athlete college students are allowed to earn money and profit from endorsements. There shouldn&#x27;t be special rules just for athletes.

Good, that was pure exploitation. Student athletes should be able to profit off of their talents, just like any other student could profit off of their own talents.<p>It is like when a software engineer working at a tech company comes up with an idea at work, they could develop, release a product, and then make a fortune ... right? ... ... uh oh!

Hopefully this works out the same way to how California sets clean car standards just for themselves. California is a big enough market and it&#x27;s not worth making different cars just for California. So all cars sold in the U.S. are manufactured to that standard.

My preference would be for a world where college athletes were genuinely student-athletes: held to the same academic standards as other students while genuinely acting as amateur athletes.<p>But that&#x27;s not the world we live in (particularly for football and basketball.) The quasi-professional setup we have now, where athletes generate tremendous revenue for schools and and capture very little of that, is untenable. I don&#x27;t necessarily think athletes should get paid by schools, but it&#x27;s hard to articulate why they shouldn&#x27;t be able to benefit from endorsements.

Seen from Europe, the whole concept of college sports is just strange. What do the two have to do with each other? One is a place of study, the other is sport. Here if you want to be an athlete, you join a sports club. If you want to be a computer scientist or historian, you go to university. You can also do both but they have no interactions. Apparently one of the ways to get a scholarship in the US to pay the high tuition fees is through good sport results. But what does swimming really fast have to do with someone&#x27;s aptitude for studying biology or astronomy or finance?

Low quality reporting. Two things that should go in the top few sentences:<p>* Name of the Bill: SB 206<p>* Link to bill text: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leginfo.legislature.ca.gov&#x2F;faces&#x2F;billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200SB206" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leginfo.legislature.ca.gov&#x2F;faces&#x2F;billTextClient.xhtm...</a><p>Instead the bill is only accidentally named in the embedded tweet.

California from the contractor law to this has made it habit to muscle large organization to doing the progressive and right thing. Pretty interesting to see one state change so much nationally.

Honestly I dont understand what College Sports is there for. If they&#x27;re going to get paid its really stupid to have the athletes paid more than the professors.<p>I&#x27;ve heard the justification that the sports brings in money to the school, but if they athletes get paid that wont be much.

California has been on an absolute tear with progressive legislation recently. Love it or hate it (I happen to be the former) it&#x27;s definitely an experiment in how efficacious modern progressive policies will be.

The NCAA&#x27;s main argument against paying college players is completely bogus, which is that there is an uneven playing field between &quot;amateur&quot; and paid players. In reality, some players already claim that advantage by coming from rich families, which according to NCAA logic is unfair.<p>The real separation between college and professional athletics is being a student. Rich and poor students both only have 24 hours in a day and as long as a significant portion of that is dedicated to classes, then that&#x27;s fair enough for me. 12 units &#x2F; semester is the current minimum.

No doubt we aren&#x27;t doing enough to compensate our college athletes. We treat college Football like the AAA farm system for Baseball, and these kids have incentives to go out and hit hard and stand out so they can advance to the NFL. All without much of a safety net.<p>I have a friend who was on an athletic scholarship, but he blew out his knee and was cut from the team. Luckily his parents found a way to cover the cost for his final year, but overnight he went from having access to tutors, trainers, and special classes, to being tossed in with everyone else and having to cover his own knee surgery and rehab costs.<p>Now I&#x27;m not saying this is good that athletes got special treatment, but it really drives the point home that they are given special treatment when you deprive them of it right before the graduation finish line... My friend struggled; this is actually where I met him, as he was seeking tutoring.<p>He was trying, like really trying. Putting his all into academics to try and get caught up. There&#x27;s only so much you can do, and he had been given such an easy pass to that point he simply wasn&#x27;t able to do any of the work. He was depressed, felt like his whole life had been taken away, felt like his parents had sold everything they had to help him at least come out with a degree... and he didn&#x27;t want to let people down.<p>This was all in the early 2000s, so I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s changed... what I think would be good:<p>* Make scholarships irrevocable due to injuries. If you get football scholarship, you get to stay no matter what. With full access to team tutors. A school can&#x27;t offer someone a life-changing education, and then rip it away just because that person got hurt trying to help entertain the school&#x27;s athletic audience.<p>* Make health funds available. Any injury you get while at work, work is liable for. You get hurt playing football, the team has to pay your insurance premiums and provide trainers for your rehab. Like a pension fund. Not like these programs don&#x27;t have the money...<p>But paying athletes... slippery slope. It feels like then we really should split sports out into their own AAA systems, rather than relying on schools. I recognize that the drive to be a top athlete can permeate into other areas of a person&#x27;s life, and sports built team mentality and promote physical fitness... It&#x27;s just such a sketch gray area when you think about the NFL (and sure, others) diverting risk and responsibility for these kids to the NCAA.

To me athletes should be able to go pro (NBA, NFL) straight when they&#x27;re in high school. College is a waste of time for these guys. Problem solved.

This strikes me as somewhat dystopian. It is going to enhance the incentive to become a student athlete without helping students that are currently having difficulty affording education without loans, thereby potentially enhancing an already not insignificant sense of discord between athlete and non-athlete students on college campuses.

Amazing how much the TV series &quot;Ballers&quot; seems to reflect what&#x27;s going on behind the scenes in sports. I&#x27;ve felt for years that NCAA rules has treated the athletes like a virtual slave class, while everyone, other than them, makes huge amounts of money.

The sooner we can separate sports and education and allow the market play itself out, the better.

Can someone share some light on why NCAA doesn&#x27;t want the college athletes to be paid?

College athletes already were getting paid with free tuition, room, board, meal plans, expenses, etc.

Interesting that no one has raised the implications of this on the taxable income in the state. Given budget shortfalls in the state, and 50-some NCAA institutions with several power programs, this would surely be a welcomed source of revenue for the State government. It begs the question of intent behind the law.

In case you&#x27;re lacking context (not all readers here are US basketball fans) - John Oliver has an excellent take on NCAA salaries issue <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pX8BXH3SJn0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pX8BXH3SJn0</a>

America likes its markets free, but it&#x27;s sports socialist (unpaid college, revenue sharing, salary caps, drafts, etc). Funny how it&#x27;s progressive CA is going to cause college athletics to a whole lot more market oriented....

Good.

Good for liberty. Now all we need is a way for college atheletes to sell some of their income in a securitized way on the blockchain. Anyone have an example of a startup trying to do this?

So is this just for people engaged in the rapid movement of balls, or does it apply to all athletes?<p>It would also be interesting to see this expanded to other scholastic competitions, like the chess club, or the debating team.<p>&quot;Scotts, the official pre-moistened hinge of the Shippensburg University Philatelist Team.&quot;