If players were paid, are you as big of fan?

[HUSKER FREAK]

 

Why would this make anyone more or less of a Husker fan?

 

I would still love NU and cheer for the Huskers all the same. That's where I grew up. That's where I went to school. Nothing will ever change that.

 

But this sort of development would dampen my interest in sports in general. I like sports because of fair competition, the human drama, thrill of victory/agony of defeat, and sportsmanship. I would hope to use sports to help teach my children about sportsmanship, fairness, and hard work, and amateur athletics is supposed to embody this, and college sports are supposed to provide educational opportunities and pride/cameraderie for a university.

 

Paying people to play, and bidding for their services, sullies all of that in my mind, and it makes it harder to look at sports as a model for honest sportsmanship.

 

Very well said.

[Junior]

 

Why would this make anyone more or less of a Husker fan?

 

I would still love NU and cheer for the Huskers all the same. That's where I grew up. That's where I went to school. Nothing will ever change that.

 

But this sort of development would dampen my interest in sports in general. I like sports because of fair competition, the human drama, thrill of victory/agony of defeat, and sportsmanship. I would hope to use sports to help teach my children about sportsmanship, fairness, and hard work, and amateur athletics is supposed to embody this, and college sports are supposed to provide educational opportunities and pride/cameraderie for a university.

 

Paying people to play, and bidding for their services, sullies all of that in my mind, and it makes it harder to look at sports as a model for honest sportsmanship.

 

 

 

What if the players are getting a $5000 stipend, no bidding? Would that be better?

[HUSKER FREAK]

I think cash is a very bad way to pay the players. They are complaining about not having enough money for food and rent, so I would say help them there, but without cash to them.

[RedDenver]

If players are getting paid "cost of attendance" or the stipend, I don't think I'd care. If the players start negotiating salaries and ad deals, then I'd stop watching college football.

[Ulty]

What if the players are getting a $5000 stipend, no bidding? Would that be better?

There are so many factors to consider, and it has already been discussed by other people in many other threads in better detail than I can come up with, so I'll try not to get too far off track...

 

But scholarship athletes already get so much, if they value education (and if they don't, GTFO, honestly). They get clothes, food, training, housing, other goodies. The opportunities for corruption are already so rampant, and there is already cash (travel allowances and food allowances on road trips, for example), that it makes it hard to regulate.

 

So what's a little more cash? Where would it come from? The school's budget itself? How many athletic departments actually turn an overall profit? How much money does it cost to fund the non-revenue sports? Sure the bigger programs make a lot of dough, as does the NCAA, but if the schools have to cover their own additional stipends, the rich will get richer and the less wealthy programs will get poorer. Maybe the NCAA (or the big schools could break away from the NCAA altogether, which I think has been discussed) could form a whole new division, not based on school size, but based on wealth.

 

As far as biddingmore cash flowing back and forth would only make it easier to expand and hide the corruption that currently exist in college sports. If there was a way to control it, it would be better, but its not controlled or enforced very well now as it is.

 

And where do you draw the line in terms of who gets the money? The scholarship players only? The whole 105 man roster? Everyone who participates? All athletes who put in the insane amount of work and hours? Just the revenue sports? Inequality will be magnified, and more non-revenue sports will be cut. Even just limiting a $5000 stipend for the 85 football players on schollies will cost $425,000. That in itself funds multiple non-revenue sports.

 

College sports is not a job for the student athletes. It is an opportunity for their future. Full scholarships to prestigious universities are some of the greatest opportunities that anyone can ever be given. I am all for someone on scholarship making sure they have opportunities to learn, eat, and work, but if they want to get paid, they can drop out and get a job, which is a decision many students have to face, athlete or not. If that job is in pro sports, more power to you.

 

I just simply cannot see additional payments to players working without fundamentally changing not only the game of football, but all college sports. I see very few positives for this at all. This is all just rambling speculation, so if there was a way to make this work without exacerbating corruption and threatening amateur athletics, I would be willing to change my mind. But right now, I really think this is a terrible idea!

[icedavis]

All of the above.

 

Then the thought runs through my head about equal "pay" for every player and how quickly will it turn into the "I am the starting QB, I deserve more than that walk on 3rd stringer" and then the "I am better than that Alabama QB so I deserve more than him", bidding war type stuff we see in the professional ranks...because it's all about makin paper...

[TAKODA]

Can't be a performance based pay! Has to be across the board stipend increase for the necessities (food, room and board). If done this way, I would not have an issue unless it raised the cost of tuition for the rest of the student body because they can't be the ones who finance this deal. They have basically a mortgage payment due every month for a very long time just to pay for the education they got and by all accounts, most are not able to find a job within the studies of the degree they earned. If a stipend increase is done, it has to come from the revenue generated by the athletic department (IMO).

 

I did not vote because it would depend on how they handled it as stated in my post!

[I am I]

I voted yes.

If they think we as fans are hard on them now, wait til they drop a pass after cashing their check on Friday.

On some level, I simply root for the school, the State, and the other fans. No player is bigger than the Program.

But if a player comes in and gets paid for playing their sense of entitlement grows exponentially worse than it already is, and we as fans would be much much harsher than we already are.

It would remove a sense of bond between the players and fans that the amatuer has (at least it seems to imply).

[RedRedJarvisRedwine]

Depends how much money.

[cg_8]

Players come and go.

 

Will always be a Nebraska Football fan.

 

Personally, I think it's foolish to think that players getting paid would change my way of rooting for the team that I have been rooting for since I understood what sports were. Nebraska football is the reason I wanted to play football. It's the reason I understand true comraderie and what it means to be a fan. It made me want to understand the concepts and intricacies of the sport of football!

 

Players get paid and suddenly I am supposed to change my whole life? Don't think so. Sorry guys, that's never happening. I'll be rooting for these Huskers and future Huskers until my last breath.

 

GBR!

[Abdullah the Butcher]

[Abdullah the Butcher]

I was looking at state by state and Nebraska is the state with the most Yes% at 58%, nerds.

[Tatum]

As it stands now, there is no way we will ever have college football players not being paid, so that idea can be left behind. If they were to be paid just for school or have a cap to their legal earnings, then you can bet they'd get money under the table still, especially during te recruitig process, so that wouldn't help at all. It is either keep the same system or make payments without caps legal.

 

I would seem to be in favor of the latter because as it stands now, too many players are losig their futures for nothing. Let us step back from a narrow scope; let us see that there are 120ish schools in all of D1. Then there are hundreds more in smaller classes. Only a little over half the players on a BCS school's 100 man roster have full scholarships. The majority of the rest have nothing. If you keep going down the ladder from BCS schools all the way to D3, it gets much worse. My school is a high end D2 school, and only one athlete - football or not - has eve had a full ride. In all, I'd say only 5% of college football players have any financial help at all, and the percentage for college athletes in total is far less than that.

 

And for what benefit? Broken bodies in 20 years, concussions piled on undisclosed concussions, etc. in exchange for a 1 in 1000 shot at making it to the pros. Such leads me to believe the majority are getting a raw deal. Heck, I worked for my school's newspaper and had a scholarship that paid me more than all my school's football players. It is a bit unfair.

 

 

 

 

So we reach to issue of whether it is ok to demand so much for so little of them, since they after all are voluntarily accepting the trade off. I can't find any reason to knock the current system since it is non-binding for players and thy know of the risks. Couple that with the fact that it would cause massive resentment between athletes (especially those who don't GAF about school) and other students at schools who give as much to the school but don't earn hard cash from the administration. You think many non-athlete students hate athletes now, just wait until this happens: campus' will be a very toxic environment.

 

So I'm pretty ambivalent on this topic. All I know is that the onky options are, as previously stated, to keep the current system or to outright pay players without cap. Each has real negatives and unfortunately not many positives.

[Hunter94]

I voted yes.

If they think we as fans are hard on them now, wait til they drop a pass after cashing their check on Friday.

On some level, I simply root for the school, the State, and the other fans. No player is bigger than the Program.

But if a player comes in and gets paid for playing their sense of entitlement grows exponentially worse than it already is, and we as fans would be much much harsher than we already are.

It would remove a sense of bond between the players and fans that the amatuer has (at least it seems to imply).

 

 

oh boy.......i agree. it would so cheapen the relationship......the new ring of prostitution......please, don't go there....high school football will be next!

[Enhance]

I put "yes" only because it's possible. I think the more appropriate statement would be that my attitude towards being a fan would change. I probably would have more of an opinion of...."Hey...we are paying you to be here and play football. Perform at your highest level or be gone and we will find someone else." I don't have that attitude towards college players now.

The suggested money for college football players to earn is a mere pittance to what NFL players get. Hypothetically speaking, if a Husker player is getting a few extra grand per month from the school to play here, that wouldn't have much impact on my views of their performance. Compare that to the NFL guy making millions of dollars a year, but, keeps dropping passes. I may be in the minority, but, the two are very different IMHO.

 

I certainly agree with others who say this won't fix the under-the-table dealing we already have going on. If everybody is getting paid, but, you can get paid a little extra to go to a different place, then the different university still looks more appealing if finances are a big concern.

 

Overall, paying the players a few extra thousand dollars wouldn't affect my interest in the team or the way I critique them. Unless they're making tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, they're still amateur athletes going to college in my view.