Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
Boilermaker Rick wrote:
If it is money coming from the school then it needs to have some sort of limit on it to keep things equal between teams.
But what does "from the school" mean? Obviously Alabama is always going to have more boosters than Illinois or Purdue. It's not equal right now when it's illegal. The worst it could be by legalizing it is still unequal. But like I said in my previous post, there could be some limits with the enforcement just more strict than it is now. For example, you get $10 million to pay your players. You get caught giving guys more and you get a five year death penalty- no football. That ought to take care of that.
It's two separate discussions. There is the money that comes from the school which basically means whatever checks they write to the players and how they pay it. It comes from ticket sales, tv contracts, merchandise sales, and it could be from donors. That should be uniform across the board at least for the big conferences.
However, you can't really stop, and probably shouldn't stop, a big time booster from paying someone $1 million to come to their birthday party if they really want to. It does put in a fair amount of imbalance if we assume that places like Alabama and OSU have boosters who are far more invested in the program than places like Illinois or Purdue but those players are already choosing Alabama and OSU in huge numbers and it is unlikely that boosters are going to be contributing huge money to all 25 recruits in every class.
Also, if the schools do provide some money from the contracts, it makes it less likely that a booster giving $10k will make a big difference to a recruit. They'll go to the place with the best chance to succeed like they do now. It may be Alabama still. It may be being an immediate starter at Illinois rather than sitting the bench and playing special teams at Alabama for 2 years.
College sports are basically built on inequality between schools. OSU and Alabama operate under a different structure than Illinois and Purdue and it creates a gap in terms of recruiting that is virtually impossible to make up. Illinois and Purdue do the same to NIU and Ball State. NIU and Ball State do it to whoever is below them. It's not an even playing field now and this probably just keeps that going.
If the cable bubble fully knocks out the big tv contracts then we have a different discussion but that's probably true regardless.