Former agent Josh Luchs pulled a Canseco recently in an interview with Sports Illustrated magazine. He admitted giving money and gifts to college football players in exchange for signing with his agency once they turned pro. Thing is, he outed all the players he claims to have paid and all the agents he worked with over the years.
I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, outing everybody else he knew who was also breaking the rules is exactly what everybody hated about what Jose Canseco did with his tell-all steroids book. Well, there was also the fact that Jose was full of shit too, and a lot of his “knowledge” was made up in his delusional head. But as we now know, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in awhile, and a lot of what Canseco said turned out to be true, for certain definitions of that word.
Anywho, completely truthful or not, Jose outed a lot of guys in his book, and many saw him as a dirty rat for doing so. Luchs now doing much the same thing regarding agents paying amateur players will likely earn him the same sort of reputation.
On the other hand, it brings squarely to the forefront the ridiculous issue of college athletes being barred from accepting any kind of compensation for their services. Worse, I hear lots and lots of people defending this ridiculousness as if it makes some kind of actual sense. What possible justification could there be for making it against the rules for somebody to make money doing what they do best? Colleges and Universities make millions of dollars selling tickets and broadcast rights to the games these athletes play in, and yet the athletes themselves don’t get a cut? Sure, many of them get a free education. But what’s that worth? A quick look at the tuition and fees for the University of Colorado at Boulder (the closest Division I school to where I’m at) puts the yearly cost for an out-of-state student somewhere in the $25k to $30k range, which includes room and board and health insurance. Let’s just take the top number since I don’t feel like doing any actual math, and say $30k a year.
The NFL minimum wage, for players with no time in the league (i.e. rookies), is $320,000 a year. Sure, a lot of the guys playing at even the highest level of college football (Division I) wont ever make the NFL. But many of them will. But while they’re spending two, three, or four years honing their craft, the NCAA says they’re only allowed to make a salary of $0 a year, at least as far as earning money from their athletic skills is concerned. If they do accept money in exchange for their services, they risk being thrown out of school–and without playing football at an NCAA sanctioned school, there’s basically zero chance of making it in the NFL.
How does this make any sense? Someone else attending the University of Colorado on a full-ride scholarship, who is not a student-athlete, is allowed to make whatever money they can legally make from whatever skills they have. But student-athletes are inexplicably barred from making money at what they do best. That dude who created Facebook became a hojillionaire from the website he created while in school, and nobody threw him out of school and basically killed any chance he had of making it in his chose career field. Why do it to football players? To me, it’s unconscionable.
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