Quote Originally Posted by 99Bison View Post
NCAA should start planning organized professional leagues, with tiers - something like how soccer is organized in Euro countries, eventually feeding into the NFL/NBA/etc being the top tier.

“Member Schools” have the stadiums, rights to pay for players/transfers/etc. Schools can offer the players schooling as a compensation option (eg. all non revenue sports), but not required.

Players get paid according to market value, and endorsement value just like anyone else, they may or may not attend the school as it’s entirely optional.

NCAA could generate significant amounts of revenue (like it does today) by organizing, facilitating the leagues, tourneys, sponsorships, etc at all levels.

Younger than college players are also entirely eligible for this as well. So perceived top players in what’s current AAU, HS and the likes can go into the profession early, similar to the hockey/etc leagues.

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Note:
This requires the ncaa to honestly admit what’s going on and find a real solution. So very likely this will not happen by the accord of the ncaa. Cue yote53s comment... the have/have not gap widens, and slowly people stop caring about their mediocre school athletics in the popular sports and maybe cheer remotely for another school/semi pro team, or find something else to do.
And this is where I stop following college athletics, or at least pay as much attention to it as I do minor league baseball teams, which is very little.

I've heard people talking about the NCAA setting up rules to regulate all this and "cap" how much the earnings can be, but truth be told, good luck with that. Once you go down the road of allowing compensation for student-athletes it will be impossible to set up barriers. I mean, what is "fair compensation" for image and likeness? $20,000? $100,000? $1 million? The dollar amount is all relative depending on where you sit and your POV, which means there can be no limits because that would be "unfair" in principle.

Go down this road and the genie is now out of the bottle. The slow descent and destruction of college sports is at hand. The market for college sports is people watching because of the name on the front of the jersey that represents your school or your city/state (or maybe your religion ala Notre Dame or BYU), not the name on the back. The thin veil of amateurism makes it okay to watch a sub-par product because of school pride. If I want to watch paid professionals I can watch the NFL or any of the other pro sports leagues where the BEST players play.