Big Ten to start offering 4 year scholarships football and hoops

[ChicosBailBonds]

MU better figure it out, their competition around them is going down this path.  Big Ten outlined their plan this evening.

As mentioned in the other thread, MU was against this in 2011 and again in 2012.  Looks like MU will have no other choice now.  Then again, with Crean and Buzz at the helm, I'm not sure either was too excited about this.  Perhaps Wojo is.


Here is the Big Ten plan.  No mention of transfer implications.  It was signed by all 14 schools.


We must guarantee the four-year scholarships that we offer. If a student-athlete is no longer able to compete, for whatever reason, there should be zero impact on our commitment as universities to deliver an undergraduate education. We want our students to graduate.

If a student-athlete leaves for a pro career before graduating, the guarantee of a scholarship remains firm. Whether a professional career materializes, and regardless of its length, we will honor a student's scholarship when his or her playing days are over. Again, we want students to graduate.

We must review our rules and provide improved, consistent medical insurance for student-athletes. We have an obligation to protect their health and well-being in return for the physical demands placed upon them.

We must do whatever it takes to ensure that student-athlete scholarships cover the full cost of a college education, as defined by the federal government. That definition is intended to cover what it actually costs to attend college.

[Jay Bee]

Look closer.

[Marqevans]

Has the threat of a union put the fear of God into them?

[LloydMooresLegs]

That and the OB suit and pressure on other fronts. 

[Dawson Rental]

MU better figure it out, their competition around them is going down this path.  Big Ten outlined their plan this evening.

As mentioned in the other thread, MU was against this in 2011 and again in 2012.  Looks like MU will have no other choice now.  Then again, with Crean and Buzz at the helm, I'm not sure either was too excited about this.  Perhaps Wojo is.


Here is the Big Ten plan.  No mention of transfer implications.  It was signed by all 14 schools.


We must guarantee the four-year scholarships that we offer. If a student-athlete is no longer able to compete, for whatever reason, there should be zero impact on our commitment as universities to deliver an undergraduate education. We want our students to graduate.

If a student-athlete leaves for a pro career before graduating, the guarantee of a scholarship remains firm. Whether a professional career materializes, and regardless of its length, we will honor a student's scholarship when his or her playing days are over. Again, we want students to graduate.

We must review our rules and provide improved, consistent medical insurance for student-athletes. We have an obligation to protect their health and well-being in return for the physical demands placed upon them.

We must do whatever it takes to ensure that student-athlete scholarships cover the full cost of a college education, as defined by the federal government. That definition is intended to cover what it actually costs to attend college.

Gee, whattaya know... they are student athletes, not employees.  At least now, maybe.

I wonder where the term student-athlete comes from, anyway?

Oh, here's the answer.
http://www.sippinonpurple.com/2014/1/28/5355988/ncaa-student-athlete-kain-colter-union-workers-comp

[The Lens]

I doubt MU will stand against this for very long and I doubt it was TC or Buzz driving the veto, rather the CW of the day.

Remember, Bill Clinton once signed the DOMA and it got 85 votes in the Senate.  Times change.

With the aforementioned OB lawsuit, the Unionization efforts and more, schools need to throw a bone of two.  This is a much easier bone to toss than other options.

[tower912]

Feels like a response to the Northwestern lawsuit to me.   Once again, unions, or the threat of unionization, gets better conditions for all.     

[dgies9156]

Maybe my memory isn't what it used to be but my general recollection is that Marquette for years worked with their players to make sure the door was open to getting their degree. I'm not sure how it was financed, but our players came back if they left early.

Al particularly made that commitment. By the mid 1970s, my recollection is that only one or two of our players never received their degrees. I'm sure along the way fulfilling this commitment cost the Jesuits a few dollars, but it's the thing we did. After all, we are Marquette!

To the posters who believe the threat of a union brought on the four year football and basketball scholarships......  "YA THINK??????!!!!!!"

[TAMU, Knower of Ball]

Curious. If I read that correctly, the B1G is saying that a kid who declares early for the draft but doesn't make it, and decides to return to school, could demand that he is given his athletic scholarship back. So if Vander Blue had one of these scholies, he could have come back to school last year and said "I can't play for y'all but give me my athletic scholarship." It's honorable but again puts a lot of risk on the school. I wonder what the rules will be on passing them off to other scholarships.

[NersEllenson]

Feels like a response to the Northwestern lawsuit to me.   Once again, unions, or the threat of unionization, gets better conditions for all.     

Unions are going the way of the dinosaur.  They will slowly disband and unfurl.  The actual victim is becoming the employee who pays to be in most* unions (public sector unions are amazing to be in, though being challenged and rightfully so by taxpayers.)  A basic pyramid scheme.  Sadly, I see many union tradesmen - plumbers, electricians, HVAC, masons - and their companies all get passed up for private sector work, in favor of non union.  Why would any business pay roughly a 50-75% premium for a union trade, when it can save that much by going non-union?  Sadly, many union tradesmen end up posting and looking for work on Craig's List - which ultimately is a violation of their union pledge.

Funny thing is, any union member if faced with a decision on requiring the service of a skilled laborer to fix - say their car - wouldn't choose a union mechanic if he was going to charge 50-75% more for doing the exact same repair as another non-union mechanic.

Global economy is too competitive to try to support anything other than market driven labor rates.

[GGGG]

Unions are going the way of the dinosaur.  They will slowly disband and unfurl.  The actual victim is becoming the employee who pays to be in most* unions (public sector unions are amazing to be in, though being challenged and rightfully so by taxpayers.)  A basic pyramid scheme.  Sadly, I see many union tradesmen - plumbers, electricians, HVAC, masons - and their companies all get passed up for private sector work, in favor of non union.  Why would any business pay roughly a 50-75% premium for a union trade, when it can save that much by going non-union?  Sadly, many union tradesmen end up posting and looking for work on Craig's List - which ultimately is a violation of their union pledge.

Funny thing is, any union member if faced with a decision on requiring the service of a skilled laborer to fix - say their car - wouldn't choose a union mechanic if he was going to charge 50-75% more for doing the exact same repair as another non-union mechanic.

Global economy is too competitive to try to support anything other than market driven labor rates.

Not all unions are the same.  My father in law was a union member for years, never had trouble getting a job and his union pension funded his retirement and is funding my mother in laws right now.  When you are member of a union that is focused on skill development, versus simply lobbying for higher wages, they have value for both its members and those who hire them.

They aren't dead by any respects.  The good ones will survive and thrive.

[ChicosBailBonds]

Feels like a response to the Northwestern lawsuit to me.   Once again, unions, or the threat of unionization, gets better conditions for all.     

Except this was approved long before the union vote, a vote which I guarantee failed.

By the way, what Northwestern lawsuit?


And better conditions for all, that actually never happens with unions or unionization...it's better conditions for SOME and that will be the case here.  Just like in the real world, a group will pay dearly for this. 

[ChicosBailBonds]

Gee, whattaya know... they are student athletes, not employees.  At least now, maybe.

I wonder where the term student-athlete comes from, anyway?

Oh, here's the answer.
http://www.sippinonpurple.com/2014/1/28/5355988/ncaa-student-athlete-kain-colter-union-workers-comp

From his suite at the College World Series, Texas Athletic Director Steve Patterson wondered aloud last week how many college baseball programs would survive if antitrust lawsuits ultimately reinvent the college model and create an open market for schools to pay athletes and treat them as employees.

Texas, which generates more than $160 million a year in athletic revenue, more than any other school, would be fine in such a new world. Most others probably would not, he said.

"The bottom line is that, as successful as the University of Texas has been, as good as this baseball team is, we average less than one [new] Major League Baseball player a year," Patterson said. "I'm talking about guys that just have a cup of coffee [in the major leagues]. We average less than four professional football players a year making their way into the NFL. So out of all those student athletes, we're talking about five to 10 kids a year that would truly benefit the most [from an open-market system]. And we're talking about professional careers that span four years or less [on average]. Then they've got a half-century of their life, at least, where they've got to figure out how to work in the world.

"So we spend all of this time worrying about a guy or two who thinks he's losing all of this money over his likeness? It doesn't make any sense."

The climate for change in college athletics dominated a 30-minute conversation between Patterson and SportsBusiness Journal last week at the CWS in Omaha, Neb. Standing next to Roger Clemens and a handful of baseball parents in his suite, an animated Patterson said the current litigation is about agents and trial lawyers who are trying to benefit while "ruining" the collegiate model.

What's clear is that Patterson, who was named AD at his alma mater in November and has spent more than two decades as an executive in pro sports, is tired of college athletics losing the public relations battle, and he isn't afraid to go on the offensive. Among his views: More autonomy for the five power conferences within the NCAA is mandatory, or else they should leave.

Here are Patterson's views on:

■ Pending NCAA changes that would grant the five power leagues more autonomy: "It's a part of the everyday business right now. There's five conferences that want to do the best they can for their student athletes and provide them with the best outcomes. There's a bunch of other schools that are fairly atavistic in their viewpoints and want to take the rules back to 1950. That's not going to happen. They need to let the more well-resourced conferences operate, or these five conferences need to leave. It's that simple. We've waited far too long and we've been far too accommodating. ... I think there's a harder and harder resolve as each day goes by for the institutions in higher-profile conferences to take the necessary moves."

■ The potential competitive imbalance that could result for conferences not in the power five: "There's nothing wrong with having different kinds of programs at different schools. The Ivy League does a great job. They have different kinds of athletic programs than we do and they haven't dried up and blown away. They're wonderful institutions and well-supported. We're in a different position. We ought to be able to respect our differences."

■ Providing additional student services, such as a cost-of-attendance stipend, longer scholarships and post-graduate health insurance: "We're self-supported at UT. I recognize that many others are not. But it's incumbent on us to provide the kind of student services that we do. When you look at the issues raised at Northwestern, we do all of the things they're talking about, except for one — allowing them to monetize their likeness. If you're a baseball player and you decide after your junior year that you want to go pro, and you follow the rules, we'll help you come back and finish. If you get hurt and you can't play, we don't take your scholarship away. A lot of these claims, at least as they apply at Texas, are specious. What you've got are a bunch of trial lawyers and agents who can't find any more clients in the NBA or NFL. That's what this is about."

■ Whether other schools can provide similar services for athletes: "A lot more schools would be there if we didn't have to keep fiddling around with the schools that don't want to be more progressive."

■ College athletes marketing their own rights: "We're spending all of this time talking about one-half of 1 percent of our student athletes [who have the power to market their likeness]. Not the 99.5 percent of student athletes who are supported by these programs. What we're giving our student athletes, in terms of academic, athletic, financial aid, support for room and board, training, mentoring, student services, tutoring, is more than the average household income. And for some of our teams, it's pushing into $70,000 a year per student athlete, and pushes into the top third of household incomes. Tell me one guy whose likeness is worth more than the average household income. ... There was one guy last year. [Patterson holds his hands up and rubs his fingers together like Johnny Manziel.]

"It's absolutely agents and trial lawyers that are the whole reason we're talking about this. You've got guys like Jay Bilas out there making the claim that scholarships aren't worth anything, and nobody says anything to discredit that. ... So who is saying with any rationality or any fact that student athletes on a full ride aren't getting something? They're just flat-out wrong and they're liars. And they're doing the bidding of agents and trial lawyers. The longer everybody waddles around acting like it's not about agents and trial lawyers, the more silliness we're going to have out there."

■ The concept that an open market would kill Olympic sports: "The reality is that if we're going to fall prey to the agents and the trial lawyers, we're going to kill the second-largest scholarship program in the history of the country, after the GI bill. You're going to take this money and it's going to gravitate to a handful of guys on the football team and maybe a handful on the basketball teams. And so what's going to happen to the budgets? It's going to wipe out men's sports and it's going to wipe out women's sports."

■ Always finding a way to pay the football coach: "But the football coach generates the vast majority of the revenue. You're compensating the coach based on the marketplace. Only football and men's basketball, and just a few schools in baseball and ice hockey, can make money. Everything else operates at a deficit. So what is the model that's going to replace that? If you take all of the money football generates and put it back into football, what's going to pay for everything else?

"The point of paying a football coach based on the market is the hope that he generates enough revenue to support the rest of the athletic department. Now, people make mistakes on hires. But if you have a successful coach and a successful football program, you can support scores of teams. If you can't, what happens? The same thing that happened at Arizona State before I got there. You start whacking sports. Same thing happened at Maryland. Same thing happened at Berkeley. Sports are getting whacked and that's bad. The other way you balance the budget — you cut the number of football scholarships. You want to go down that road?"

■ On the academic piece of the scholarship being removed from the debate: "If athletes are employees, what's the point of going to class? We spend millions and millions of dollars each year tutoring, mentoring, providing student services. We make that commitment because we should, and if we don't, you wind up like UConn and you don't get to play in the NCAA tournament. And at the end of four or five years, you hope that a student has graduated and something really good has happened. Generally, it does.

"Now, you can go find some jerk who was a former basketball player, who was a jerk in college and was a jerk in the pros, who decides he wants to disparage one of the best college basketball programs out there. Yeah, you can find that guy. But for every one of him, I'll find you 500 kids who say, 'Thank God I had a basketball scholarship or a baseball scholarship or a track scholarship. It changed my life and it changed my family's life.'"

[GGGG]

Wow.  The head of the richest athletic department in college athletics wants to retain the current way of doing business.

Shocking.

[Chicago_inferiority_complexes]

Not all unions are the same.  My father in law was a union member for years, never had trouble getting a job and his union pension funded his retirement and is funding my mother in laws right now.  When you are member of a union that is focused on skill development, versus simply lobbying for higher wages, they have value for both its members and those who hire them.

They aren't dead by any respects.  The good ones will survive and thrive.

Is it a trade union? Ala a plumbers union, etc.? A lot of them are responsible and helpful, I think. Labor unions, maybe not so much.

[ChicosBailBonds]

Wow.  The head of the richest athletic department in college athletics wants to retain the current way of doing business.

Shocking.

I would suggest you read a little deeper.  His comments are dead on.  The media, many people here, are focusing on 0.5% and ignoring the 99.5%, which is ironic as hell considering some of the folks here always chirping about the 99%.  tsk tsk

Some of the things people with no understanding want, will destroy opportunities for the 99% and he is right to explain why.  There are consequences to all actions, problem is that most people (especially those with no business background) don't get.  They think money grows on trees and should be spent accordingly (not you Sultan, but there are plenty that think this way). 

Be careful what you wish for fellas.  Many of you might just have to become fans of a school you may not care about.

[ChicosBailBonds]

Not all unions are the same.  My father in law was a union member for years, never had trouble getting a job and his union pension funded his retirement and is funding my mother in laws right now.  When you are member of a union that is focused on skill development, versus simply lobbying for higher wages, they have value for both its members and those who hire them.

They aren't dead by any respects.  The good ones will survive and thrive.

Not dead, and some are ok.  My wife has been a union member for 25+ years.  I've had to work with UAW, sports unions, etc.  Some make me cringe.  Gov't unions should be outlawed.  They are there to keep seniority, meritocracy a secondary afterthought.  Great if you have seniority, but ask the rank and file that are new and busting arse and their contributions don't mean much.  Which of course, ends up having an adverse effect because they soon learn it's not about the quality so much, it's about the time you put in. 

Not dead, but not trending well.  They had their place and were needed 50 years ago, 100 years ago.  They made some positive contributions.

[NersEllenson]

Not all unions are the same.  My father in law was a union member for years, never had trouble getting a job and his union pension funded his retirement and is funding my mother in laws right now.  When you are member of a union that is focused on skill development, versus simply lobbying for higher wages, they have value for both its members and those who hire them.

They aren't dead by any respects.  The good ones will survive and thrive.

Sure...won't disagree with your above point...yet...as you mention it was your father in law...who I'm guessing now is probably in his 70s?  (Feel you mentioned here at some point you were in your early 40s?)  So, back in that day and age..unions had more true benefits to their members, and we weren't in any kind of global economy we are in today..the landscape has shifted...as was only inevitable...to have such a higher standard of living than the rest of the worls...as we've had in America for so long...simply couldn't and cannot sustain itself.  The world is flat theory comes to mind...economically speaking...of course industrialized nations will continue to lead in GDP and such, but emerging markets certainly are gaining share.

[GGGG]

Sure...won't disagree with your above point...yet...as you mention it was your father in law...who I'm guessing now is probably in his 70s?  (Feel you mentioned here at some point you were in your early 40s?)  So, back in that day and age..unions had more true benefits to their members, and we weren't in any kind of global economy we are in today..the landscape has shifted...as was only inevitable...to have such a higher standard of living than the rest of the worls...as we've had in America for so long...simply couldn't and cannot sustain itself.  The world is flat theory comes to mind...economically speaking...of course industrialized nations will continue to lead in GDP and such, but emerging markets certainly are gaining share.

He was in his 80s and worked at least part time until the middle of the 1990s.  Skilled labor is not as easy to replicate globally as you may think.

An example:

http://www.milwaukeejobs.com/j/f-Welder-l-Milwaukee,-WI-jobs.html

[ChicosBailBonds]

http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/eye-on-college-football/24596437/big-ten-presidents-endorse-four-year-full-cost-scholarships



As for the notion that this just started as a result of recent events, uhm...no.

Penn State, Wisconsin, Michigan, Michigan State, Iowa Northwestern, Illinois, Nebraska and Ohio State began using 4 year scholarships in 2012.


"We went and made them four-year scholarships and we'll see where that all goes with the NCAA and some addendums with how you'd lose a scholarship," Michigan coach Brady Hoke said. "Obviously you quit football, you're not going to be on scholarship."
- Feb 1, 2012


Mike Slive, yes that Mike Slive of the SEC, called for it in 2012 as well.  Auburn is one school that has been providing 4 year scholarships.  Not mandatory, but schools were encouraged to do so.  He wanted academic and behavior conditions attached to the scholarships, for some of the same reasons I brought up yesterday.   Nick Saban and Steve Spurrier didn't like the idea, Spurrier calling it terrible.  Other coaches didn't have an issue with it.

[Skatastrophy]

You guys are ruiners.

[GGGG]

Is it a trade union? Ala a plumbers union, etc.? A lot of them are responsible and helpful, I think. Labor unions, maybe not so much.

Yes.  It is a trade union.

[GGGG]

I would suggest you read a little deeper.  His comments are dead on.  The media, many people here, are focusing on 0.5% and ignoring the 99.5%, which is ironic as hell considering some of the folks here always chirping about the 99%.  tsk tsk

This paragraph perfectly encapsulates why I absolutely cannot stand how you approach Scoop.  Seriously, stick to the topic at hand.  There is no reason whatsoever to turn it political in the passive aggressive way you always do.

Honestly, you are like a child.

[ChicosBailBonds]

This paragraph perfectly encapsulates why I absolutely cannot stand how you approach Scoop.  Seriously, stick to the topic at hand.  There is no reason whatsoever to turn it political in the passive aggressive way you always do.

Honestly, you are like a child.

What's political about it?  The 99% vs 1% is as much an economic concern as anything.  Sorry if you don't see that.  What strikes me as most obviously wrong with the approach so many take here is that they have no clue what the ramifications are on things, none.  Absolutely NONE.  More than anything, it is to remind a few that argue one way that they are so clueless on other stuff, they argue against themselves and don't even know it.

So you would tell a child to go f uck themselves?  Interesting.  I always thought name calling and such was child like, I remember a little rhyme of such when I was a child...sticks and stones....ironic.

[GGGG]

What's political about it?  The 99% vs 1% is as much an economic concern as anything.  

Stop.  Again.  Passive aggressiveness. 

So you would tell a child to go f uck themselves?  Interesting.  I always thought name calling and such was child like, I remember a little rhyme of such when I was a child...sticks and stones....ironic.

First, I didn't call you a name.  I gave you a command. 

Second, if it doesn't hurt you, you certainly can't seem to let it go.  And believe me, I would have no qualms about doing it again.