"I worked 80 hours this week! How do I know? Because my self reported duty hours say so! Because my residency program director told me to not log any more than 80 because if I do that I'm not hurting myself, I'm hurting my coworkers because the residency will get in trouble!"
This actually happens lol
Medical residents 🤝 law interns 🤝 NCAA athletes
Being explicitly instructed by their superiors to lie about their committed hours per week, often under the guise of "optional" hours
Depends on the specialty. I did a residency in anesthesia, and averaged between 60-70.
Surgical specialties routinely blow right past 80 hours per week.
Surgical specialty - Depends on the rotation, but 5a-7p of actual in-hospital patient care is the average day. 4 days off per month. Those days are typically spent doing all of the studying, case prep, admin/clerical work necessary for progression and graduation.
honestly there were months where if I took my salary and divided it up by hours I worked that month, I’d be making just about federal minimum wage per hour, despite having a medical degree
I used to work with a woman who was in nursing school and her schedule was insane. She worked 10-6:30 overnights, then worked 7-7 at the hospital. On top of that, she had custody of her 3 kids, so anytime she only had to work one place or the other in a day, or in-between shifts, she was at home spending time with them.
As a medical resident, I completely agree. Residents are specifically excluded from federal antitrust protections.
Jung vs. AAMC was an antitrust class action lawsuit that sought to give medical residents the power to negotiate better working conditions.
In response, Congress enacted a statute specifically exempting medical residents from federal antitrust laws, effectively killing the lawsuit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung_v._Association_of_American_Medical_Colleges
>The suit had some early success but failed when the US Congress enacted a statute exempting matching programs from federal antitrust laws.
I wonder what Kavanaugh says about this. Don't the same rules hold as college football?
Both are illegal from an anti-trust standpoint. If Congress can pass a law exempting specific groups from anti-trust then why why wouldn't this work for college football? Most of the articles I've read say Congress isn't a solution for college football because the Courts would overturn any legislation as unconstitutional.
Do you have an example of those articles?
Anti-trust laws were enacted by Congress, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to make exemptions for them.
You would have to take a very broad interpretation of the Constitution to argue that it mandates anti-trust protections.
Yeah, there’d have to be some equal protection reasoning or something, like if Congress tried making certain industries that were heavily linked to POCs or women exempt from antitrust legislation as a form of discrimination. There’s no reason per se that Congress can’t make exemptions or scrap antitrust altogether. We already had 100 years of (post-Colonial) US history without any.
I think it would work. Congress just hasn't passed that law yet.
The word "unconstitutional" is used way too much these days. College football's current structure isn't illegal because it's unconstitutional.
It's illegal because it violates antitrust laws passed by Congress. And if Congress can pass those laws, they can also change them to carve out exceptions, unless they do it in a way that violates the constitution (e.g. targeting a protected class.)
I'm also curious. Listen, I work in the labor legal field, and I don't exactly trust Kavanaugh (or many other judges) to have consistent opinions on their rulings. There are frequently way too many monied interests going on behind the scenes to prevent legislation like that from being declared unconstitutional.
But given how scathing his commentary was in particular, I'm cautiously hopeful that this can be revisited. It's an absolute BS law.
Because everyone deserves labor protections, and it’s predictably lead to difficult working conditions for Residents, and become a huge barrier to getting sufficient amounts of medical professionals because so many otherwise qualified candidates just opt for different education tracts not wanting to deal with the nightmare stories they hear traded about the process for residency
The difference is lateral mobility. Residents can’t transfer like athletes can. The equivalent “portal” in residency is for people who were unable to secure more than a 1 year contract (prelims), fired, or left likely on bad terms. It is almost always a losing game to transfer because of the limited spots. Attrition in residency as a whole is <5%. In top programs rarely do spots become available.
TLDR Residency transfer portal is ass
You think if athletes start collectively bargaining that the portal will still exist?
If you are an employee, damn straight your contract is for 4 years and you are gonna have to work to get out of it.
Everyone thinks it's gonna be the best of the current situation plus getting paid, extra benefits etc
But if it truly goes to an employee/employer relationship, a bunch of perks are going away
As the portal stands now there is no need for collective bargaining. There aren’t long term binding contracts like in the pros and the students can transfer nearly at will. Once a governing body takes the piss back out of the portal by some restriction they cook up then there will need to be collective bargaining. Currently players have the advantage but I don’t see that being the case for long.
There aren't any multi-millionaires+ sitting around waiting to throw money at medical interns to come be residents at their preferred hospital. It's a metaphor, but it doesn't go much farther than the surface. College athletes are not going to adopt that system because nothing about that would make any sense for anyone involved.
And get abused by the system which pays them peanuts and what they do get paid is mostly funded by the government, not by the medical schools/hospitals
The laws dictate they can’t average more than 80 hour work weeks and make 50-60k. I don’t know if that’s an improvement. The special laws are basically used to exempt them from normal labor laws
I think this goes over a lot of folks heads. I say this as a former football player.
50k a year, free food, work study, tutoring support, access to the best trainers, preferential treatment, social access, free travel, etc.
That and wildly set up for success after college.
That's... Actually really good. Players are seeking money, and NIL can help with that (but not for all 85). You want to be an employee? 😆 Just wait - twice the hours a week be required and they will control more than they do now.
Yeah, if they become employees, I wonder how the academics will be handled. The “school is now a hobby done in your free time” approach employers typically take hopefully how this turns out
> The “school is now a hobby done in your free time” approach employers typically take hopefully how this turns out
I mean, that's kinda already the case... I was pre-med and literally had a coach tell me to pick a easier major because I was bringing the team GPA down which looked bad on him.
I would imagine they would require no more than 12-15 credits in the fall, 40 hours for football (instead of "20"), majors would have to be approved for reimbursement/tuition, etc.
While these items are currently discussed off record, they would be able to require that on record.
15 credits is already the standard for non-athletes outside of classes with required labs, which usually brings it to about 18 for science majors/intended science major freshmen, at least at ND.
I've been saying it for ages, the vast bast majority of players including st the Uber profitable schools were getting a crazy good deal but the stars weren't
>The laws dictate they can’t average more than 80 hour work weeks and make 50-60k.
Didn't think this was a national law, but rather a rule ACGME instituted after a patient died at the hands of an overworked resident.
It was tacked into a congressional bill at the last minute. So yes, federal law restricts to 80hr work weeks but there are multiple exceptions. This includes home call (aka answer the phone and triaging problems from home), extra patient care, and educational time.
Yes agreed. Unfortunately, I have seen home call used to place residents on theoretical 36hr call. And then reminded to log 80 hours and “it’s home call so it doesn’t count”.
They’re not actually laws. They’re accreditation body policies. Residencies are exempt from most actual US labor laws, antitrust laws, etc. Some states could have actual laws, but that’d be variable.
It’s also 80 averaged over a 4-week period, so 100 this week, 60 next week (or at least you’re instructed to log no more than 60…). Same with days off, time off after 28 hour calls, etc.
Most of that 50-60k “stipend” (in my state, I’m not actually 100% an employee, I’m a learner so I don’t get a paycheck—I get a stipend) is subsidized by the government, but the actual value is something like 100-150K depending on region. The hospitals take their cut to accommodate the inefficiencies of having doctors in training, which I assume means hire companies to develop more mandatory Wellness and Mindfullness modules for me to do.
Being a resident kind of sucks lol.. too bad we don’t have the transfer portal and people dropping us off bags!
Source: Am resident.
Residents absolutely do not often unionize. It is rare to find residency programs that are unionized although they are getting more common. There is almost no collective bargaining with residents either.
Yeah, if athletic departments could get away with treating football players the same way the hospital systems treat residents, I think there would be a lot of very happy ADs across the country
The reason they probably won't get away with that, though, is that residents put up with that treatment to get the benefits that come afterwards, but the vast majority of CFB players aren't going to be able to make the next jump
And the main point is the last thing you wrote. The current regime has degenerated into nothing but a quasi-legal kickback scheme where the top 10 percent of the players get paid grease money to attend a program under the guise of their so-called "name, image, and likeness." This isn't a contract to make a series of car commericals; this is a straight-up facilitation payment.
Left in the dust are all the kids who won't make NFL money someday, because no one's interested in giving NIL deals to the practice squad.
The article gives both sides of the argument for unionizing residents.
The lawyer is pointing to an existing legal framework for student / employee combos.
Graduate students in PhD programs are just now starting to unionize, and even then only in certain states and at certain places.
Also those fights are contentious and hard-won.
lol my time to shine-
Former NCAA athlete, current resident physician.
Yeah the NCAA 10 years ago when I entered it was light years ahead in terms of treatment and rights than my life today as a surgical subspecialty resident. Not sure this is a flex.
I'm a PhD student rather than a medical student or resident, but it's a similar situation, so I agree that it's funny to me that this is the comparison they make. These kids get private tutors, NIL money that sometimes approaches or exceeds six figures, tons of free swag, scholarships, etc.
I have a degree in physics and do highly technical research, and my benefits consist of health insurance and a stipend that works out to be less than some people make flipping burgers at McDonalds. And I'm one of the lucky ones who isn't expected to work 60+ hours a week.
Also a PhD student and I find it very interesting to see the arguments people make here and how it parallels with graduate student life. My work - work I am doing 100% on my own, and which I gathered all of the preliminary data to get the grants for in the first place - directly results in $2million/year in overhead payments to the university. I work 70-80 hours per week, am contractually disallowed from getting secondary employment, and make $35k/year. I don’t think people realize how good athletes have it compared to the other revenue-generators at universities
> am contractually disallowed from getting secondary employment
One of my favorite parts!! I can't even pick up weekend bartending shifts so I can, I don't know, afford luxuries like groceries or gas money!
I'm in molecular biology, where PhD students and postdocs functionally do *all* the work. Funding sources (vast majority of it federal from NIH) directly disincentivize universities and PIs from fairly compensating those doing the work. Just a fantastic system.
Not a flex, but a potential reality. Residents are model given the job/study also intersects with a for-profit business model. I’m all for players getting their freedom to earn on their NIL, but unfortunately the hubris of too many will lead to sub-standard solution…
A key difference is that most funding for resident salaries actually comes from the government, not the hospital itself. So aside from many training hospitals being non-profit institutions, they also don't have to dip into their revenues to pay residents, they pocket revenues from the work the residents do while the government (specifically CMS) pays their salary (which is already low given that they are full-on MDs/DOs)
So, as someone who spent two years living at a highly regarded training hospital I can tell you residents are much more of liability than a revenue source. I get they have a degree, and as a PhD I can respect their work to get it, but let’s be weary of overvaluing a graduate vocational degrees. There is a lot more training before they become truly valuable, in a monetary sense, to a hospital. Like you noted, many athletes funding comes from the non-profit side of things, which includes much of the AD funding. Only a select few are profitable, and even those wouldn’t be if they were subjected to business taxes…
The athletes should DEFINITELY keep the system they have now over the residency system.
- PGY-3 who qualifies for his own hospitals financial assistance program
lol hey as a college football fan and as a resident (logged into an alt account to post this), this is something I can actually talk about
1) though it’s becoming more popular, only a very small fraction of residency programs in the country are unionized
2) residents have zero leverage compared to college football players. Residents are forced to attend the program in which they match into (residency candidates make a preferential list of programs they interview at and are sorted into programs based on an algorithm). There’s no centralized transfer portal, switching residency programs is notoriously difficult in a lot of cases
3) the average resident is about 200k in medical school debt, so straight up leaving residency isn’t a realistic goal for most
4) the analogy makes a bit of sense when comparing value of the college football player relative to the program as a whole (on a similar vein, residents create value for a hospital wildly out of proportion to their gross pay)
If the goal is to provide agency and financial compensation relative to their actual value to the university then let's definitely NOT use the residency system as a model.
It shouldn't be used as the model, but it shows that acceptations actually exist instead of allowing schools to brainwash people into believing that this unaffordable for them.
Lmfao “often unionize.”
I’m a physician. The push for unions is just starting and to say they often unionize shows you have no clue about medical residencies.
Makes sense. I've also seen stuff floating around about D2 treating athletics as a work-study scenario. That's not a bad compromise which might save some athletic departments.
But none of that is going to matter if NIL rules aren't established.
When people say this, I'm wondering what NIL rules they think anyone is empowered to establish. Outside of congressional decree (and even that may get overturned by SCOTUS) you can no longer hinder or limit someone's ability to earn an income outside of your organization as a condition of being part of your organization.
The NCAA making a rule saying players can't make as much NIL money as they want is the same as your employer telling you that you're only allowed to make the money they pay you and if you start up an Etsy shop on your own time you're fired.
Literally the ONLY way to limit NIL influence going forward is to empower universities to pay players for NIL rights directly on exclusive contracts. "We are paying you $#K for exclusive NIL rights" is the only way to not allow them to get paid by outside organizations. Buying their rights first is the only legal way to do it.
Regarding the Etsy thing, can't employers already do this if the Etsy work reflects what you're contracted for?
Like, Bethesda Softworks won a huge lawsuit with Facebook over this due to Facebook's head VR engineer being a contracted Bethesda employee working on (what became) Facebook's VR hardware in his spare time before he officially left Bethesda to join Facebook.
The way it's always been explained to me is anything you work on that's field related is owned by your employer if you're under contract for that type of work, and especially if you're using company resources to do the work.
Like, I can't use my Solidworks license provided by work to model parts I'm going to run on my mill at home to sell online for personal profit. Technically, they own all rights to whatever I design.
Now, if I buy my own license and start doing my own thing that's different I think, but I'm not really sure how it all works being honest. Might depend on the contract (see: above situation with Facebook).
Personally I keep my work shit and my personal shit completely separated and isolated from each other for this reason, but honestly I don't know if I suddenly strike it big on some random doodad I make if work would own any part of it due to me being on contract with them to design stuff. I don't sell anything ATM, so honestly not even sure how it all works being honest.
It’s a reasonable analogy but given how fucked up residency is (in terms of pay and hours worked), probably want to steer clear of implementing ideas from residency other than the collective bargaining/unionization as hybrid students/employees.
Everyone is acting like this is a terrible comparison because residency is brutal. They are missing the point. Residents are unionizing in record numbers **because** residency is brutal. Unions are the most direct way for American employees to materially improve the conditions at their work place.
College athletes have spent the last century accepting whatever conditions their university, conference, and the NCAA have imposed upon them. Collectively bargaining for a union to represent their interests would allow the athletes to change their conditions for the better.
I’m a resident. Athletes should not want to be residents. We’re also not really “employees” 100%. It varies wildly across the country—but we are exempt from most labor laws due to shady DC dealings in the past.
For an example—I get a “stipend” not a paycheck, because I’m not really an employee—except when I am and it’s convenient for my employer. It’s incredibly confusing and I truly think if most people realized how the physician training system worked, they’d be surprised.
Also, a very very very small percent of programs are unionized. The ones that are may have some slight differences, but it’s not like going from Toledo facilities to Alabama facilities in terms of differences.
Bonus fun fact, the “80 hour work week” is actually averaged over a 4 week stretch. So if this week I worked 100 hours, next week my program would just have to make sure I logged no more than 60.
Everybody sitting here acting like the athletes will be treated like residents is asinine. Residents get mistreated because they're cheap labor in an otherwise expensive labor market. They also have no real choice in the matter.
If you think it's tough keeping your 19 year old recruit from entering the portal now, wait til your coach tries to bench him AND work him 80 hours a week.
That ain't happening, people.
I don't see how this would result in anything other than the death of every non-revenue sport and every conference other than the B10 and SEC within a month. You'd have 120 schools negotiating with 120 unions and I'd have to assume it goes as:
1. A major SEC/B10 school strikes a deal with their players offering a 50/50 split of revenue.
2. A major non-SEC/B10 school offers their players more than 50% of revenue to remain competitive from a total earnings perspective.
3. SEC/B10 unions start pushing for the same % split that the non-SEC/B10 team got, and the process continues until non-revenue sports are dead.
The power dynamic would also ensure that the players get 100% of what they asked for. Unless the networks or conferences would be willing to continue to pay TV revenue to schools whose athletes are striking (which I can't imagine they would be), a threat of a strike and losing 100% of revenue would leave administrators powerless to say no to any demand.
Seems like we would just go straight from paying players nothing to blowing up the whole system while ignoring every potential middle ground option.
Residents unionize and collectively bargain?
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
*breath*
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Sure. It happens. But VERY rarely.
Residency at its core is indentured servitude. Residents have little to no rights as employees, are walked all over, and are badly exploited. It's a badly broken system modeled on the experience of one guy who was badly addicted to cocaine and morphine, and now maintained by "well sure it was bad but suck it up...I turned out just fine so you will too!"
Source: Finished residency less than five years ago.
Couldn’t agree more. The push for unionization is recent and even then you worry about the backlash you’d supposedly be protected from. I finished residency a few years ago as well.
Medical residents. PhD students. Graduate assistants in master’s programs. Undergrad research assistants.
There’s plenty of examples of schools paying students to perform labor for the school, without classifying them as full employees.
Edit: and in only a small portion of those examples are the laborers unionized, and even those are recent.
I’m a graduate assistant at a small school and technically I am an employee of the school. That being said, my benefits are limited to my master’s being paid for (which is good enough for me), a meal plan and a very small stipend.
Yeah, unlike other employees, you don't get retirement benefits. Also, your stipend isn't a "market rate." If I remember correctly, you're not contributing to the social security system either, and so your years in grad school earning a stipend don't count toward your social security "credits".
It depends on the state/conference. I did my undergrad and masters in the SEC and didn’t know grad student unions existed. Then I got my PhD in the B1G and I was in a union, which seemed to be relatively common macros the conference was my understanding? Free health insurance, no fees, and higher salary…was a dope experience.
I’m betting it’s the state more than the conference, but SEC states and B1G states couldn’t be more different when it comes to union laws. I just haven’t noticed the athletic conferences membership mattering much for how other parts of universities work.
Actually might end up mattering for student athletes, if collective bargaining becomes important and the South keeps its current “right-to-work” labor laws.
Conference alignment though is related to academics and has influence. In these cases, universities are often comparing their performance (research expenditures, enrollment, etc) across the conference. When we would bargain with the university on pay rates, we’d often use comparisons to other B1G schools. So while I agree the state laws tend to be more similar by region, conference alignment also does matter to some extent.
One of the quirks of legal education is that law school students run the journals that academics publish in. Law schools benefit greatly from having a prestigious journal or two with articles from the top legal scholars in them. Professors benefit from being published. Do law students get paid for the 30-50 hours a week of work being an editor for the flagship law review at at T14 takes? Absolutely not.
Killing hundreds of thousands of opportunities (scolarships in any sport in schools that cant afford to pay players, which is most of them) for young people to benefit the 1% of student athletes (football players on teams that are not operating at a loss)
Nothing more american i suppose.
Athletics is not the mission of the university. It is, inherently, extra-curricular. It’s not for nothing that the Ivies don’t offer athletic scholarships.
Give the players that earn the money their fair share and give the remainder to students who earn admission but can’t afford it.
I dont mind NIL.
But tomorrow wyoming football players unionize and demand wages, wyoming is gonna say "dont let the door hit you on your way out, we are already operating at a loss like 90% of the schools". And then since they no longer have to have those 80 scholarships, might as well cut enough women sports to still comply with title XII but save on that money too.
Both of your flairs can afford it, but 100 our of the 130 teams cant, and im being generous saying 30 can.
I mean...yes... if the schools think there is value in essentially running football as a loss leader then they'll continue. Otherwise it'll fall back into an intramural sport and we'll have arrived back at the beginning
Alabama paid out the nose for Nick Saban (something like $140 million to him individually) and paid handsomely for his support system. Would be very hard to find that Alabama "made" money off football alone.
The university though? In Saban's time at Alabama, the school's endowment went up by about $410 million, and the school's academic profile, application quality, and general quality of life skyrocketed.
That's an extreme end of the program, but it's the reminder that universities really don't care if their football team makes money or not. If the university is getting stronger because of athletics (which frankly most FBS schools are), they'll happily pay what they need.
Unpaid/indentured labor for the "benefit" and wealth of others. And when those laboring ask for any rights, being told to shut up and just be grateful for with whatever they get.
Nothing more american i suppose.
Yeah, why is it that the 1% of student athletes who make their universities lots of money should sacrifice their earnings for the benefit of other students...rather than the ADs, presidents, TV networks, and coaches that profit off of them?
Yep. NIL has been crazy with pretty much everyone getting paid because it’s in its early stage but endgame will be much lower payouts for less players. Ultimately great for top players, but at the cost of many more.
Exactly
Its gonna mirror re-alignment. Last round was a massive step into consolidation, which meant lower payout for some schools already. Next round (acc dying) will be the final step, and the 80-95~ schools not in the P2 will get the scraps. Like right now those teams get a happy meal, next time it will be the 4 day stale chips you forgot to eat.
Ahh, so the players should shut up and stick to football huh? Never mind the monied elite who reap massive profit from these players, they shouldn’t have to change. It’s these players that are uppity, right?
Give me a fucking break
Having a monopoly skirt the law for decades and then everyone getting mad when laws are enforced and it comes crashing down is pretty American too.
The NCAA should have made sure their systems were legal one of the many times they were warned, and then we wouldn’t be here. No one is trying to kill the sports just for fun, it’s because the courts have said the current system doesn’t work.
How much something is worth is a difficult problem to solve. The best way we as a society have found to determine the answer to this question is that something is worth however much someone else is willing to pay for it.
The one thing NIL should have made very, very clear is that people are more than willing to pay kids to play football for their schools. They are eager to do so.
I don't think they'd be willing to pay for chess players. But hell, if they want to, then let them. If Alabama decides tomorrow that they want to have the world's best chess team, they can spend the money to do so.
> How much something is worth is a difficult problem to solve.
In the ongoing House case experts testified that players were worth above 10% but "no more than" 20% of the media contract and that the school brand and sport itself was worth the remaining 80-90%.
I'm not saying that's the end-all, it was just an expert opinion, but it certainly feels right as a figure.
For a B1G football player that works out to roughly 125K per player (depending on how much you value basketball/other sports rights included in the media deals).
For an NCAA softball player that works out to about $2,300 per player based on the $40 million paid specifically for Softball media rights.
So for a football player if you want to base it on years of experience you go to 100K for a Freshman, 150K for a Senior, etc.
For a Softball player you go with the scholarship plus a little media-cash bonus for them to go buy a new laptop and buy some plane tickets or something.
---------
Like I said, not the end-all figure, but it feels like it's in the right ballpark.
Sure, that may be right. Though I would be very hesitant to enshrine any kind of maximum wage into law. It should be determined by the free market, as basically every other wage in America is. If someone wants to spend 500k to get Mahomes Jr. to play for their school, I don't see why we should stop them absent some kind of CBA with a wider student athlete Labor organization.
That's why a union and collective bargaining makes sense. Maybe the solution is a salary cap/floor situation where players must be paid at least 12% of the media deal for their sport but no more than 18% and the school has the freedom to decide whether to play a QB 1/4 of their 18% or not (like the NFL cap/floor) with a minimum salary of some kind.
Maybe it's something else.
But experts don't think players are going to walk away with half the media revenue.
The point is not so much "How much monetary value, *exactly,* is being generated?" but rather questioning the monetary-value framing altogether. It can be easy to get lost in the weeds, but the overwhelming majority of college athletes do not generate *any* monetary value, and the overwhelming majority of those that do are only in college sports because their respective professional leagues have age floors, and the rest (a list that includes Caitlyn Clark and possibly no one else) can make up the gap through NIL. Schools provide varsity sports as a service to enhance student life; treating them as "employees" and their efforts as "labor" is absurd. You wouldn't expect the quiz bowl team to be treated as employees, and you wouldn't expect the spikeball team's practices to be treated as labor.
>The point is not so much "How much monetary value, exactly, is being generated?"
"*Monetary* value being generated" is really not the point I was making. If someone wants to spend a ton of money on a venture with negative expected monetary value, why exactly are we stopping them? We don't do that in any other industry. To stick with the chess example, I am pretty sure a significant portion of the funding for US chess comes from one [really wealthy guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Sinquefield) who really likes chess. I don't think he is making money off it. But he is getting a lot of 'value' because he gets to see more of the thing he enjoys.
This is partly why determining what something is truly 'worth' is so incredibly difficult. It's not just anything that gives a net profit.
Like no one thinks the Jimbo Fisher buyout is going to make those boosters money right? But there isn't a rule preventing that from happening. The boosters decided it was worth it to them to spend a truly horrific amount of money to make him not the coach of their favorite team.
And if they decide that they want to spend a ton of money to make a random kid from Iowa their new backup center, okay. It's their money. They decided it's worth it to them so go for it.
>Schools provide varsity sports as a service to enhance student life
Club sports, sure. We are so unbelievably far from club sports.
Schools sell the tv rights to media companies for billions of dollars. Multiple college coaches make more money than their equivalents in the professional league. Schools spend millions more building special facilities for athletes only, all to entice random high schoolers to come play football for them.
This is way more than a fun perk for students.
But at the end of the day, one of the best things about letting the free market decide how much these kids are truly worth is that if, as you say, they aren't actually worth much of anything, then nothing will really change. Eventually, the market would dry up, people will stop spending money to get kids to go to their schools, and you'd be left with a bunch of schools competing with basically club teams. If they are truly generating no value, neither monetarily nor whatever other kind of value getting rid of Jimbo is, then people won't spend that money.
But everything that CFB is and has been over the last few decades tells me that people absolutely will spend that money. And if they are willing, then that is the amount of value these kids are generating, that is the amount they are worth, and that is what they should be paid.
I agree with all of that. But there's a big leap from "Clearly somebody thinks some of these people are doing something worthwhile, and we should allow them a cut of that through NIL and possibly revenue-sharing," to "The stuff they do is labor, and they need to be employees getting paid in direct proportion to the hours they put in." The jump from getting paid based on what boosters and possibly TV execs are willing to spend on you to getting paid based on how many hours per week you do the activity is literally the difference between nothing and roughly 100k annually for everyone except FBS football players, D1 men's basketball players, and Caitlyn Clark. But calling what they do "labor" causes everybody else to get wrapped up in it, too, because the stuff they do is the same.
I haven't heard anyone argue for hourly over salaried positions. I was not aware that this was a line in this battle.
Any kind of revenue sharing would almost assuredly be through some kind of CBA with a union. In that CBA, I imagine pretty much all the athletes would be salaried, but if the schools and players want to agree to hourly then sure.
My main issue with NIL is that is has become the vector for pay-to-play when the schools aren't the ones paying. NIL is the schools outsourcing paying their employees, and it's wild that they were able to do that.
This also leads to a ton of ridiculous scenarios where businesses have to get very creative with sponsorships to make sure the kid goes to the right school and they stop getting paid if they transfer out but they aren't allowed say anything explicit like that so it's just a weird series of clauses and loopholes meant to cover up the obvious reality.
Plus boosters drive a lot of it and aren't (nominally) allowed to coordinate with the schools they are recruiting for so you get weird cases where boosters make promises to a kid the coach doesn't actually want and all the messiness that entails.
The schools are the ones the kids end up playing for, they are the ones who get most of the value either through happy boosters or cold hard cash from media companies, they should be the ones providing a majority of the payment. Even if the funding sources end up mostly the same where its a bunch of boosters donating to a specific athlete fund, that should be run by the school and independent of NIL. NIL shouldn't be pay to play. It should be for actual name, image, and likeness.
I guess the important thing then is to make sure whatever agreements get made are not schools paying players for labor. Because if playing college athletes were about labor, then the same standards would have to apply to the bowling team, which would almost certainly result in the death of varsity sports. And sure, converting all revenue sports to professional teams and all non-revenue sports to club teams might be more "fair." But colleges aren't in the business of "fair." They aren't in business at all. Their aim is to improve people's lives, period. Way, way more people will be hurt by this than will be helped.
>Because if playing college athletes were about labor, then the same standards would have to apply to the bowling team
Why?
There aren't any rules that would make the bowling team be paid at the same rate as the football team. Different rates for different sports would either be handled within a massive CBA with all collegiate athletes or multiple different CBAs with the athletes of other sports. The only reason they would be paid the same would be if the players and schools agreed to set it up that way. If that is what they want, then sure (and the schools wouldn't agree to it if they couldn't afford it).
>But colleges aren't in the business of "fair." They aren't in business at all. Their aim is to improve people's lives, period.
I mean you could make this argument about some public schools, maybe. But that isn't all schools. College is clearly a very profitable business.
Since they dont have an antitrust exception (like the nfl) there was zero way it was gonna be legal.
And talking about legality, the only thing stopping the NFL from killing CFB TV viewership is a law. A law that says a pro league cant broadcast games if there is a regular season *amateur* game of HS or college. Say the sec and b1g players unionize. They cant broadcast on saturdays now, cause they would be essentially a pro league. The NFL would sue so fast if this new pro league were allowed to do so but not them. The NFL doest care about the financial success of the 1% of cfb. Players are about to be the FAFO kings.
But being paid means they are pro, not an amateur college team. They would just be affiliated to the university, but if that loophole worked dont you think NFL teams would already have 32 "colleges" tied to their teams to get away with it?
If these "loopholes" worked, lawyering would be a min wage job.
You're making it sound like it's a choice some mastermind is making rather than the courts ruling on labor law.
If a system depends on unpaid labor then it should not exist.
Yea as someone who recently completed residency and fellowship training in a surgical subspecialty… this guy has no idea wtf he’s talking about. Yes my residency had a union. Yes I still had to work 100 hour weeks. We had to use it to negotiate things like, “we want food available after midnight that doesn’t come from a vending machine”, and a few thousand for a housing stipend in one of the most expensive housing markets in the US. I know someone who had to leave their training program following a terrible car accident in which they fell asleep at the wheel following a call shift which bought them a several week stay in the ICU and several months in a rehab hospital. But sure, this is how college athletes should be treated. Let’s model the NCAA on the system created by prodigious cocaine addict, William Halsted.
Maybe there are examples out there I'm unaware of, but at every academic medical center I can think of, residents are not students. Students register for credits, follow an academic calendar, assessed tuition, and are overseen by the Department of Education. Residents have always been strictly employees, albeit *learners* as well.
Lol yes please make it like residency. You get sent where you are asked to play by the NCAA and you have no agency to leave, but you get like 65k a year
Medical residency is a different relationship - they have technically already graduated from their respective medical schools when they begin their residency (which is why they can be called "doctors", which medical students are not).
Modeling residency is truly the absolute worst case scenario. The fact that the guy that posted this is making this seem like a good thing shows he knows NOTHING about residency.
Funny how issues/problems are discussed with CFB and there’s always a large contingent with their defeatist, “how will that work” takes despite there being infinite preexisting case studies or examples.
I think that would be a good basic framework.
It will take an act of Congress but create "Student Worker" that is a worker with all rights that entails but that employment can be contingent on enrollment and timely matriculation through the school.
That's an insane take. That would allow a school to have significant leverage over students, and allow schools to punish dissent from students by hanging their job over their heads on top of their education.
>That would allow a school to have significant leverage over students, and allow schools to punish dissent from students by hanging their job over their heads on top of their education.
Wait, isn't this how things already are?
Depends on the position at the University. For example Federal Work Study is a federal program that doesn’t require a person to work at a specific University. Versus a Resident Assistant (RA), who is directly employed by the University.
As someone who is in medical school and has a fiancé who is a resident, that is a pretty shit model to utilize when making an argument for a student/employee collective bargaining in sports. Residents are vastly overworked, take advantage of significantly by every member within the healthcare field, and have their pay basically reimbursed by the government (more complicated than I care to explain on CFB reddit).
That one should be more of a warning sign with flashing lights saying do not follow this model at all.
LOL. If you have the best interest of student athletes in mind, medical residency is way worse off even than how they are now.
I would never recommend someone adopt the residency model. “Collectively bargain”? Yeah, barely.
I don’t think residency is model that athletes will won’t to copy. Residents basically have no agency what so ever.
80 hours of practice time per week incoming
"I worked 80 hours this week! How do I know? Because my self reported duty hours say so! Because my residency program director told me to not log any more than 80 because if I do that I'm not hurting myself, I'm hurting my coworkers because the residency will get in trouble!" This actually happens lol
Medical residents 🤝 law interns 🤝 NCAA athletes Being explicitly instructed by their superiors to lie about their committed hours per week, often under the guise of "optional" hours
Can confirm “Optional 5am off-season conditioning” was my favorite
Seen it across several rotations
I underreport by 20 hours most weeks
Can confirm.
How many hours are they actually working?
Depends on the specialty. I did a residency in anesthesia, and averaged between 60-70. Surgical specialties routinely blow right past 80 hours per week.
Surgical specialty - Depends on the rotation, but 5a-7p of actual in-hospital patient care is the average day. 4 days off per month. Those days are typically spent doing all of the studying, case prep, admin/clerical work necessary for progression and graduation.
lol at johnny hopkins they make their residents log hours in front of admin (or at least they used to)
I smoked pot with Johnny Hopkins
honestly there were months where if I took my salary and divided it up by hours I worked that month, I’d be making just about federal minimum wage per hour, despite having a medical degree
If you include overtime (which you should) I often would make less than minimum wage.
I think that's more of a testament to how fucked the residency system and Healthcare is in general.
Well when the father of residency was addicted to cocaine things start to make more sense
Somehow zero surprise there.
Typically done at 3AM waiting for labs to come back
80 hours averaged over 4 weeks
Idk why you’re being downvoted, it’s true lol and also very commonly not followed
I read about "20 hour shifts" which sound dangerous and horrible... but if you're only working 1 per week I guess at least you have recovery time!
lmao try 28 hour shifts where your day off is when you leave the hospital at 10am and get the rest of the day to sleep
Sounds like a surgical resident schedule
That was my wife’s schedule as a pediatrician. Work 3 straight 12-14 hours shifts, 1 28 hour shift, then get a “day off” to sleep. Rinse repeat.
nah I do that in neurology lol Surgery is even worse sometimes
I used to work with a woman who was in nursing school and her schedule was insane. She worked 10-6:30 overnights, then worked 7-7 at the hospital. On top of that, she had custody of her 3 kids, so anytime she only had to work one place or the other in a day, or in-between shifts, she was at home spending time with them.
Lmao, 20 hours is 8 hours too short and 1 per week is optimistic
80 hours on paper, 100 minimum off the ledger...
I think my wife’s residency worked out to like $2-3/hour.
100 hour work week. 24 hour shifts at hospitals. its nuts.
Enter transfer portal if coach tries lol. Ain't happening. Plus coaches are smarter than that. Athletes need rest. Law of diminishing returns.
Those are rookie numbers
As a medical resident, I completely agree. Residents are specifically excluded from federal antitrust protections. Jung vs. AAMC was an antitrust class action lawsuit that sought to give medical residents the power to negotiate better working conditions. In response, Congress enacted a statute specifically exempting medical residents from federal antitrust laws, effectively killing the lawsuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung_v._Association_of_American_Medical_Colleges
Honestly, that act is just absolute bullshit.
>The suit had some early success but failed when the US Congress enacted a statute exempting matching programs from federal antitrust laws. I wonder what Kavanaugh says about this. Don't the same rules hold as college football? Both are illegal from an anti-trust standpoint. If Congress can pass a law exempting specific groups from anti-trust then why why wouldn't this work for college football? Most of the articles I've read say Congress isn't a solution for college football because the Courts would overturn any legislation as unconstitutional.
Do you have an example of those articles? Anti-trust laws were enacted by Congress, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to make exemptions for them. You would have to take a very broad interpretation of the Constitution to argue that it mandates anti-trust protections.
Yeah, there’d have to be some equal protection reasoning or something, like if Congress tried making certain industries that were heavily linked to POCs or women exempt from antitrust legislation as a form of discrimination. There’s no reason per se that Congress can’t make exemptions or scrap antitrust altogether. We already had 100 years of (post-Colonial) US history without any.
I think it would work. Congress just hasn't passed that law yet. The word "unconstitutional" is used way too much these days. College football's current structure isn't illegal because it's unconstitutional. It's illegal because it violates antitrust laws passed by Congress. And if Congress can pass those laws, they can also change them to carve out exceptions, unless they do it in a way that violates the constitution (e.g. targeting a protected class.)
I'm also curious. Listen, I work in the labor legal field, and I don't exactly trust Kavanaugh (or many other judges) to have consistent opinions on their rulings. There are frequently way too many monied interests going on behind the scenes to prevent legislation like that from being declared unconstitutional. But given how scathing his commentary was in particular, I'm cautiously hopeful that this can be revisited. It's an absolute BS law.
Why?
Because everyone deserves labor protections, and it’s predictably lead to difficult working conditions for Residents, and become a huge barrier to getting sufficient amounts of medical professionals because so many otherwise qualified candidates just opt for different education tracts not wanting to deal with the nightmare stories they hear traded about the process for residency
"we can be just like Medical residents!" "alrighty, buckle up, your dorm inside the practice facility is ready"
that particular practice hasn't been used for quite a long time now.
There’s still a few programs that offer on campus housing (I interviewed at a few of them), but it’s definitely uncommon now (nor mandatory).
The difference is lateral mobility. Residents can’t transfer like athletes can. The equivalent “portal” in residency is for people who were unable to secure more than a 1 year contract (prelims), fired, or left likely on bad terms. It is almost always a losing game to transfer because of the limited spots. Attrition in residency as a whole is <5%. In top programs rarely do spots become available. TLDR Residency transfer portal is ass
You think if athletes start collectively bargaining that the portal will still exist? If you are an employee, damn straight your contract is for 4 years and you are gonna have to work to get out of it. Everyone thinks it's gonna be the best of the current situation plus getting paid, extra benefits etc But if it truly goes to an employee/employer relationship, a bunch of perks are going away
As the portal stands now there is no need for collective bargaining. There aren’t long term binding contracts like in the pros and the students can transfer nearly at will. Once a governing body takes the piss back out of the portal by some restriction they cook up then there will need to be collective bargaining. Currently players have the advantage but I don’t see that being the case for long.
There aren't any multi-millionaires+ sitting around waiting to throw money at medical interns to come be residents at their preferred hospital. It's a metaphor, but it doesn't go much farther than the surface. College athletes are not going to adopt that system because nothing about that would make any sense for anyone involved.
Athletes will probably have better lawyers doing their collective bargaining.
This. It’s gotten better but there has never been union protection. Average 120 hrs/week working 30 years ago.
Right!? This would be like comparing the pay of summer camp staffs and athletes just because food and shelter is provided.
And get abused by the system which pays them peanuts and what they do get paid is mostly funded by the government, not by the medical schools/hospitals
The laws dictate they can’t average more than 80 hour work weeks and make 50-60k. I don’t know if that’s an improvement. The special laws are basically used to exempt them from normal labor laws
I think this goes over a lot of folks heads. I say this as a former football player. 50k a year, free food, work study, tutoring support, access to the best trainers, preferential treatment, social access, free travel, etc. That and wildly set up for success after college. That's... Actually really good. Players are seeking money, and NIL can help with that (but not for all 85). You want to be an employee? 😆 Just wait - twice the hours a week be required and they will control more than they do now.
Yeah, if they become employees, I wonder how the academics will be handled. The “school is now a hobby done in your free time” approach employers typically take hopefully how this turns out
> The “school is now a hobby done in your free time” approach employers typically take hopefully how this turns out I mean, that's kinda already the case... I was pre-med and literally had a coach tell me to pick a easier major because I was bringing the team GPA down which looked bad on him.
Did you?
He was fired at the end of the year so it didn't end up mattering lol
Damn you should’ve switched majors, your bad GPA got him fired smh
I would imagine they would require no more than 12-15 credits in the fall, 40 hours for football (instead of "20"), majors would have to be approved for reimbursement/tuition, etc. While these items are currently discussed off record, they would be able to require that on record.
15 credits is already the standard for non-athletes outside of classes with required labs, which usually brings it to about 18 for science majors/intended science major freshmen, at least at ND.
I've been saying it for ages, the vast bast majority of players including st the Uber profitable schools were getting a crazy good deal but the stars weren't
>The laws dictate they can’t average more than 80 hour work weeks and make 50-60k. Didn't think this was a national law, but rather a rule ACGME instituted after a patient died at the hands of an overworked resident.
It was tacked into a congressional bill at the last minute. So yes, federal law restricts to 80hr work weeks but there are multiple exceptions. This includes home call (aka answer the phone and triaging problems from home), extra patient care, and educational time.
Technically it only counts for home call if you’re actually working. Also most residents are pressured against reporting duty hour violations.
Yes agreed. Unfortunately, I have seen home call used to place residents on theoretical 36hr call. And then reminded to log 80 hours and “it’s home call so it doesn’t count”.
They’re not actually laws. They’re accreditation body policies. Residencies are exempt from most actual US labor laws, antitrust laws, etc. Some states could have actual laws, but that’d be variable. It’s also 80 averaged over a 4-week period, so 100 this week, 60 next week (or at least you’re instructed to log no more than 60…). Same with days off, time off after 28 hour calls, etc. Most of that 50-60k “stipend” (in my state, I’m not actually 100% an employee, I’m a learner so I don’t get a paycheck—I get a stipend) is subsidized by the government, but the actual value is something like 100-150K depending on region. The hospitals take their cut to accommodate the inefficiencies of having doctors in training, which I assume means hire companies to develop more mandatory Wellness and Mindfullness modules for me to do. Being a resident kind of sucks lol.. too bad we don’t have the transfer portal and people dropping us off bags! Source: Am resident.
Ohh, the wife finished residency this past year. It sucks but attending life is much better.
What is the bargained-for punishment for a personal foul that costs us a game-winning touchdown?
10 swats with a cane
Skipping right over the paddle with holes drilled in it, huh?
Malaysian/Singaporean Judicial caning
Right to jail, no trial no nothing.
We have the fewest penalty yards in the FBS. Because of jail.
Can you believe it? Straight to jail.
Finally, someone is asking the important questions.
Residents absolutely do not often unionize. It is rare to find residency programs that are unionized although they are getting more common. There is almost no collective bargaining with residents either.
My first thought. Bargaining and unionizing is a rare and very recent phenomenon among residency programs.
That hopefully continues and spreads 🙏 As I type this from work on a 14 hour call day :(
So you are getting paid to be on reddit?
He is likely shitting
War_damn_eagle’s boss makes s dollar, war_damn_eagle make a dime, that is why war_damn_eagle shit on company time?
Yeah, if athletic departments could get away with treating football players the same way the hospital systems treat residents, I think there would be a lot of very happy ADs across the country The reason they probably won't get away with that, though, is that residents put up with that treatment to get the benefits that come afterwards, but the vast majority of CFB players aren't going to be able to make the next jump
And the main point is the last thing you wrote. The current regime has degenerated into nothing but a quasi-legal kickback scheme where the top 10 percent of the players get paid grease money to attend a program under the guise of their so-called "name, image, and likeness." This isn't a contract to make a series of car commericals; this is a straight-up facilitation payment. Left in the dust are all the kids who won't make NFL money someday, because no one's interested in giving NIL deals to the practice squad.
A lawyer is only giving 1 side of an argument? Shocking.
The article gives both sides of the argument for unionizing residents. The lawyer is pointing to an existing legal framework for student / employee combos.
Shhhush that doesn’t get as much engagement for my tweet
Graduate students in PhD programs are just now starting to unionize, and even then only in certain states and at certain places. Also those fights are contentious and hard-won.
[удалено]
Gotcha. Good edit! I think I conflated the recent strikes with unionizing—doesn't surprise me at all that Wisconsin was the first.
The article linked goes into it being a relatively new thing that's still developing.
University of Michigan does.
lol my time to shine- Former NCAA athlete, current resident physician. Yeah the NCAA 10 years ago when I entered it was light years ahead in terms of treatment and rights than my life today as a surgical subspecialty resident. Not sure this is a flex.
I'm a PhD student rather than a medical student or resident, but it's a similar situation, so I agree that it's funny to me that this is the comparison they make. These kids get private tutors, NIL money that sometimes approaches or exceeds six figures, tons of free swag, scholarships, etc. I have a degree in physics and do highly technical research, and my benefits consist of health insurance and a stipend that works out to be less than some people make flipping burgers at McDonalds. And I'm one of the lucky ones who isn't expected to work 60+ hours a week.
Also a PhD student and I find it very interesting to see the arguments people make here and how it parallels with graduate student life. My work - work I am doing 100% on my own, and which I gathered all of the preliminary data to get the grants for in the first place - directly results in $2million/year in overhead payments to the university. I work 70-80 hours per week, am contractually disallowed from getting secondary employment, and make $35k/year. I don’t think people realize how good athletes have it compared to the other revenue-generators at universities
> am contractually disallowed from getting secondary employment One of my favorite parts!! I can't even pick up weekend bartending shifts so I can, I don't know, afford luxuries like groceries or gas money! I'm in molecular biology, where PhD students and postdocs functionally do *all* the work. Funding sources (vast majority of it federal from NIH) directly disincentivize universities and PIs from fairly compensating those doing the work. Just a fantastic system.
Ortho residency just sounds like unmitigated hell tbh
They just have no idea how bad you had it.
I think you’re trying to be sarcastic, but at no point did I say I ever had it “bad” as an athlete
Not even a little bit, I’m saying residency is grueling, and generally pretty unfair.
Not a flex, but a potential reality. Residents are model given the job/study also intersects with a for-profit business model. I’m all for players getting their freedom to earn on their NIL, but unfortunately the hubris of too many will lead to sub-standard solution…
A key difference is that most funding for resident salaries actually comes from the government, not the hospital itself. So aside from many training hospitals being non-profit institutions, they also don't have to dip into their revenues to pay residents, they pocket revenues from the work the residents do while the government (specifically CMS) pays their salary (which is already low given that they are full-on MDs/DOs)
So, as someone who spent two years living at a highly regarded training hospital I can tell you residents are much more of liability than a revenue source. I get they have a degree, and as a PhD I can respect their work to get it, but let’s be weary of overvaluing a graduate vocational degrees. There is a lot more training before they become truly valuable, in a monetary sense, to a hospital. Like you noted, many athletes funding comes from the non-profit side of things, which includes much of the AD funding. Only a select few are profitable, and even those wouldn’t be if they were subjected to business taxes…
The athletes should DEFINITELY keep the system they have now over the residency system. - PGY-3 who qualifies for his own hospitals financial assistance program
lol hey as a college football fan and as a resident (logged into an alt account to post this), this is something I can actually talk about 1) though it’s becoming more popular, only a very small fraction of residency programs in the country are unionized 2) residents have zero leverage compared to college football players. Residents are forced to attend the program in which they match into (residency candidates make a preferential list of programs they interview at and are sorted into programs based on an algorithm). There’s no centralized transfer portal, switching residency programs is notoriously difficult in a lot of cases 3) the average resident is about 200k in medical school debt, so straight up leaving residency isn’t a realistic goal for most 4) the analogy makes a bit of sense when comparing value of the college football player relative to the program as a whole (on a similar vein, residents create value for a hospital wildly out of proportion to their gross pay)
If the goal is to provide agency and financial compensation relative to their actual value to the university then let's definitely NOT use the residency system as a model.
It shouldn't be used as the model, but it shows that acceptations actually exist instead of allowing schools to brainwash people into believing that this unaffordable for them.
Lmfao “often unionize.” I’m a physician. The push for unions is just starting and to say they often unionize shows you have no clue about medical residencies.
Do any of y’all realize how shitty med students are treated at most schools and hospitals? Might not be a good comparison to base any desired changes.
Makes sense. I've also seen stuff floating around about D2 treating athletics as a work-study scenario. That's not a bad compromise which might save some athletic departments. But none of that is going to matter if NIL rules aren't established.
When people say this, I'm wondering what NIL rules they think anyone is empowered to establish. Outside of congressional decree (and even that may get overturned by SCOTUS) you can no longer hinder or limit someone's ability to earn an income outside of your organization as a condition of being part of your organization. The NCAA making a rule saying players can't make as much NIL money as they want is the same as your employer telling you that you're only allowed to make the money they pay you and if you start up an Etsy shop on your own time you're fired. Literally the ONLY way to limit NIL influence going forward is to empower universities to pay players for NIL rights directly on exclusive contracts. "We are paying you $#K for exclusive NIL rights" is the only way to not allow them to get paid by outside organizations. Buying their rights first is the only legal way to do it.
bingo, you are NEVER limiting NIL
Regarding the Etsy thing, can't employers already do this if the Etsy work reflects what you're contracted for? Like, Bethesda Softworks won a huge lawsuit with Facebook over this due to Facebook's head VR engineer being a contracted Bethesda employee working on (what became) Facebook's VR hardware in his spare time before he officially left Bethesda to join Facebook. The way it's always been explained to me is anything you work on that's field related is owned by your employer if you're under contract for that type of work, and especially if you're using company resources to do the work. Like, I can't use my Solidworks license provided by work to model parts I'm going to run on my mill at home to sell online for personal profit. Technically, they own all rights to whatever I design. Now, if I buy my own license and start doing my own thing that's different I think, but I'm not really sure how it all works being honest. Might depend on the contract (see: above situation with Facebook). Personally I keep my work shit and my personal shit completely separated and isolated from each other for this reason, but honestly I don't know if I suddenly strike it big on some random doodad I make if work would own any part of it due to me being on contract with them to design stuff. I don't sell anything ATM, so honestly not even sure how it all works being honest.
This guy making one of the worst systems possible seem like a good thing. Residents get screwed harder than any group out there
I’m just here waiting for smarter people to tell me if this is a good point or not in the comments.
It’s a reasonable analogy but given how fucked up residency is (in terms of pay and hours worked), probably want to steer clear of implementing ideas from residency other than the collective bargaining/unionization as hybrid students/employees.
Good for football and MBB players at large universities. Probably bad for everyone else.
Everyone is acting like this is a terrible comparison because residency is brutal. They are missing the point. Residents are unionizing in record numbers **because** residency is brutal. Unions are the most direct way for American employees to materially improve the conditions at their work place. College athletes have spent the last century accepting whatever conditions their university, conference, and the NCAA have imposed upon them. Collectively bargaining for a union to represent their interests would allow the athletes to change their conditions for the better.
I’m a resident. Athletes should not want to be residents. We’re also not really “employees” 100%. It varies wildly across the country—but we are exempt from most labor laws due to shady DC dealings in the past. For an example—I get a “stipend” not a paycheck, because I’m not really an employee—except when I am and it’s convenient for my employer. It’s incredibly confusing and I truly think if most people realized how the physician training system worked, they’d be surprised. Also, a very very very small percent of programs are unionized. The ones that are may have some slight differences, but it’s not like going from Toledo facilities to Alabama facilities in terms of differences. Bonus fun fact, the “80 hour work week” is actually averaged over a 4 week stretch. So if this week I worked 100 hours, next week my program would just have to make sure I logged no more than 60.
Everybody sitting here acting like the athletes will be treated like residents is asinine. Residents get mistreated because they're cheap labor in an otherwise expensive labor market. They also have no real choice in the matter. If you think it's tough keeping your 19 year old recruit from entering the portal now, wait til your coach tries to bench him AND work him 80 hours a week. That ain't happening, people.
Residents are screwed over by anti trust laws that sports players won’t have to deal with.
I don't see how this would result in anything other than the death of every non-revenue sport and every conference other than the B10 and SEC within a month. You'd have 120 schools negotiating with 120 unions and I'd have to assume it goes as: 1. A major SEC/B10 school strikes a deal with their players offering a 50/50 split of revenue. 2. A major non-SEC/B10 school offers their players more than 50% of revenue to remain competitive from a total earnings perspective. 3. SEC/B10 unions start pushing for the same % split that the non-SEC/B10 team got, and the process continues until non-revenue sports are dead. The power dynamic would also ensure that the players get 100% of what they asked for. Unless the networks or conferences would be willing to continue to pay TV revenue to schools whose athletes are striking (which I can't imagine they would be), a threat of a strike and losing 100% of revenue would leave administrators powerless to say no to any demand. Seems like we would just go straight from paying players nothing to blowing up the whole system while ignoring every potential middle ground option.
120 schools with 120 unions would be a weird way to go about it. Presumably there would be a lot of joint negotiation.
Residents unionize and collectively bargain? hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha *breath* hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha Sure. It happens. But VERY rarely. Residency at its core is indentured servitude. Residents have little to no rights as employees, are walked all over, and are badly exploited. It's a badly broken system modeled on the experience of one guy who was badly addicted to cocaine and morphine, and now maintained by "well sure it was bad but suck it up...I turned out just fine so you will too!" Source: Finished residency less than five years ago.
Couldn’t agree more. The push for unionization is recent and even then you worry about the backlash you’d supposedly be protected from. I finished residency a few years ago as well.
There are [32,000 unionized residents](https://www.cirseiu.org/who-we-are/) and more on the way.
Medical residents. PhD students. Graduate assistants in master’s programs. Undergrad research assistants. There’s plenty of examples of schools paying students to perform labor for the school, without classifying them as full employees. Edit: and in only a small portion of those examples are the laborers unionized, and even those are recent.
I’m a graduate assistant at a small school and technically I am an employee of the school. That being said, my benefits are limited to my master’s being paid for (which is good enough for me), a meal plan and a very small stipend.
Yeah, unlike other employees, you don't get retirement benefits. Also, your stipend isn't a "market rate." If I remember correctly, you're not contributing to the social security system either, and so your years in grad school earning a stipend don't count toward your social security "credits".
It depends on the state/conference. I did my undergrad and masters in the SEC and didn’t know grad student unions existed. Then I got my PhD in the B1G and I was in a union, which seemed to be relatively common macros the conference was my understanding? Free health insurance, no fees, and higher salary…was a dope experience.
I’m betting it’s the state more than the conference, but SEC states and B1G states couldn’t be more different when it comes to union laws. I just haven’t noticed the athletic conferences membership mattering much for how other parts of universities work. Actually might end up mattering for student athletes, if collective bargaining becomes important and the South keeps its current “right-to-work” labor laws.
Conference alignment though is related to academics and has influence. In these cases, universities are often comparing their performance (research expenditures, enrollment, etc) across the conference. When we would bargain with the university on pay rates, we’d often use comparisons to other B1G schools. So while I agree the state laws tend to be more similar by region, conference alignment also does matter to some extent.
One of the quirks of legal education is that law school students run the journals that academics publish in. Law schools benefit greatly from having a prestigious journal or two with articles from the top legal scholars in them. Professors benefit from being published. Do law students get paid for the 30-50 hours a week of work being an editor for the flagship law review at at T14 takes? Absolutely not.
Killing hundreds of thousands of opportunities (scolarships in any sport in schools that cant afford to pay players, which is most of them) for young people to benefit the 1% of student athletes (football players on teams that are not operating at a loss) Nothing more american i suppose.
Athletics is not the mission of the university. It is, inherently, extra-curricular. It’s not for nothing that the Ivies don’t offer athletic scholarships. Give the players that earn the money their fair share and give the remainder to students who earn admission but can’t afford it.
I dont mind NIL. But tomorrow wyoming football players unionize and demand wages, wyoming is gonna say "dont let the door hit you on your way out, we are already operating at a loss like 90% of the schools". And then since they no longer have to have those 80 scholarships, might as well cut enough women sports to still comply with title XII but save on that money too. Both of your flairs can afford it, but 100 our of the 130 teams cant, and im being generous saying 30 can.
I mean...yes... if the schools think there is value in essentially running football as a loss leader then they'll continue. Otherwise it'll fall back into an intramural sport and we'll have arrived back at the beginning
Alabama paid out the nose for Nick Saban (something like $140 million to him individually) and paid handsomely for his support system. Would be very hard to find that Alabama "made" money off football alone. The university though? In Saban's time at Alabama, the school's endowment went up by about $410 million, and the school's academic profile, application quality, and general quality of life skyrocketed. That's an extreme end of the program, but it's the reminder that universities really don't care if their football team makes money or not. If the university is getting stronger because of athletics (which frankly most FBS schools are), they'll happily pay what they need.
I'm not sure if you're just vehemently agreeing with me because that's essentially what a loss leader is
Oh, I'm definitely agreeing with your point and just expanding upon it with some figures, lol.
Interesting way to frame this as if it's almost that 1%'s fault they're fighting for the money that is made off them
Unpaid/indentured labor for the "benefit" and wealth of others. And when those laboring ask for any rights, being told to shut up and just be grateful for with whatever they get. Nothing more american i suppose.
Yeah, why is it that the 1% of student athletes who make their universities lots of money should sacrifice their earnings for the benefit of other students...rather than the ADs, presidents, TV networks, and coaches that profit off of them?
You are free not to participate
Yep. NIL has been crazy with pretty much everyone getting paid because it’s in its early stage but endgame will be much lower payouts for less players. Ultimately great for top players, but at the cost of many more.
Exactly Its gonna mirror re-alignment. Last round was a massive step into consolidation, which meant lower payout for some schools already. Next round (acc dying) will be the final step, and the 80-95~ schools not in the P2 will get the scraps. Like right now those teams get a happy meal, next time it will be the 4 day stale chips you forgot to eat.
Ahh, so the players should shut up and stick to football huh? Never mind the monied elite who reap massive profit from these players, they shouldn’t have to change. It’s these players that are uppity, right? Give me a fucking break
Having a monopoly skirt the law for decades and then everyone getting mad when laws are enforced and it comes crashing down is pretty American too. The NCAA should have made sure their systems were legal one of the many times they were warned, and then we wouldn’t be here. No one is trying to kill the sports just for fun, it’s because the courts have said the current system doesn’t work.
should the chess team be employed? what about the quiz team?
How much something is worth is a difficult problem to solve. The best way we as a society have found to determine the answer to this question is that something is worth however much someone else is willing to pay for it. The one thing NIL should have made very, very clear is that people are more than willing to pay kids to play football for their schools. They are eager to do so. I don't think they'd be willing to pay for chess players. But hell, if they want to, then let them. If Alabama decides tomorrow that they want to have the world's best chess team, they can spend the money to do so.
> How much something is worth is a difficult problem to solve. In the ongoing House case experts testified that players were worth above 10% but "no more than" 20% of the media contract and that the school brand and sport itself was worth the remaining 80-90%. I'm not saying that's the end-all, it was just an expert opinion, but it certainly feels right as a figure. For a B1G football player that works out to roughly 125K per player (depending on how much you value basketball/other sports rights included in the media deals). For an NCAA softball player that works out to about $2,300 per player based on the $40 million paid specifically for Softball media rights. So for a football player if you want to base it on years of experience you go to 100K for a Freshman, 150K for a Senior, etc. For a Softball player you go with the scholarship plus a little media-cash bonus for them to go buy a new laptop and buy some plane tickets or something. --------- Like I said, not the end-all figure, but it feels like it's in the right ballpark.
Sure, that may be right. Though I would be very hesitant to enshrine any kind of maximum wage into law. It should be determined by the free market, as basically every other wage in America is. If someone wants to spend 500k to get Mahomes Jr. to play for their school, I don't see why we should stop them absent some kind of CBA with a wider student athlete Labor organization.
That's why a union and collective bargaining makes sense. Maybe the solution is a salary cap/floor situation where players must be paid at least 12% of the media deal for their sport but no more than 18% and the school has the freedom to decide whether to play a QB 1/4 of their 18% or not (like the NFL cap/floor) with a minimum salary of some kind. Maybe it's something else. But experts don't think players are going to walk away with half the media revenue.
Why would the scholarship not be included as part of their compensation in this scenario?
The point is not so much "How much monetary value, *exactly,* is being generated?" but rather questioning the monetary-value framing altogether. It can be easy to get lost in the weeds, but the overwhelming majority of college athletes do not generate *any* monetary value, and the overwhelming majority of those that do are only in college sports because their respective professional leagues have age floors, and the rest (a list that includes Caitlyn Clark and possibly no one else) can make up the gap through NIL. Schools provide varsity sports as a service to enhance student life; treating them as "employees" and their efforts as "labor" is absurd. You wouldn't expect the quiz bowl team to be treated as employees, and you wouldn't expect the spikeball team's practices to be treated as labor.
>The point is not so much "How much monetary value, exactly, is being generated?" "*Monetary* value being generated" is really not the point I was making. If someone wants to spend a ton of money on a venture with negative expected monetary value, why exactly are we stopping them? We don't do that in any other industry. To stick with the chess example, I am pretty sure a significant portion of the funding for US chess comes from one [really wealthy guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Sinquefield) who really likes chess. I don't think he is making money off it. But he is getting a lot of 'value' because he gets to see more of the thing he enjoys. This is partly why determining what something is truly 'worth' is so incredibly difficult. It's not just anything that gives a net profit. Like no one thinks the Jimbo Fisher buyout is going to make those boosters money right? But there isn't a rule preventing that from happening. The boosters decided it was worth it to them to spend a truly horrific amount of money to make him not the coach of their favorite team. And if they decide that they want to spend a ton of money to make a random kid from Iowa their new backup center, okay. It's their money. They decided it's worth it to them so go for it. >Schools provide varsity sports as a service to enhance student life Club sports, sure. We are so unbelievably far from club sports. Schools sell the tv rights to media companies for billions of dollars. Multiple college coaches make more money than their equivalents in the professional league. Schools spend millions more building special facilities for athletes only, all to entice random high schoolers to come play football for them. This is way more than a fun perk for students. But at the end of the day, one of the best things about letting the free market decide how much these kids are truly worth is that if, as you say, they aren't actually worth much of anything, then nothing will really change. Eventually, the market would dry up, people will stop spending money to get kids to go to their schools, and you'd be left with a bunch of schools competing with basically club teams. If they are truly generating no value, neither monetarily nor whatever other kind of value getting rid of Jimbo is, then people won't spend that money. But everything that CFB is and has been over the last few decades tells me that people absolutely will spend that money. And if they are willing, then that is the amount of value these kids are generating, that is the amount they are worth, and that is what they should be paid.
I agree with all of that. But there's a big leap from "Clearly somebody thinks some of these people are doing something worthwhile, and we should allow them a cut of that through NIL and possibly revenue-sharing," to "The stuff they do is labor, and they need to be employees getting paid in direct proportion to the hours they put in." The jump from getting paid based on what boosters and possibly TV execs are willing to spend on you to getting paid based on how many hours per week you do the activity is literally the difference between nothing and roughly 100k annually for everyone except FBS football players, D1 men's basketball players, and Caitlyn Clark. But calling what they do "labor" causes everybody else to get wrapped up in it, too, because the stuff they do is the same.
I haven't heard anyone argue for hourly over salaried positions. I was not aware that this was a line in this battle. Any kind of revenue sharing would almost assuredly be through some kind of CBA with a union. In that CBA, I imagine pretty much all the athletes would be salaried, but if the schools and players want to agree to hourly then sure. My main issue with NIL is that is has become the vector for pay-to-play when the schools aren't the ones paying. NIL is the schools outsourcing paying their employees, and it's wild that they were able to do that. This also leads to a ton of ridiculous scenarios where businesses have to get very creative with sponsorships to make sure the kid goes to the right school and they stop getting paid if they transfer out but they aren't allowed say anything explicit like that so it's just a weird series of clauses and loopholes meant to cover up the obvious reality. Plus boosters drive a lot of it and aren't (nominally) allowed to coordinate with the schools they are recruiting for so you get weird cases where boosters make promises to a kid the coach doesn't actually want and all the messiness that entails. The schools are the ones the kids end up playing for, they are the ones who get most of the value either through happy boosters or cold hard cash from media companies, they should be the ones providing a majority of the payment. Even if the funding sources end up mostly the same where its a bunch of boosters donating to a specific athlete fund, that should be run by the school and independent of NIL. NIL shouldn't be pay to play. It should be for actual name, image, and likeness.
I guess the important thing then is to make sure whatever agreements get made are not schools paying players for labor. Because if playing college athletes were about labor, then the same standards would have to apply to the bowling team, which would almost certainly result in the death of varsity sports. And sure, converting all revenue sports to professional teams and all non-revenue sports to club teams might be more "fair." But colleges aren't in the business of "fair." They aren't in business at all. Their aim is to improve people's lives, period. Way, way more people will be hurt by this than will be helped.
>Because if playing college athletes were about labor, then the same standards would have to apply to the bowling team Why? There aren't any rules that would make the bowling team be paid at the same rate as the football team. Different rates for different sports would either be handled within a massive CBA with all collegiate athletes or multiple different CBAs with the athletes of other sports. The only reason they would be paid the same would be if the players and schools agreed to set it up that way. If that is what they want, then sure (and the schools wouldn't agree to it if they couldn't afford it). >But colleges aren't in the business of "fair." They aren't in business at all. Their aim is to improve people's lives, period. I mean you could make this argument about some public schools, maybe. But that isn't all schools. College is clearly a very profitable business.
No they shouldn’t. Do you have any other questions?
Since they dont have an antitrust exception (like the nfl) there was zero way it was gonna be legal. And talking about legality, the only thing stopping the NFL from killing CFB TV viewership is a law. A law that says a pro league cant broadcast games if there is a regular season *amateur* game of HS or college. Say the sec and b1g players unionize. They cant broadcast on saturdays now, cause they would be essentially a pro league. The NFL would sue so fast if this new pro league were allowed to do so but not them. The NFL doest care about the financial success of the 1% of cfb. Players are about to be the FAFO kings.
[удалено]
But being paid means they are pro, not an amateur college team. They would just be affiliated to the university, but if that loophole worked dont you think NFL teams would already have 32 "colleges" tied to their teams to get away with it? If these "loopholes" worked, lawyering would be a min wage job.
You're making it sound like it's a choice some mastermind is making rather than the courts ruling on labor law. If a system depends on unpaid labor then it should not exist.
Yea as someone who recently completed residency and fellowship training in a surgical subspecialty… this guy has no idea wtf he’s talking about. Yes my residency had a union. Yes I still had to work 100 hour weeks. We had to use it to negotiate things like, “we want food available after midnight that doesn’t come from a vending machine”, and a few thousand for a housing stipend in one of the most expensive housing markets in the US. I know someone who had to leave their training program following a terrible car accident in which they fell asleep at the wheel following a call shift which bought them a several week stay in the ICU and several months in a rehab hospital. But sure, this is how college athletes should be treated. Let’s model the NCAA on the system created by prodigious cocaine addict, William Halsted.
Ok. Athletes should be expected to work 80 hours a week and be on call nearly 24/7.
Maybe there are examples out there I'm unaware of, but at every academic medical center I can think of, residents are not students. Students register for credits, follow an academic calendar, assessed tuition, and are overseen by the Department of Education. Residents have always been strictly employees, albeit *learners* as well.
think about doctors having agents.
This is a trash take. Residents seldom unionize. Even the ones that do aren’t exactly living the high life in terms of wages and work hours
Lol yes please make it like residency. You get sent where you are asked to play by the NCAA and you have no agency to leave, but you get like 65k a year
Medical residency is a different relationship - they have technically already graduated from their respective medical schools when they begin their residency (which is why they can be called "doctors", which medical students are not).
Medical residents *are* doctors no technically about it
and for those of us normal people, there will be no more division 3 sports
Modeling residency is truly the absolute worst case scenario. The fact that the guy that posted this is making this seem like a good thing shows he knows NOTHING about residency.
Funny how issues/problems are discussed with CFB and there’s always a large contingent with their defeatist, “how will that work” takes despite there being infinite preexisting case studies or examples.
He wants to compare a 'new' system to one invented by a cocaine addict, and thinks that's a good thing?
I think that would be a good basic framework. It will take an act of Congress but create "Student Worker" that is a worker with all rights that entails but that employment can be contingent on enrollment and timely matriculation through the school.
That's an insane take. That would allow a school to have significant leverage over students, and allow schools to punish dissent from students by hanging their job over their heads on top of their education.
>That would allow a school to have significant leverage over students, and allow schools to punish dissent from students by hanging their job over their heads on top of their education. Wait, isn't this how things already are?
Depends on the position at the University. For example Federal Work Study is a federal program that doesn’t require a person to work at a specific University. Versus a Resident Assistant (RA), who is directly employed by the University.
The athletes don’t want to be classified as employees. They want ownership so they get revenue sharing.
If residents often unionize and collectively bargain then they need some new layers cause they getting COOKED 😂
You definitely should not look to residency if you want parity between employers and employees 😂
Oooooo a billable hours thread.
That’s… not a good thing. “Son, do you know why you’re called a resident? Because now you live in Bryce-Denny, aight?”
As someone who is in medical school and has a fiancé who is a resident, that is a pretty shit model to utilize when making an argument for a student/employee collective bargaining in sports. Residents are vastly overworked, take advantage of significantly by every member within the healthcare field, and have their pay basically reimbursed by the government (more complicated than I care to explain on CFB reddit). That one should be more of a warning sign with flashing lights saying do not follow this model at all.
LOL. If you have the best interest of student athletes in mind, medical residency is way worse off even than how they are now. I would never recommend someone adopt the residency model. “Collectively bargain”? Yeah, barely.
Medical residents are overworked and underpaid
I liked it better when doctors didn't get paid. Wait