Now Legal: Schools Buying Players

[rrlbees]

As I've worried about for a while - it's all about money and reducing, pricing out the competitive field.

No doubt about that. It's been discussed for a long time and predicted that there would be power conferences followed by breaking away from the NCAA in some manner. The power conferences want to make their own rules and get all the money.

 

[RF2044]

This could be so much simpler if they just let the players profit from their own name and likeness.

Agreed. And it takes away the messiness / uneven playing field of the school's paying athletes directly.

 

[Lawrinson14]

Hmm...let's break down these costs (excluding tuition, fees, room and board, and books.)

I'm from NJ, so let's use this as an example:

United round trip tickets from Hancock to Newark currently run about $300 (although this is closer to $500 during holidays).

So let's say I go home 3 times a year (Thanksgiving week, Christmas, Spring break):
That's $900-$1500 right there in airfare.

Plus $3o0/month for food (times 9 for the months in school) = $2700
Plus another $200 for gas/month (times 9 for months in school) = $1800

So that's $1500 + $2700 + $1800 = $6000. So it's not totally absurd that some schools are offering close to this amount of money.

What is absurd however, is that a school can basically use the same math i did above to justify their payments. Sprinkle another thousand in here or there for some extraneous charge...

 

[rrlbees]

This could be so much simpler if they just let the players profit from their own name and likeness.

As has been discussed in other recent threads, that opens a whole nother can of worms. Now which boosters will pay the most.

 

[javadoc]

Cost of attendance goes way beyond the discussion of paying student-athletes. While it is determined by each school individually, it is intimately tied into how financial aid is factored for all students attending the school. I would imagine that if Cuse wanted to increase their CoA for student athletes, they would have to increase the CoA for all students - which would impact overall admissions of the institution.

If paying of student-athletes goes unregulated, it's going to hurt the private schools for sure. Here's some light reading about CoA for all of you higher ed junkies:

https://ifap.ed.gov/sfahandbooks/attachments/0607Vol3Ch2.pdf

So there are significant implications for financial aid, across the entire university, and there are legal implications as well flowing from that. So, the immediate question is, do private schools have less leeway in tinkering with that number? I am assuming that proportionally more students receive financial aid at private schools than at government schools, given the generally higher tuition costs.

Take the University of Georgia. I believe that the HOPE scholarship program essentially pays tuition for you if you maintain some minimum academic standing and achievement through high school. I would expect that most of the students at UGA are from Georgia, and a great many (most?) are there on the HOPE scholarship. Since the taxpayers of the state are already paying the tuition costs for that chunk of the student body, there is less dependence on Pell grants and other traditional forms of financial aid. So UGA can jack up the TCoA number if desired, because it has little effect on the student body at large, but it could be a boon toward the athletics folks. Right?

 

[Lawrinson14]

This could be so much simpler if they just let the players profit from their own name and likeness.

This would never work. It would be far too easy for schools to get their biggest boosters to pay the athletes as if they were paid endorsers.

"Oh, we want a great QB recruit? Let me call Billy Fucillo to see if he can hire this guy to pump some cars..."

 

[rrlbees]

This would never work. It would be far too easy for schools to get their biggest boosters to pay the athletes as if they were paid endorsers. "Oh, we want a great QB recruit? Let me call Billy Fucillo to see if he can hire this guy to pump some cars..."

Or a booster giving a kid $10k to come to his business and sign autographs. Or a player selling an autographed picture for $10k to a booster. Etc. It becomes a booster bidding war.

 

[raf4488]

"Elite private institutions sometimes underestimate students’ personal expenses in their published cost of attendance as a way of limiting the sticker shock that can accompany their tuition bills."

So SU could offer more if it wanted to. I'm not in favor of taking this money away from athletes just because Syracuse and other privates underestimate their cost of attendance relative to other schools.

 

[TexanMark]

If that's all true why are the privates in the lower end?

Not all...look at TCU

 

[Lawrinson14]

So SU could offer more if it wanted to. I'm not in favor of taking this money away from athletes just because Syracuse and other privates underestimate their cost of attendance relative to other schools.

The Syracuse stipend at ~$1600, is extremely low. I used to head back to school with about $3000 every year, that I earned by working a summer job. Midway through the second semester, it would inevitably run out.

 

[Shenexon]

Nice avatar, by the way. Is that across Flowed Lands?

Right you are! Been thinking about visiting again, with the avatar to remind me of a place I need to go soon...

 

[rrlbees]

Not all...look at TCU

Then they must have decided to spend more of their own money on them since it's not coming out of some state budget.

 

[Capt. Tuttle]

It doesn't take a SU2NASA to figure out where this is going.

SU gets raped by the NCAA for an administrator writing a paper for a player while the SEC can tell us it is 3 times more expensive to live in the rural SE than LA and Boston and the NCAA just watches.

But the good news for the SEC...they are still paying the athletes way less than they have to pay the handlers and relatives to get these kids to commit.

If cost of attendance included the cost to get there and back, it could be more expensive in rural areas.

 

[CarolinaCuse]

So there are significant implications for financial aid, across the entire university, and there are legal implications as well flowing from that. So, the immediate question is, do private schools have less leeway in tinkering with that number? I am assuming that proportionally more students receive financial aid at private schools than at government schools, given the generally higher tuition costs.

Take the University of Georgia. I believe that the HOPE scholarship program essentially pays tuition for you if you maintain some minimum academic standing and achievement through high school. I would expect that most of the students at UGA are from Georgia, and a great many (most?) are there on the HOPE scholarship. Since the taxpayers of the state are already paying the tuition costs for that chunk of the student body, there is less dependence on Pell grants and other traditional forms of financial aid. So UGA can jack up the TCoA number if desired, because it has little effect on the student body at large, but it could be a boon toward the athletics folks. Right?

You are right - private universities do have some greater limitations.

Your summary is pretty much spot on. Public institutions can increase the CoA because they have to worry less about a family's ability to contribute to the CoA. Public schools are heavily subsidized. Private schools, like Cuse, need to keep the CoA lower to keep the family's estimated contributions lower (needed to determine financial aid).

Think about this - how much of a financial advantage does a school like UGA (or UF, FSU, etc.) have when the vast majority of their recruits are from in-state? While the cost of education for any student is the same, I would imagine that the CoA (behind the scenes) is different for an in-state student vs. an out-of-state student. Right? I have to believe that there are some financial benefits to a public university in a talent-rich state that can keep their best recruits at home. It really makes me wonder how any private school an keep up - even with the separation of the P5s from the NCAA.

Funny you should mention UGA and the HOPE scholarship - I did a research project once on the impact of the HOPE program on brain drain of in-state students before and after the implementation of the HOPE.

 

[Cootface]

The Syracuse stipend at ~$1600, is extremely low. I used to head back to school with about $3000 every year, that I earned by working a summer job. Midway through the second semester, it would inevitably run out.

Hopefully CoA isn't including paying for all night benders every Thursday, Friday and Saturday. That's where an inordinate amount of my summer money went.

 

[MaxwellCuse]

The Syracuse stipend at ~$1600, is extremely low. I used to head back to school with about $3000 every year, that I earned by working a summer job. Midway through the second semester, it would inevitably run out.

It is also lower than SU's published Cost of Attendance of $3,044. As seen here...

https://syr.edu/financialaid/costofattendance/

Boston College's published COA is also higher than the amount reported in the article posted by the OP.

 

[MaxwellCuse]

Cost of Attendance usually includes, among other things, transportation costs to and from home. Perhaps Syracuse's lowball figure is just more evidence that we are going to be giving up recruiting outside the Northeast?

 

[Ringostar57]

The high cost of fees and living travel and other expenses of attending a high priced private institution like SU athletes should receive roughly 9000 dollars per annum.

 

[Lawrinson14]

NYU should just create a basketball and football team. Pay the best athletes $50k per year and say it's a cost of living stipend. Damn, it's like $25 bucks for low quality Chinese food here.

 

[TexanMark]

If cost of attendance included the cost to get there and back, it could be more expensive in rural areas.

Nah...Louisville is fairly cheap to fly out of...

 

[rrlbees]

Nah...Louisville is fairly cheap to fly out of...

Bottom line is though, each school decides what to include and SU could make their number higher.

 

[Chip]

Does SU still offer the football players an unlimited SUpercard?

You can't put a price on that.

#Kimmel4Life

 

[OttoinGrotto]

As has been discussed in other recent threads, that opens a whole nother can of worms. Now which boosters will pay the most.

This would never work. It would be far too easy for schools to get their biggest boosters to pay the athletes as if they were paid endorsers.

"Oh, we want a great QB recruit? Let me call Billy Fucillo to see if he can hire this guy to pump some cars..."

I'm 100% fine with that.

Look, people worry about a fair competitive landscape. Why? To me there's a much bigger issue at play here that matters a lot more, and that is that a school is able to take someone's identity from them and profit from it, as part of their scholarship agreement. That's ridiculous. The world has changed. People's identities now can be monetarily quantified in new ways.

Brown University didn't get to collect royalties from Emma Watson's movies while she attended there. Know why? Because that would be ridiculous. But for an athlete it's not because they get a scholarship? I guess that isn't that ridi- oh wait, IT TOTALLY IS RIDICULOUS.

 

[Moontan]

So there are significant implications for financial aid, across the entire university, and there are legal implications as well flowing from that. So, the immediate question is, do private schools have less leeway in tinkering with that number? I am assuming that proportionally more students receive financial aid at private schools than at government schools, given the generally higher tuition costs.

Take the University of Georgia. I believe that the HOPE scholarship program essentially pays tuition for you if you maintain some minimum academic standing and achievement through high school. I would expect that most of the students at UGA are from Georgia, and a great many (most?) are there on the HOPE scholarship. Since the taxpayers of the state are already paying the tuition costs for that chunk of the student body, there is less dependence on Pell grants and other traditional forms of financial aid. So UGA can jack up the TCoA number if desired, because it has little effect on the student body at large, but it could be a boon toward the athletics folks. Right?

HOPE pays about 80% of tuition and is paid on a per-semester-hour basis, with a lifetime maximum (I believe it's around 130 hours). students need to maintain a 3.0 college GPA to maintain their HOPE scholarship. If lost it can be re-instated once. GA Tech claimed to have the highest HOPE retention rate, which was just north of 60%. Something tells me that most football players would struggle to maintain the meeded GPA.

 

[Full_Rebar]

Does SU still offer the football players an unlimited SUpercard?

You can't put a price on that.

#Kimmel4Life

Those have a limit- I believe it's the equivalent to the cost of a 19-meal plan.