I genuinely didn’t know about this until this morning, but my limited understanding is that it will allow college athletes to profit off branding and endorsements, for their name and face, effectively, like professional athletes. This came in from July this year.
Personally, I think this is a terrible decision that will ruin the whole... Function, and spirit, of college sports, and will further the narcissism and “social media obsession” of millennials and zoomers. Everything I’ve seen about it is just... I fucking hate it.
However, I appreciate that a) colleges were making bank out of exactly this, without the money going to the “athletes” directly (can we remember they were meant to be students first, and that was THE WHOLE POINT of sports scholarships, in the first place??!), and b) America... Does this shit differently. Your “peak capitalist” (lol) system, and your... Culture, treats student athletes completely differently to anywhere else in the world. I get that.
Nonetheless, I just think this is a fucking stupid decision. I really do.
Thoughts? Every article and news piece I can find is totally one-sided, supporting this. But... That’s the media for ya. Question everything.
Top tier college sports in the US where players would actually be able to profit off this are more akin to minor professional leagues than a typical collegiate sport comprised of full-time students who play a sport as a part-time hobby. A few years back there was a college football player who made headlines for saying he didn't attend college to "play school", and all the usual people directed their outrage at him for saying what everyone knew was true but aren't allowed to say in polite company: these people have no interest in attending university for any reason other than to play sports and get drafted and do the absolute bare minimum coursework to stay eligible to play.
The NFL makes players all take basic IQ tests as part of the draft process, and every year some of these players get scores that mark them as borderline if not outright retarded; yet somehow they all manage to graduate.
On the one hand we'd be better off having minor leagues for these players to play in so they weren't diluting the purpose of these universities. On the other hand as someone who wants to see the university system crash and burn and be seen for the joke it is, perhaps this takes us one step closer to that.