Chip Kelly's take on conference realignment

[Pepe Silvia]

I think he gets a lot of things right with this

 

[LoudHogRider]

He does ... right up to the point he thinks it should be a shared revenue pie. Ain't nobody giving up their media contracts to share with the AAC, Mountain West, etc.

Separate football from the other sports? Sure. Keep the other sports more regional to maintain rivalries and control costs? Sure. Make the players "employees" so they get paid in a more responsible way than NIL? Why not. But the buck stops hard when he "redistributes the wealth".

I'm glad it's out there so the conversations that need to take place can start taking place in earnest.

 

[Scott Hall]

Even if the schools paid the players NIL is never going away. That toothpaste can not be put back in the tube. It would be similar to trying to NFL players, you get paid so you can’t do endorsements. NFL endorsements are at least real

 

[Baron Winnebago]

He does ... right up to the point he thinks it should be a shared revenue pie. Ain't nobody giving up their media contracts to share with the AAC, Mountain West, etc.

Separate football from the other sports? Sure. Keep the other sports more regional to maintain rivalries and control costs? Sure. Make the players "employees" so they get paid in a more responsible way than NIL? Why not. But the buck stops hard when he "redistributes the wealth".

I'm glad it's out there so the conversations that need to take place can start taking place in earnest.

To be fair, every other pro sports league, which is what this would be, has at least one mechanism to redistribute wealth between franchises.

To me the questions for any proposal to revenue share are:
1. Is the split determined at the school, conference, or division level?
2. Is the split just for revenue generating sports or all sports? Specific sports?
3. Who bargains for the split? Pros have unions that cover 1 league, colleges could have as many as a union per school per sport if they were so inclined.


But Chip's plan may run into landmines even before then. It's not clear you can just excise football from the athletic department and get away from Title IX. Even in professionalizing football and basketball get you out of title IX that's 98 scholarships out of women's programs that schools can just cut. If the school doesn't cut some or all of them it's just an albatross around the schools neck financially.

Beyond that, I'm not sure that any school will back a play to go away from paying all players the same. Maybe they will, but just figuring out the logistics of doing some kind of payment to players that still isn't structured like a monopsony or cartel is a significant lift on its own

 

[Pepe Silvia]

Even if the schools paid the players NIL is never going away. That toothpaste can not be put back in the tube. It would be similar to trying to NFL players, you get paid so you can’t do endorsements. NFL endorsements are at least real

Can't wait to have teams paying players directly with conference-mandated salary caps so we can get back to schools paying players under the table to get around the cap

 

[Scott Hall]

Can't wait to have teams paying players directly with conference-mandated salary caps so we can get back to schools paying players under the table to get around the cap

Will never happen, federal courts have ruled kids can profit off their NIL. No one is going to be able to say that a booster cant pay a million or two for an autographed picture.