Donor fatigue: Some college football fans wonder why they have to pay for players

They would then be considered paid employees. I wonder if that's even legal.

Nowhere in the SCOTUS ruling did the SCOTUS lead us to believe that an Agency like the NLRB could come behind them (their NIL ruling) and change their NIL into meaning full employment by a school. Not even using the 1984 Chevron Deference as their (NLRB) guide is that plausible.

Chevron deference

 

The entire donation system for universities is a total racket. Given how much tuition costs why do they need donations? Given how we lack 90k in the Swamp and the TV/conference package is enormous, why do they need donations.

Now they need donations for NIL?

It’s ridiculous. What other leagues take all the revenue and distribute zero to players and then ask fans to donate to pay the roster?

Universities and their schools should be able to operate on their operating budget.

 

The oversimplified answer is that the money goes to different places. Not all 36k undergrads paying tuition care about football. Not all 450k alumni donate to the school. Not all 90k fans in the Swamp can afford to donate hundreds/ thousands of dollars per year to NIL. Not all rich donors feel like donating to football. Most rich donors will only donate to NIL if there is a tax write-off.

 

NIL is pay up or shut up.

 

I participated for a year, then I saw the attrition of the players that I thought I helped get to Florida. Nope. I'm done. But that is me.

 

So does each university have 2 organizations trying to get donations from the same alumni base? Is it you either give to the NIL for buying players or to the AD for stadium renovations? Or both supposedly both with each getting a half donation.

 

My point is the school itself shouldn’t be needing donations. Their operations should be able to fund their own existence

 

Short answer yes. Long answer is the schools that want to win started pushing donors to NIL.

 

Should there just be one pot of money controlled by the AD office then?

The real money is in the TV deals with conference money but with the way the NCAA is now there is no way to get that money to the players. It has to come from boosters, correct?

 

The money they are talking in from just football is plenty to sustain football. How they budget the 100’s of millions is the problem.

 

Correct. Football brings in more than enough revenue to sustain athletics. IMO fan donors should neither fund the UAA OR NIL. All of it should be based on revenue

 

Why be fiscally responsible when you can ask donors to fund the entirety of the program?

 

They are eating it up right now for sure.

 

Everybody wins but the fans. That’s why it isn’t sustainable.
The nfl gets a minor league they don’t have to pay a dime for.
The kids get money.
The university gets the fans to foot the bill.

and the fans get stuck with the entire cost. Not only are they the ones actively and passively paying the TV rights and also tickets like any sports league… but unlike pro leagues (who again get off Scot free here). they pay the booster fees, they pay the insane coaches salaries, they pay the almost comically dumb buyouts, they pay for the crazy facilities upgrades and lazy rivers, space age locker rooms etc, they pay to endow the scholarships, and they pay NIL now on top of it all now.
No way this system lasts long term in its current form, it’s light years past reasonable for the average, or even above average fan.

 

I think you are conflating the school with the football program. If by “operations” you mean “classrooms, salaries, and instructional materials” then I would agree that tuition covers that. If by “operations” you mean “the football program, uniforms, scholarships, equipment, practice facilities, a stadium, stadium support staff, a few buses with drivers, a couple airplanes with pilots and crew, bus maintainers, aircraft maintainers, bus fuel, jet fuel, coach salaries, assistant salaries, offices, NIL payments to athletes, et cetera” I would disagree that tuition should cover all of that.

Even within “the football program” there are different pools of money with different tax breaks and other incentives for donors as the money goes for different purposes.

 

Tuition doesn’t need to cover football. Football should cover football as it does with every other league in the world. The gate + TV money is massive

There should be zero reason for fans to have to donate. Football takes in plenty of revenue

 

The NFL is the key. The NFL was established under a nonprofit paradigm where the owners who were not NFL employees were the ones making profit. The NFL somewhat recently stopped operating as a nonprofit organization, but that is how it started. In college football there are no owners as each team is part of its school. There needs to be a legal construct for a handful of college football teams to have owners operating a nonprofit league across all 50 states that generates revenue to pay its employees and pay licensing fees to public and private universities to operate a team on behalf of the university. Just like AAF, XFL, and USFL, this league would need financial support from the NFL to sustain its existence.

 

There is no college football league. At least, not yet. Every other league has a legal construct to operate as a league. College football is an optional activity for athletes that happens to generate a lot of revenue, which in turn creates opportunities for investors to fund things that are important to each investor.

When we talk about college football we try to map each component directly to the NFL but these are not apples to oranges comparisons.