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Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
In my professional opinion, most senior leaders in college sports aren’t saying anything especially interesting on social media. I can think of a few who share more than empty platitudes and box score results — Boise State athletic director Jeramiah Dickey, Pacific AD Adam Tschuor and Kansas AD Travis Goff — but I wouldn’t say that’s typical.
And I get it. When you’re in the big chair and making the big decisions, the last thing you want is some tweet about airline travel difficulties or “Game of Thrones” or whatever other banal stuff regular people talk about to go viral in the wrong circles.
So credit to Jamie Boggs, the AD at Grand Canyon, for recently getting on multiple platforms and discussing the messy business of college sports reform. (I actually saw her thoughts first on LinkedIn, because I am a super cool guy who knows how to have fun on the internet.)
Her missive can be found here, on the website formally known as Twitter dot com:
Let me quote from part of this passage, because I really do think this is a thought experiment worth talking about:
As someone who has spent years leading college athletic departments and who believes in free markets, I see this differently. Today’s NIL environment doesn’t reflect a true free market.
College athletics is built around nonprofit, government-supported educational institutions, not professional sports franchises. We’re operating in an environment of constant legal uncertainty where lawsuits, inconsistent state laws, and changing rules have created chaos instead of a functioning marketplace.
That uncertainty has created opportunities for attorneys, agents, and others whose financial incentives rely on continuing litigation and escalating an arms race rather than creating long-term stability for student-athletes or higher education.
Why are athletes who command substantial NIL packages earning significantly less in the G League or established professional leagues overseas, in mature professional markets?
If this is capitalism at work, should taxpayers be asked to provide even more financial support to public universities as athletic costs continue to rise? Public universities have asked for additional state funding or other forms of public financial support while this increasingly unstable system continues to expand.
That’s not a functioning free market. It’s a distorted marketplace operating within nonprofit educational institutions that ultimately depend on students, donors, and, at many public universities, taxpayers.
I’ve made similar arguments, especially about whether any of this is a “free market.”
I am not some Rothbardian free market absolutist or anything, but I will cheerfully admit to believing markets are awesome a lot of the time. I am a small business owner and a capitalist, after all. Markets can be spectacularly efficient ways to distribute resources, introduce competition, and reward innovation.
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But I think Boggs is correct that the current college labor market isn’t exactly a free market, on any level. Coaching salaries exploded for years because schools couldn’t “legally” directly compensate their athlete labor force, but those salaries haven’t adjusted to the new market realities; they've remained high and still have the same crazy buyout language they commonly did in the mid-2010s.
Free markets are also supposed to trend towards “perfect information," where buyers and sellers have the requisite knowledge of prices and utility of various goods and services. On absolutely no planet does that occur with athlete compensation, and individual universities and state lawmakers have vigorously fought efforts to introduce transparency into how athlete pay works. So you have a system where it’s exceptionally easy to lie about the “going rate” for any player or service, and middlemen (agents, etc.) pocket the difference. Plus, there’s a whole hell of a lot of externalities and transaction costs that place pressure on buyers and sellers.
But even if you solved all of that, there’s no downward pressure on wages anywhere in this system, except for the poor souls making, like, $47,000 deep in the bowels of athletic departments. There’s no “profit taking” like there is in the NFL or NBA, because there aren’t profits. These are (technically) non-profit universities that have no incentive whatsoever to save money, only to spend it in the hopes of becoming more competitive.
To me, the labor market for athletes and coaches (and honestly, for senior administrators) more closely resembles a market failure than a free market. That’s what regulations are for.
Over the next few weeks, it looks like we’ll hear from more and more coaches (and probably ADs, too) trying to gin up support for the Protect College Sports Act once the Senate comes back from its Summer Vacation Campaign Trip.
I don’t like the odds of those efforts going anywhere. The opposition (from both congressional Democrats and Republicans) will have more time to get organized, legislative time will be even more limited, and the bill is trying to do too much in too short an amount of time. I’ll take a whack at proposing a compromise bill idea for next week, in the spirit of trying to be helpful.
But I actually do believe it’s a good idea for those involved in the college sports industry to be honest with themselves and the public and talk about what college sports actually is, not what we pretend it is or want it to be. It’s not going to be a perfect free market, nor do we probably want it to be, because we like not paying $300 for a football ticket. We like that college swim teams exist and that massive brands play in places like Starkville, Eugene and College Station, instead of, like, New York. We don’t want efficiency at all costs.
But if that’s the case, then let’s be honest about what kind of regulations really make sense, and why. Let us not hide behind euphemisms like “the collegiate model.” Let’s stand up and remind people, like Boggs did, that this system is one of the most massive college scholarship programs in the United States. Some of those scholarships are unquestionably at risk. Are they worth protecting?
If so, let’s get there. But we don’t do it if we pretend those efforts are really about something else … like we do with the entire “NIL” compensation model.
The College Sports Industry Data You Need to Make Better Decisions
Extra Points Library gives college sports professionals instant access to the contracts, financial records, salary benchmarks and operational data shaping the industry. Whether you’re benchmarking salaries, researching vendor deals, comparing your school to its peers, reporting a story or simply trying to better understand how college athletics actually works, Library gives you the data behind the headlines.
It’s built specifically for professionals who work in college sports. Over the past week, we’ve added salary data for more than 5,000 new athletic department employees across the country, new Division II budget data, major Division I vendor contracts, and the latest coach contracts across baseball, golf, track and more. Take a look for yourself here.
Read about our summer launch here — more benchmarking data, new institutional data reported via IPEDS and a FREE scheduling tool called GamePlace.
A few other important things from earlier this week:
I announced a bunch of new product improvements and releases. Extra Points now has its own message board-like community, which is open to all subscribers, not just the paid ones. I’ve dropped in links I find interesting and asked questions in there, but the community will really take off once all of you start posting your own links, questions, discussions, etc. We also have new referral rewards, updates to our games, and more! Check it out.
I got on the phone to try and figure out the jersey sponsorship question that everybody was wondering: Where on earth do you put these things for a college swim team? Where are you even allowed to do that? Well, good news. I think I found the answer.
College sports is a big business, but it sure as hell isn’t as big a business as college, period. I tried to do some math to figure out where athletic revenue represents the largest share of total university revenue across Division I … or where the subsidies schools pay to athletics represent the biggest chunk of the budget. A few names on here certainly surprised me!
And oh yeah, I added another 100-plus documents to Extra Points Library.
You can support our work by sharing EP with your friends and colleagues, playing our games, clicking on our ads and, most importantly, telling your alma mater to subscribe to the premium newsletter and to buy EPL. You, of course, can also upgrade to a premium subscription and get access to everything we write. It’s only $9! That’s a good deal.
Thanks for reading, everybody. Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you on the internet.
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