NFL team executive rips NCAA system: 'How in the world is this legal?'
When it comes to the NCAA, everyone but the actual athletes makes money.
To many, that’s absurd. To some, it’s as it should be.
At least one NFL team executive is with those who believe it’s absurd.
‘This whole thing stinks’
Robert Klemko, who covers the NFL for Sports Illustrated, tweeted a screen shot of a lengthy quote on Thursday afternoon. He said it was from a team executive, and the exec began ranting about college football and amateurism.
“This whole thing stinks,” the executive said. “There so much money at the college level, and if the good guys aren’t gonna pay you, then the bad guys are. The college coaches are always on us about their kids leaving early, and I tell them, until you start paying them, they’re leaving.
“You have these huge TV contracts and you can pay 10 coaches on the staff $1 million [each] but you can’t pay the players? It’s doesn’t make sense. It’s garbage. And everybody knows it’s garbage.”
‘The NCAA, they’re all crooks’
He (we can pretty safely assume it’s a he given the demographics of NFL front offices) was just getting warmed up.
“The NCAA, they’re all crooks. It’s extortion of these players, because they’re all beat up. In April I see 350 physicals [of draft-eligible players] and listen to all the injuries and it’s just brutal. They’re 22-years-old and we can’t draft him or we knock ‘em down the draft board and the doctor says we might be able to get one contact out of him.
“They’re never more marketable than the four years they’re in college. Their stadiums are bigger than ours and everyone paid 100 bucks to get in and $50 to park and the conference has a TV contract and there’s national TV and the players don’t get a dime? How in the world is this legal?
“If you or I were real talented at singing or playing guitar or rap, we could just go make a bunch of money. It’s not like we have to go to some music school and let them reap millions off of us first. We can go off on our own.
“These kids don’t have that option. You throw in the fact that the average NFL career is three years, and it’s just a travesty.”
(In the interest of playing devil’s advocate, there are plenty of awful music industry contracts, ones that see the actual artists make pennies while the labels, producers, promoters and countless others get a bigger share. But the internet and digital music services have made it so artists can publish their music directly to the world without a middle-man.)
As the kids say, there are no lies detected in the executive’s words.
Was talking to an NFL exec for another story and he went off on this tremendous rant on college football and amateurism that I have to share.
"This whole thing stinks..." pic.twitter.com/rQuixmVURo— Robert Klemko (@RobertKlemko) March 21, 2019
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