About this episode
Things Discussed: Tigers: They go dormant for years but then they pop, and you gotta get a World Series when they do. Sign Skubal! Craig's long story about golf in Alabama. House Settlement: NCAA is going to relinquish enforcement to a commission/CEO run by the commissioners. Will it work? Without legislation they'll just get sued again. What some schools are going for is to have rules that nobody enforces except against programs they don't like. This was ideal for OSU/Bama/Georgia/LSU who could get a competitive advantage on programs that self-police, and occasionally could be used as a weapon against rivals. Who's the CEO? They said someone not in sports—so Condi Rice? Who's going to take this job who's not in athletics? Can they create a player's union? Why would the players unionize when they are getting everything they want. MLB unionized because their players were employees; NCAA doesn't control player movement because they want to avoid their athletes being employees. NCAA is getting out but it falls to conference commissioners, who are not at all equipped to handle this. They're serving needs of ADs who are complaining about different things. Ohio State wants there to be rules they don't have to follow and Michigan does. Michigan wants to be able to spend whatever they can raise. Purdue wants to have some player control so their cornerbacks don't get poached. Michigan State isn't thinking "oh I need to make sure Michigan and Ohio State don't boot me" and not even thinking about what's best for Michigan State; they're thinking how can we screw Michigan. You're expecting this mix to come up with solutions? Clearinghouse won't work because they'll get a flood of lawsuits. Player already have the money; they won't let you close the spigot. Answer is legislation that gives the NCAA some kind of anti-trust protection. Will it get prioritized at the federal level? Probably not this Congress, but the next one or the next one. State laws are only trying to make their own teams better. Sam: Can they make a special class? They had it in student athletes but that got blown up by the states, which is how we got here. The players have no incentive to change things because they're winning. NCAA is deathly afraid of the players becoming employees, which is why they can't regulate player movement even with NIL deals. The NCAA can't create a student-athlete class. The federal government can. The schools have real interest in getting legislation that cuts off the players' spigot, and that means the fans have leverage now that we've not had at any point in this conversation. What I want them to do (not saying it'll happen) is use that leverage to get things we want. What do we want? Guaranteed access to football broadcasts. Our old conferences back. A cap on student fees (this doesn't matter to us but it's a big deal to smaller schools). Schools can't balloon ticket prices by participating in the secondary ticket market. What do we want as Michigan fans? Our interests are aligned with PSU/Notre Dame/USC who want the buy-in price to be high but also some kind of cap so that the value of the education makes us the best option. Prediction: House settlement/clearinghouse will be a patch, it won't work, and they'll let it play out until they can get legislation. Could they get legislation now? Maybe but it won't do anything for the fans—it would be the schools buying up whatever votes are for sale and passing something they write, and odds are it won't be Constitutional enough to survive the players bringing it to court.