The NCAA has asked LSU to investigate whether star running back Leonard Fournette and his family received discounted services in 2014 to set up a business and a website where they planned to sell Fournette merchandise, USA Today reported this week.
The NCAA shut down the online business, which was going to sell hats and T-shirts with Fournette's "BUGA Nation" catchphrase, in a single day. It's believed no product was ever sold.
Fournette may indeed have violated some NCAA rules by receiving a discount based on his fame as a player. We'll see. Fournette is expected to play Saturday against Arkansas.
The business of college sports has grown exponentially through the decades with six-figure stadiums, school-owned cable channels and booming endorsement and media deals. Top coaches and administrators, as a result, receive millions. Staffing levels have exploded. Private jets and police escorts are common. "Facilities," including office space that Fortune 500 CEOs would blush at, keep getting built and rebuilt.
Who knows how serious the NCAA will take this long term.
It certainly shouldn't take it far.
A family-owned merchandise website isn't a problem. It's actually a common-sense future for college sports – which is under legal, political and, at least some believe, ethical pressure – to properly compensate its athletes, particularly high-profile ones such as Fournette.
The debate over how college sports should "pay" its athletes is long and tedious. Athletes already get "paid" in tuition, room and board, which isn't an inconsiderable amount. For some it's more than they earn back for the school. For others it isn't.
The business of college sports has grown exponentially through the decades with six-figure stadiums, school-owned cable channels and booming endorsement and media deals. Top coaches and administrators, as a result, receive millions. Staffing levels have exploded. Private jets and police escorts are common. "Facilities," including office space that Fortune 500 CEOs would blush at, keep getting built and rebuilt.
Meanwhile, the amount given to the athletes – those scholarships – has remained mostly the same. It took a federal lawsuit just to get colleges to toss a few hundred dollars in living expenses back to the players – so-called "laundry money" was once common, then later banned.
More can and should be done, yet every plan to take care of players runs into real-life hurdles concerning the establishment of pay levels, salary caps, intra-team and intradepartmental fairness and Title IX.
The solution is simple though: get the regulation out of the way and allow the free market to drive everything. The need to "pay" athletes exists in part because the schools won't allow anyone else to pay them first. If they stop with the latter then they don't have to do the former.
In other words, if Fournette and his family want to create a clothing line and sell some hats and shirts then let them do it. LSU already sells his No. 7 jersey all over the place. It can, and does, sell anything it wants featuring him. Obviously there is a huge market, here. A Fournette game-worn jersey recently fetched $101,000 at a charity auction.
So why shouldn't Fournette get in on it? Colleges should be encouraging students to start their own businesses, not prohibiting it.
BUGA Nation – "Being United Generates Attitude" – was created before he got to LSU. It didn't use LSU, SEC or NCAA logos. It was a separate design based on the player, the Fournette brand, if you will. Let him make some money, if money can be made.
And let that be the start.
If a Baton Rouge car dealership or Home Depot wants to pay him to show up and sign autographs to draw in foot traffic, then all the better. If a local restaurant wants to feature him in a commercial, then good. If a quarterback club somewhere wants him to give a speech, then cool. If he becomes so big that a national brand such as Nike or Subway wants him as a pitchman, then let him be hired.
These are all incredible and positive opportunities, no matter the scale. LSU already engages in those businesses, including featuring Leonard Fournette or any other athlete.
Arguing what is good for one side isn't for the other requires intellectual gymnastics that are rooted wholly in college administrators' desire to horde all the money and all the power.
It's a monopolistic effort, the NCAA pushing out competition and inserting itself as the middleman by requiring businesses that want to deal with Fournette to go through it.
This is what the Olympics did for generations, trying to require full amateurism and giving all power to national organizations. The International Olympic Committee is one of the most corrupt organizations on earth, yet it even gave up on this charade 30 years ago.
The IOC long argued that the Games were popular because the athletes succumbed to its bankrupt concept of amateurism. Instead, the IOC found out it had no bearing on anything. Allowing Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps to make millions in endorsements didn't hurt the popularity of the games. Neither did having lesser-known athletes make small deals within their sport (say endorsing a certain brand of cross-country skis).
It actually increased the popularity of the Olympics.
No one went broke. Everyone got richer.
The beauty of the free marketplace is it eliminates the NCAA from all the headaches.
A school doesn't have to decide how to compensate all 85 scholarship football players – does Fournette get more than a third-stringer? It doesn't have to gut itself paying a marketable basketball center the same as an anonymous field hockey goaltender. It doesn't have to worry about Title IX.
The market figures that out. If you make yourself valuable, you will receive value back. At most schools only star athletes will make much – and very few will make anything considerable – but it's certainly possible that most starters could make something through merchandise signings or speaking gigs.
At some places it won't even be football or basketball that can cash in the most.
There are schools where women's basketball, hockey, softball, baseball, soccer, water polo, whatever, is most popular. Oklahoma State and Iowa, for instance, are set to stage a wrestling meet in Iowa City this weekend with a crowd that might push 40,000. Those guys are stars, too. Even small schools can dominate small markets – a good D-III program can have a following.
If no one wants to hire an athlete for some side work, then that person will still have the same scholarship deal he or she has now.
There is literally no harm in any of this except it runs counter to the NCAA's insistence on controlling everything. Coaches and administrators love the patronizing practice of they, and only they, being in charge of everything involving student-athletes.
They see any dollar made from the BUGA Brand as a dollar that would have otherwise been spent on LSU official merchandise. Or if a store gives Fournette a grand to make an in-store appearance, it's one less grand the operation might donate to the athletic department.
So they engage in hysteria and scare tactics and claim the Fournette family and their humble website could cause the entire empire to crumble.
This is too complicated, they wail. It would tilt recruiting and affect their fictional "level playing field," they argue. Wild boosters would promise recruits jobs at their businesses at outlandish rates. It would leave their players – legal adults, mind you – open to shady vultures that might con them into bad business deals.
They argue everything will be upended, the way they do with every single advancement – remember, a four-team college football playoff was supposedly impossible and would ruin the sport, too.
It's none of those things.
It's actually easier than investigating everything. Just let the players be like any other student and do what they want. If a school wants to take the money spent on bloated "compliance staffs" and shift it to monitoring all deals, effectively serving as a clearinghouse for proposals, then fine.
Could a player start a clothing line that fails? Sure. That's business, though. In most cases, for the vast, vast majority of student athletes, the opportunities would be smalltime and foolproof. Anyway, how much worse can the deal be than the current one with the NCAA, which has a 100-0 revenue cut with student-athletes?
Could some fan-run businesses waste money on recruits who may not pan out for jobs that don't make sense ... sure, some would, but most still must focus on the bottom line, and there is probably a legislative way to police this.
The idea that schools with bigger fan bases or corporate support would have recruiting advantages is only partially true, but immaterial. They already have recruiting advantages.
Yes, the popularity, exposure and business possibilities of LSU football would help lure in the next Leonard Fournette but they already do. LSU always beats, say, Tulane for great recruits, in part because it tries to widen the gap by grabbing all the available revenue and building opulent facilities with lavish coach and athletic director offices.
The most likely scenario is nothing changes in recruiting trends.
Even then, it's quite possible smaller schools could sell the idea that being the big fish in a smaller pond could be more valuable. A huge star at Boise State might be capable of making more in side businesses than just another star at Alabama.
No one knows for sure.
It'd be great to find out, though. If only college sports saw Leonard Fournette as a young businessman rather than just the latest vehicle to make them all the money.
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