Taboo Trades
Taboo Trades
College Sports with Paul Haagen
With the Final Four nearly upon us, I discuss college sports with Paul Haagen of Duke University and UVA Law 3L, Jackson Bailey.
Paul is a Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Sports Law and Policy at Duke University.
His principal academic interests are contracts, the social history of law, and law and sports.
Recommended Reading:
Sports in the Courts: The NCAA and the Future of Intercollegiate Revenue Sports, 103 Judicature 54-61 (2019)
At the point that all of you say this is merely another professional team, they're just not as good, then intercollegiate sports has lost its hold.
SPEAKER_08:Hey, hey, everybody. Welcome to the Taboo Trades podcast, a show about stuff we aren't supposed to sell, but do anyway. I'm your host, Kim Kravick. Thank you so much. Paul, welcome. It's good to see you, and thank you so much for doing this.
SPEAKER_07:Glad to be with you.
SPEAKER_08:Let me give Jackson, my co-host for today, a chance to introduce himself.
SPEAKER_01:Hi, Paul. I'm Jackson Bailey. I'm a 3L here at UVA, and I'm excited to talk with you today. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for inviting me.
SPEAKER_08:We thought that we might, if you wanted, give you a chance to sort of do a where are we now type of thing. We keep reading that we're at some sort of turning point or inflection point. And I mean, I have to say it looks that way, right? With after Alston, NIL, the well-publicized financial and other tensions in division one, the transfer portal. I mean, it looks like a lot is changing or under tension, but maybe it just looks that way to us. And you have a long-term view. of this entire thing. And so we kind of wanted to get your sense of where we are, how we got here, and where we might be going.
SPEAKER_07:Basically, we've got a regulatory structure in which the regulator gets all 95% of its revenues from a single sport and basically a single event within that sport. So about 95% of the revenue of the NCAA comes from men's basketball. And it creates a variety of questions about distribution, resources, awkwardnesses. And those are particularly intense because this is the sport most disproportionately African-American in the entire lineup of NCAA sports. So the distribution of resources is basically from African-American men to everybody else. Now, from the time of its founding in 1905, 1906, the NCAA has attempted to control a number of aspects of competition and particularly uh the the basis on which uh players were brought in uh it has not been entirely consistent over time and this is part of what we're going to be talking about but the the large normative principle was that sports and sport competition should be on the basis of the love of the activity, amateurism. And it should not be a cash nexus, but limitation has gotten increasingly eroded, and therefore the justifications get harder and harder to sustain. Up until 1984, it wasn't entirely clear that any of this was commerce. In 1984, the Supreme Court said that NCAA business was commerce and therefore subject to the antitrust laws. And Then the question is, how far did the limitations of what is admittedly a cartel, the NCAA is a cartel, it's a classic cartel, in what sense could it continue to impose a variety of restrictions on the way in which institutions attracted players, made them eligible, things like that? In a loose comment, the court said that nothing in its opinion dealt with the revered tradition of amateurism. And the NCAA continued to rely on that. I had a conversation at a conference in which NIL issues were first coming up And I asked- What year was
SPEAKER_08:that, Paul? Do you know what
SPEAKER_07:year it was? 2004.
SPEAKER_08:Okay.
SPEAKER_07:And I said, basically, you guys have to give this up. You're going to get killed. This isn't a sustainable argument. And they- harumphed at me and said, no, we can rely on Board of Regents and the revered tradition of amateurism. Well, that got challenged. And basically, the Ninth Circuit recognized that the NCAA was subject in its eligibility rules to antitrust challenges, but upheld the idea that under the rule of reason, the need to maintain a separate market for intercollegiate sports justified the bright line between professional sports and amateur sports. And in so doing, they reversed Judge Claudia Wilkin and basically upheld some restrictions the NCAA about to lose on others, including payments above cost of attendance. They, excuse me, the NCAA agreed to those. And then we got the Alston Bills, Jenkins cases back again in front of Judge Wilkin. The really interesting intervening matter starts with California and Senate Bill 206, which becomes legislation. And it's a very funny piece of legislation. It basically doesn't do anything right away. It threatened to regulate the NCAA on NIL if they continued to restrict the market, but it more or less turned it back to the NCAA to come up with sensible regulations. And the legislature said it was gonna review where they were in, I'm testing my memory here now, I think it was four years. Shortly after California acted, Florida acted. But the difference in the Florida legislation was that it was going to be immediate. There was now enormous pressure on the NCAA to respond. They were basically relying on the possibility that this was in a by states to interfere with interstate commerce turned to the federal government to look for legislative antitrust relief. They got one piece of legislation introduced, and it was not very helpful. The legislation was Congressman Shalala's bill, which would have exempted the NCAA from antitrust liability for restrictions on coaching salaries, but nothing about paying athletes. Essentially coterminous with that, two Democratic senators, Booker from New Jersey and Murphy from Connecticut, started basically holding hearings. They initially were doing this jointly with Mitt Romney, but it was clear there were significant differences in approach. But basically their direction was this was a civil rights issue. So what I would think started as an antitrust matter because of who was being affected. They thought this was a civil rights matter, and they had a number of drafts of proposed legislation that would have been significantly hostile to restrictive on the ability of the NCAA to regulate. So that's a little bit of the background. Alston eventually makes it to the Supreme Court, but in a very different posture because the dissenter in initial consideration of this is now writing the opinion and basically consistent holding NCAA is subjected to the rule of reason, but that it couldn't meet the rule of reason on this. Goes up to the Supreme Court, very, very narrow decision. case. And the Ninth Circuit is affirmed, but we get this fairly extraordinary concurrence from Kavanaugh. And so when Kem said, this looks like an uncertain time, I think Kavanaugh's concurrence, which I would claim echoed my My article in Judicature, but I'm sure it didn't, and my article had nothing to do with what he said, but basically he called into question all of the restrictions on compensation for student-athletes, although he signaled this might be a proper place for some kind of congressional legislation to ensure. One of the concerns is if this market is opened up, it might gut women's athletics and the support for that. It might undermine the entire structure of intercollegiate athletics. It might unbalance things. So he signaled that this would be an appropriate place for legislation, but was not an appropriate place for the court to intervene.
SPEAKER_08:Before I turn this over to Jackson for questions, can I get you to the extent you feel comfortable speculating, or maybe you actually know, I mean, I find the NCAA strategy with Austin puzzling, and maybe you can shed some light on it, to appeal on education-related benefits. I mean, it just struck me as being a terrible test case for them, not to mention a really bad look. Do you have any insight into why they chose, maybe they didn't have any, maybe they felt they had no choice, but I mean, I was just interested in why they chose to pursue this litigation in the way they did.
SPEAKER_07:So, as I already indicated, I haven't understood their strategy for a long time. I I think that they thought that they had better case law and board of regents than I thought they did up until Austin. They've got a very consistent record of winning. They looked at the Supreme Court and I think thought it was a very conservative court and that it might basically take a more traditional approach and sustain them in that direction. So I think it was some of that. The consequences of not appealing it, I think, are the Kavanaugh consequences. So I suspect they feared that the The next stage was Armageddon. They thought they might be able to get the Supreme Court to protect them. They clearly believed they were going to get something out of Congress. And I think we're surprised that Congress was as hostile or indifferent as it was. But do I have any direct personal insight? All
SPEAKER_08:right, I'm going to turn this over to Jackson now for some questions.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, Paul, so... In light of Kavanaugh's concurrence in Austin, do you think it's true that direct payments from universities to players is a foregone conclusion? And if so, what would those payments look like? Would it be where University of Georgia is paying X amount and Duke is paying a different amount, or would it be level across all universities?
SPEAKER_07:Okay. Under the current structure, without protection, it can't be level. So... Either we're going to discover that there is some number consistent with maintaining the bright line between professional and intercollegiate sports, and this is necessary to maintain the separate character. It's pro-competitive because it's sustaining something. I don't see any way that, short of legislation, you can have a single number. So is it inevitable? Nothing in this space is inevitable. I think one of the things that we could see that, frankly, this is relevant to Kim's other question, it could be that we're going to see senators from significant parts of the country, any SEC people here. There's several. Right. This is potentially culturally pretty distressing if college sports might fall apart. And some of the other pressures, the pressures here are going a lot of different directions. I think increasingly we're going to see alternatives to college for basketball players. And so there are markets that slightly undermines some of the claims about the cartel and the antitrust impact, but they're also going to be a competition that big-time schools are going to want to respond to. So one of the parts of this that I think is difficult is if it looks like the NIL money is going to athletes in schools urban environments, better media places, things like that, you know, the player or the the administrators in Manhattan, Kansas, are going to need to figure out some way to send money to athletes to because they're not effectively competing in the NIL space. So I expect pressure on the cartel to find some way to get money to athletes in a way that doesn't subject you to the NCAA regulation or other forms of regulation.
SPEAKER_08:So that's an interesting insight, Paul, because I mean, in some ways, and you'll see from some of the questions that we have coming up, some of the questions were, you know, will NIL take off some of the pressure or will NIL act as a substitute for direct payments? But it sounds like under your interpretation, it's actually an additional point of pressure in favor of direct payments because the NIL payments may not go in a politically positive Yes, I think that
SPEAKER_07:that's correct. I mean, there are a whole series of unknowns. Yeah. So a number of schools have basically gotten very involved in NIL promotion and payment. The first was BYU. The second was NIL. And the way they got involved was to direct money to the non-scholarship football players. Georgia Tech is directing money to football players. There is some evidence from Washington State that the NIL money is not new money at all. It's just substituting what had been contributions to the athletic department to money Payments to, again, football players. In each of the ones I've mentioned, this is taking money that was generally available, including for women's athletics, and pulling it out of the pot. So it's a redirection. It's not actually new money.
SPEAKER_08:Got it. Got it. That is really interesting. Okay, we had a series of questions from folks here about amateurism more generally, which you brought up in your introduction, and the NCAA's differentiation argument. And I'm going to turn it over to them. I think it's safe to say that as a group, most of the class members are skeptics about this argument, but they all have sort of different takes on it. I'm going to start with Neva. And Jackson, let me just emphasize that if you want to follow up or jump in at any point during this conversation, please do. Okay, so Neva.
SPEAKER_03:Hi, I'm Neva Jones. I'm also a 3L here at UK Fall. And I wanted to drill down on the definition of amateurism as you gave it about being, you know, the base of participation is kind of the love of the game. I'm fascinated by this idea that paying student athletes somehow changes how fans or other stakeholders engage with the sport. How is it that the idea of giving a student a$150,000 athletic scholarship is fine, but the idea of giving the same student$150,000 in cash is suddenly repugnant? And as you mentioned, one of the arguments seems to be that now these students will be just playing for money versus love of the game, but... weren't they always playing for just a different type of currency? I mean, whether it's a scholarship, whether it's access to an alumni network, or even just a launch pad to their professional career. It seems to me, I don't understand how the game somehow becomes less exciting to watch once you know that the star quarterback's family is no longer living paycheck to paycheck.
SPEAKER_07:Okay, so... You use the word always. I actually think there was some significant level of consistency or integrity to the idea in the very earliest stages. What was the point and how had amateurism developed? Amateurism was a way of separating gentlemen from men. And so amateurs were people who didn't need to be paid. This goes well into 19th century cricket. There were different entrances onto the pitch for gentlemen and players. And a lot of the origin of intercollegiate athletics was was associated with a movement called Muscular Christianity. And it was basically ensuring that you had a competition that was for your social group. I think the real problem, some of them are the ones that, well, Neva, is that, am I saying it correctly? Yes. raised, once you start basically clipping at the edges, what you end up with is a payment that's very significant. The notion that Duke or Virginia players aren't getting paid is reasonable. They're getting paid a lot. Every time you go to pay off your student debts, you're thinking about how much they're getting paid. They're just not getting paid in a form that's their preferred form. So I think part of what you're talking about is there was an erosion over time in underlying principle. And part of that is we no longer accept why we should be trying to do certain things. So amateurism was part of a culture of exclusion, keeping various people out. And in a society in which, or a university culture in which we're celebrating inclusion, that's a fairly unattractive, unacceptable set of normative claims. part that I think has worried the courts is why would you watch UVA and not go to see the, you know, a G League game? Why would you do that? And what separates, okay, you know, Duke has got some great players this year. But frankly, Duke would not be competitive with any NBA team and probably would not be competitive with most G League teams. So the goal is or the concern is, what is it that causes this separate market? to continue to exist. Gabe Feldman at Tulane has said, what we should be thinking in terms of is not amateur athletics, but intercollegiate athletics. It's the Wahoo, I never get your chant right, but it's the colors, it's somehow the connection between what's going on in the arena and the lawn, that that's what you're actually selling, of bringing you back to when you were young and not falling apart. And what we're getting is, as you correctly identified, a kind of chipping away at the edges of it for the purposes of of maintaining relevance, effectiveness, that kind of thing, and uneasiness with the entire concept. I don't know if that's responsive, but...
SPEAKER_08:No, it's really responsive. And Paul, this is something that we discussed sort of in advance of your visit. And one of the things that the students here at least thought was a line that couldn't be crossed without affecting their commitment to college sports was the fact that the players are in fact students. Really, you know, it had nothing to do with how much they're paid or in what form they're paid or anything like that. But there is something about the players being students as opposed to it being just a professional team that's sponsored by UVA or Duke or whatever. And that seemed to be, for them at least, the line that could not be crossed.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah. Now, I think that's an interesting one, but think how much it's been eroded.
SPEAKER_08:Yes. And I told them you would say that because you and I have had that conversation before. Can you please elaborate for listeners?
SPEAKER_07:Well, There are a couple of ways. So surprisingly, one of the most egregious is Maryland women's lacrosse. They would bring in students, they would establish their eligibility in the fall, and then all of them would more or less flunk out of Maryland during the season. They would go to Prince George's Community College, reestablish their eligibility, and be back on the field the next year. We had the scandal at Kim's alma mater in which many students, part of their defense was the corruption wasn't just about athletes. They were corrupt right through. Which the
SPEAKER_08:NCAA seemed to accept, right, as a limitation on their authority. I
SPEAKER_07:mean,
SPEAKER_08:they were like, you know, this really isn't about sports because, you know, the whole school's corrupt.
SPEAKER_07:Right, exactly. So what we're seeing is, okay, at Virginia Tech, 80-something percent of the football players are in a single major. And are they really students? What do we mean by student? What's going on? What is it that you're associating with that? So I think amateurism is under pressure, but student is under pressure too.
SPEAKER_10:That's a good point. Caitlin O'Malley. Hi, Paul. I'm a 3L at UVA. My name is Caitlin. I had two questions that are really closely related to what we had been speaking about before. And I want to give you a warning that I know very little about sports. So apologies in advance. My first question is about this amateurism defense. Primarily, is there a fear that paying athletes would make a tangible difference to the sport, that it would actually change the sort of entertainment that's being consumed? Or is it just the principle of the matter? And if, say, you could pay these kids without the consumers for the sport, knowing that you were, they wouldn't even really notice a difference.
SPEAKER_07:So I don't think it's sort of deceptive under the table payment. That's going on now, right? I think it's really the notion that it's a different market. And that consumers respond to it differently. So because you think of these, Kihei Clark is somehow one of yours for whatever reason, you treat this as different from a G-League game. And that that's really, it's separate markets and it's a consumer response to the separate market. It gets a little confused because Judge Bybee seemed to indicate that there is some content to amateurism other than simple market response. But that I think is the issue. At the point that all of you say this is merely another professional team, they're just not as good, then intercollegiate sports has lost its hold. Whether you regard it as self-serving or historic or confused or whatever, the hold on amateurism and non-payment has been a hold that this is a separate, distinct sport. kind of activity
SPEAKER_10:kind of branching off of that explanation and this idea that well it's it's the non-payment that makes it a different product couldn't creating an unpaid counterpart of any sort of service or performance like acting singing or dancing differentiate that counterpart and if so is it then justified to have kind of unpaid parts of all these other fields of work
SPEAKER_07:I think broadly, I agree with you. There are a couple of things about sport that are a little different. So sport is controlled competition. That is, we control, you know, singing is not controlled competition, right? You can sing longer or shorter. Basketball game is always a certain amount of time. By the way, historically, that used to take before the game negotiations, but it's controlled. And one of the things that has been part of the control is how do you ensure some level of equality so the product you're selling, which is competition, has integrity. In all sports, professional, international, whatever, there is a drive to limit something, whether it's nationality or gender or payment or levels of payment. You control it through contract. You control it through free agency. You control it through salary caps. There is always this drive to have some kind of control over so that you continue to have a product you can sell. So I think that's part of the distinction. It results in every single sports case, starting with the rule of reason. That would not happen if this were Apple and engineers. It wouldn't happen if it were singers. Now, specifically on your comment, I think you're hitting at one of the really critical kinds of issues. If this were to work, why shouldn't it work in other places?
SPEAKER_11:Caitlin Stallings. Hi, Paul. I am Caitlin Stallings. I'm also a 3L. And I have sort of a, it's not my own argument, but I can imagine an argument where people would say that compensating college kids with even a portion or a fraction of what we pay professionals may lead to trouble as there's at least a perception that younger people tend to make the wisest decisions with their money. So I have two questions related to this sort of argument. First, does compensating college athletes become any more palatable when we look at the compensation that young people make on social media like TikTok? It seems to me at least that athletes are doing at least as much work and oftentimes risking their own safety in ways that TikTok maybe doesn't require at least for others entertainment and that should be compensated. And then second question related to this is if people are really concerned about these young people making mass amounts of money, could the legal system play a role in protecting against those unwise decisions such as by creating trusts with the money that they're being paid?
SPEAKER_07:Okay. Yeah, it's a really interesting question and sort of personal anecdote. My former brother-in-law, now deceased, was a singer when he was an undergraduate, and he made more money than anybody else at Wesleyan University when he was a senior. So it exists in other fields. So what do I think is the biggest... argument against the concern about paying these athletes when they're young. Professionals are getting paid. And so in sports like soccer outside the United States, they're being signed at 12, 13, 14 years of age. Now, are there mechanisms? Yeah, there's basically the Shirley Temple law. You can have a court hearing in which there is a presentation in which the individual shows that they're able. So I spent 30 years advising Duke athletes going into professional sports. One of the reasons they had me do it was that they couldn't hire professional help. Now, what you can do, and this is already started to happen, is professionals can come in and advise them. Could you mitigate some of this by various forms of trust? Yeah, you could. What's the justification for doing it against other kinds of matters. Is it a problem? Yeah. I think this is the one part of the economy where your predicted income goes like this. I assume all of you are lining up great jobs and that sort of thing. And you expect over time, your income will go like this as you get wiser, more sophisticated. For a lot of athletes, their highest earning capacity are in their earliest years. And there's evidence that they blow unbelievable amounts of money. It's not a false idea. They do. It's just given other parts of the economy, maybe we ought to figure out ways of providing support rather than restriction.
SPEAKER_08:Well, I was going to ask you a couple of follow-ups related to that. And I guess the first question I had was, do you hear this argument made as often? This used to be a fairly common argument, and I actually don't hear it as much anymore. Maybe I'm reading different sources than I used to, but it's just young people are making so much money these days, so early from so many sources that I guess I just don't hear this particular argument made as much anymore. And then I guess I was going to ask you, one of the rule that you brought up about prohibition against representation always bothered me in part because it seemed to fly in the face of any concerns that we purportedly had about exploitation. And I just wondered whether what the justification was that was put forward for, was there ever an attempt to square those rationales or no, it was just like, this is our rule live with it.
SPEAKER_07:So they, they, the line they were trying to draw was the, getting money out of your professional, I mean, out of your athletic deal. And the one where I actually got myself sideways with the NCAA is the Lloyds of London would write insurance in which they called it draft protection insurance. So if you were likely to be a very high pick, you could get an insurance policy that would pay off if you fell in the draft. Now, how would they pay for that? Well, Lloyd's broker would defer payment until you signed your first professional contract. Now, this seemed to me a totally sensible risk sharing device. The NCAA said, no, what you are doing is essentially profiting while an amateur on your future earnings. So that one struck me as terrible. In terms of your question, is there less of this argument? It is true that athletes exist in a different ecosystem than some of the other people you're talking about, although, frankly, I know almost nothing about influencers and that sort of thing. And I think the thought is that so much of their lives are so deeply controlled that they don't actually mature. The response then, of course, is to control their lives even more rather than figure out ways of helping them to mature.
SPEAKER_08:Yeah. And honestly, I'm not sure that child actors or child singers are controlled any less. I mean, that's just a, seems to me an empirical question, but certainly once they grow up and have the very frequent public meltdown, we hear the stories of how they were so controlled as children that they, in fact, never developed the maturity to manage their own lives and careers. And so I guess I'm not convinced that the ecosystem is that different from some other settings, although it might be or it might be on a broader scale. OK, I'm turning this over to Madison.
SPEAKER_02:Hi, I'm Madison. I'm also a 3L at UVA. I think that recently there's sort of been a shift in attitudes regarding payment for college players. And I'm curious if you, or how much you think, kind of the understanding of how much risk these college players, particularly college football players, though other athletes as well, are taking on as we learn more about stuff like CTE or potential long-term harm that can be, that they can experience during college. And- kind of the feeling that we need to be compensating them for taking on that risk?
SPEAKER_07:I think it's a really significant question. Yes, there has been a shift. If you look at any of the debates from the mid-1990s, they were about why are we letting these athletes into UBA at all? They're essentially stealing places from all of you. And we need to ensure that they really are, you know, able to take advantage of their education and things like that. The Shape of the River by Bill Bowen is entirely about that kind of matter. So yes, the debate has shifted. Now, is it tied to concerns about health and safety. Maybe that feels to me more like an argument marshaled, but in support of a much more fundamental shift, which is a deep suspicion of any institutional controls on behavior. So maybe all of this is related to Kim's taboo markets, and she's just totally undermining culture and that sort of thing. But what I think you're seeing is a profound doubt when any institution or any authority tries to interfere with various kinds of human freedom. You mentioned football. One of the coming crises for intercollegiate sports are the number of football players opting out of bowl games. So you are now trying to sell a product. UVA is going to the big bowl game, and the quarterback says, oh, you know, my... economic interest is in being drafted by the football team. I forget what they're called now, but, you know, that's where I need to put my effort. And so, no, when I was interviewing people at Stanford, former captain of the team said, basically, I would not contribute to Stanford. I already gave them my needs. And this sort of self-protective The people putting out this product of intercollegiate football have a problem. How do we incent people to continue to be part of this? And we are maybe not that far off a crisis in the product because you're going to get player withdrawal.
SPEAKER_08:Interesting. No, I think that's a good answer. Courtney.
SPEAKER_12:Hi, Paul. My name is Courtney. I'm also a 3L UVA. So my question was, should there be more oversight over the NCAA as it decides the future of college sports following the Supreme Court's Alistair decision? Who should decide what this market should look like? Should it be more of a free market approach with schools getting to decide for themselves or at the other end of the spectrum? Should there be more congressional oversight over this industry? Some of the particular concerns I was worried about was one, gender equality and salaries for college athletes. And then my second concern, which we kind of just discussed, there already is a prohibition on representation, but I initially had written that I was concerned about a difference in sophistication of the parties. Thinking about a scenario where on one side, you have this powerhouse institution that can afford highly educated, high profile lawyers. And on the other side, you have a high school senior who's deciding where to go to college and whose family might not come for money or is unable to afford a lawyer to represent them. So generally, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about this difference in sophistication of parties and potential for exploitation, and then more generally about what sort of oversight should be in this area.
SPEAKER_07:There's one data point I want to share with you that I think may be relevant to the, how do you frame things? Since about 2005, 2010, the percentage of scholarship athletes particularly in basketball, who come from two parent college educated families has been rising. So I think a lot of the story we tell ourselves is about, you know, these kids coming out of extreme poverty and many do. But the shift has been very significant as the incentives have The money in professional sports has gone up so dramatically. And I will give you, this next anecdote will just tell you how ancient I am. When I was first hired at Duke, my initial starting salary as a newly minted member of the faculty was greater than 45% of the New York Yankees. The current minimum would be many multiples of my salary as a senior professor. So we've had this shift and part of the shift is now it's professionalized high school sports. High schools are not where they're competing. They're competing on different kinds of teams. That takes a lot of parental organization. And so you're seeing more and more and more kids who are coming from intact sports-oriented families. So just a data point as we're trying to think of this. Okay, oversight over the NCAA. The biggest issue I think right now is the NCAA isn't doing anything. They're running from all their responsibilities. They tried. On the Leah Thomas issue, to run from any responsibility related to transgender athletes and to put it on the National Federation or International Federation for the relevant sport, they then backtracked on that when there was too much blowback. But in area after area after area, what they're doing is basically neutering themselves to be ineffective. regulator. So what would the congressional oversight be? You mentioned Title IX. That's an oversight. One of the things, okay, I will hit on one of my big themes. If we start getting payment for players, like every other sport in the world, there's going to need to be some kind of mechanism for ordering the payments. Right now, the only way it'll be is UVA will decide what they're going to pay. Duke will decide what it's going to pay. Wake will decide what it's going to pay. And this is the Jay Boas solution, right? I think that that is a radically unstable short-term solution. And we're going to see various kinds of changes. What could those be? Well, one is everything gets kicked to the conference. The conference doesn't have market power. Therefore, it can impose various kinds of limits. Those limits will shift in competition with other conferences. That is the preferred solution of a lot of people writing in this area. There's another one, which I have advocated, presented evidence in the North Carolina legislature, including to Kim's mother. And I would say on the whole, they really hate it. what I had to say and probably hated me as a result. I'm sure that's not
SPEAKER_08:true. I would say I'll talk to her, Paul, but I have no ability to persuade her. So
SPEAKER_07:what I think is in every American professional sport, you control wages through collective bargaining. You can't have federal collective bargaining in the current structure because University of Virginia is a part of the government of the Commonwealth. So Duke can be under federal labor law, Wake can be under federal labor law, but Carolina State, UVA, Virginia Tech cannot. However, it would be possible to privatize your football team, to privatize men's basketball, UVA would enter into a contract with the Wahoo Club who would agree to take the marks, provide them with a football team. The players would have to be registered students at UVA, but it would simply be a contractual relationship between this private entity And the university, just like you might contract out the janitorial services to a private body. These groups, were they to do that, can enter into a multi-employer bargaining unit and could negotiate an ACC collective bargaining contract. which would be insulated from antitrust under the non-statutory labor exemption. So that, I'll just put that out there as a way to deal with it. Could there be regulation? Yes, there is in effect a form of federal regulation over the national federations as part of the Olympic movement. You could do something like that. Has that been very effective? No, I don't think you would feel an extraordinary level of comfort that that's going to be a good solution. But could you do it? Now, you were suggesting, how do we ensure that women get treated equally in this environment? Well, if we start privatizing the most commercialized sports, it's going to get harder. It will get harder to figure out how to do that because right now, single exception of tennis, women's sports aren't doing particularly well at the professional level. So would there be a group who wants to take over women's basketball or women's soccer and promote it and enter into a contract with UVA? I don't know. I think that's an open question. Now, I know you started with NIL. One of the things that I think we're seeing in a couple of places is a weak form of what I was talking about with the privatization of the commercialized sports. That is a lot of NIL money is simply being pulled out of the general payments to the university and going into... alleged third party payments almost always to football. And a group of women at Washington State actually protested that that was happening and they were being starved of new funds. Is this part of it? Yeah, will be part of it. And there are real conflicts that are being hidden by the attack on authority. So I think a massive reorganization of intercollegiate sports and reshifting of the money is going to take current models out of the monies available for women. And then the question is going to be, do you have an institutional or national or other commitment to take general monies and put them in to women's athletics. You don't have the simple Title IX rules if this alienation of the commercialized sports were actually to happen. Great.
SPEAKER_08:Yeah, that's great. And we actually have a number of sort of follow-up questions. And I'm going to start with Jackson, who wanted to follow up on, I think, something you had mentioned about regional differences.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, Paul, I grew up in Georgia, went to the University of Georgia, pretty much my whole family has also gone there um and you know people make fun of the sec for their slogan it just means more but i think it really does and this hits on uh our conversation you made it abundantly clear that it's going to be very difficult in a lot of ways for universities to maintain athletics once payments start being introduced and you know there's a general lack of regulation and so i wonder if you foresee know in the south i feel like they'll do anything they can to keep college sports alive because it is such a cultural thing and it's so ingrained but i wonder if you foresee areas such as the northeast where you know maybe college athletics aren't as big a part of the culture where universities say you know what this is too much for us to deal with we're just gonna lead college athletics to the side altogether. Or
SPEAKER_07:try to redefine it. So, yeah, I think there will be shifts. And I'm not saying the thing's going to fall apart. It's going to take a different form. It may fall apart. Men's basketball clearly is going to have huge challenges because this is a place where where we're starting to see significant development of alternatives. Football, there is no alternative, and the costs are so high. That will be the last place it happens, so Georgia can feel safe about that. We've had shifts. So when the NCAA was created, President Roosevelt called the great football powers of the nation to the White House. to hammer out a way to ensure that intercollegiate sports and particularly football would come together. Do you know who the great football powers of the country were?
SPEAKER_01:I'm assuming some Ivy League schools.
SPEAKER_07:Yale, number one. Its big rival for the Thanksgiving Day game, which was the biggest game in the country, Princeton, Harvard. And, you know, those schools discovered sometime after World War I, that the rest of the country had sort of caught up and was playing a more effective, competitive game. And they said, okay, we're gonna take our ball and go home, right? The biggest power, you know the phrase, the monsters of the Midway? The monsters of the Midway were the University of Chicago. If you see that classic C, on the bears, that was the University of Chicago's sea. How did it get to the bears? Well, the Chicago, University of Chicago, which was a massive powerhouse, sold its used uniforms to the Chicago Cardinals, now the Arizona Cardinals. And when they left Chicago and didn't need a sea anymore, they sold They're doubly used uniforms to the Bears. So you've got this. There was a time when schools like Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Princeton pulled out. Penn tried to go the other way. Since television started in Philadelphia, Penn... tried broadcasting all its games and was thrown out of the NCAA or threatened with being thrown out. They then attempted to go big time and discovered they couldn't effectively compete with the Georges of the world. And so they went back to a non-scholarship model. Okay, is it a non-scholarship model? It's not a non-scholarship model. Princeton's got so much money. They're giving money to everybody. And therefore, all you have is the loss of control over the athletes that the athletic scholarship has. But they're trying to run serious programs in everything except men's basketball and football. They have big time track athletes, big time. hockey programs, things like that. So could you get regional differences? Yes. And I think that's part of the hope of the people who want to devolve power to the conferences. And we will see a movement. I will give you a number that may or may not capture your imagination. There is no professional league in the world bigger than 32 teams. That's That appears to be the, you know, they're in the sort of 20 to 32. Right now, the power five conferences is what, 68, something like that. One of the things we could see is a shrinking of big time football down to 32 teams. We've seen the massive reorganization of conferences and it's continuing to go on. If this thing gets pushed, I think Mississippi State might be out of the SEC. I think you're going to see a reorganization and a movement toward something like 32, 35, 30 as the basic number. Now, you had also said, should Congress be stepping in? Expect Congress to step in When the senators discover that the schools that were getting pushed out, Iowa, for example, which doesn't do well financially on its own, they might be one of the schools that get pushed out. Don't expect Joni Ernst to sit by quietly and let that
SPEAKER_08:happen. We have some questions about NIL that I want to turn to.
SPEAKER_06:Sure. Hi, Paul. Thanks for joining us today. I'm another 3L here at UVA. I had a couple of questions about sort of the players union issue. You answered most of my questions. First question was about salary caps. How could you impose that? We'd have to have some sort of collective bargaining. But also, we've seen all these big sort of structural conversations about, let's say, the college football playoff. or redefining the conferences in a way. I'm an Oklahoma fan, so we've sort of been on the front line of that. But could you see these collective bargaining groups, players unions, whatever, would they have any bargaining power to, let's say, change the conversation about structural changes like conferences, conference realignment, maybe playoffs, the March Madness tournament or whatever, would the players have a say in those negotiations at all?
SPEAKER_07:Okay. So if we're assuming somehow you can get under the National Labor Relations Act, there you privilege negotiations over wages, hours, and conditions of work. The entire debate will be whether the structure of is a wage, an hour, or a condition of work. Okay. And so the Baseball Players Union has gotten itself involved in questions of contraction, the Football Players Union, over whether a team could be placed in or you could be required to play in Mexico. So That would be the lever. It's not an easy legal problem. Turn yourselves loose on this one. But yeah, potentially. Now, there is another matter, which is at a Final Four not too long ago, one team voted on whether they wouldn't play. They eventually voted to play. That would have sent shockwaves everywhere. through the entire sport if we're going up to this weekend and Carolina says, no, we think we have a lousy deal here. We're not playing. Expect a huge scramble, a crisis, right? There is a lot of potential leverage in withdrawing labor. The problem is, That by withdrawing labor, the players hurt themselves phenomenally. And that's what, it was Wisconsin. That's what they eventually decided. No, we'd rather play one game than have the enmity of the people of Wisconsin for all time.
SPEAKER_08:something like
SPEAKER_07:that.
SPEAKER_08:The group had some questions about NIL, which I think fall into three broad categories, Paul. And so we'll kind of skip around depending on what your answers are. But I sort of grouped them into questions about the different types of NIL we're seeing. In other words, the source of the payments, which you've raised a couple of times already. Issues relating to the disparate race and gender implications of these deals and the role of social media sort of related to that. And then finally, the potential impact on competitiveness of the different teams. So I think those are the three main topics that we sort of discussed. And I'm going to turn it over to Jackson to get us started.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So Paul, in my mind, they're two different categories of NIL deals available right now to college athletes. The first being a deal direct with a brand such, for example, Paige Becker's, the Yukon women's basketball player has a NIL deal with Gatorade. And the second category would be deals given out by the recent development of collectives, which I see as basically pooled money from boosters that were already giving money to schools. So I was wondering how we can distinguish the longevity of those two markets. For example, I think the page backers example in Gatorade might have a shorter lifespan because Gatorade is seeking, you know, that to be a good investment and it wants a return on their deal with her. Whereas boosters putting money into a collective aren't really sinking any sort of monetary return beyond their team winning games.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, I think you've got it. Basically, yeah. There might be another category that I've been struck by are non-traditional purchasers of athlete name, image, and likeness, who I think have entered this market in a short space for the purpose of gaining notoriety by announcing a deal. And they aren't actually interested in Paolo Bancaro or Paige Beckers or... you know, Kihei Clark or whatever, they're interested in the announcement that they've made a deal, which gets reported all over the place. So there have been some crypto entities that have done this kind of thing, new, highly entrepreneurial. And I don't think they have a structure in which they could use the athletes in any way. Okay, yeah. So what will change the booster collective or individuals? You know, some of these are an insurance agent or a car dealer or something like that. That's actually what almost all of the athlete possibilities are up until you become LeBron James. So they're local. When I've been advising guys, basically they tell me you're from upstate New York. You have some endorsement possibilities in upstate New York. And then in North Carolina. And that's it. You know, the numbers are small. The numbers that are being... So anybody want to guess what the median NIL deal is for an... Somebody
SPEAKER_08:looked it up in class the other day and said it was like$250 or some very... Well,
SPEAKER_07:the number I've seen is 51. Oh,
SPEAKER_08:even lower.
SPEAKER_07:And a lot of the numbers that are capturing imagination are numbers put out by agents or people who are promoting this. So Paige Becker, there are numbers you see that are crazy, but she's not actually going to get paid that now or possibly ever. They're highly contingent kinds of things. So... What will the market look like? When I was representing Grant Hill, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike said, I would never pay to have Coach K, his phrase was some middle-aged guy. This was a long time ago. Some middle-aged white guy put sneakers or endorsed my sneakers if I could put them right on the feet of kids. that that's what he wanted. And I think that's the hope of the NIL advocates. I think the problem is that the sports endorser market may be just a lot smaller than people imagine. Because what's the value of either, you know, the the star with the mustache from St. Peter's? Well, It's of value as long as people are talking about St. Peter's, which is what, 72 hours? Anybody talking about St. Peter's now? It's such an ephemeral space unless you're in Georgia or Charlottesville or something like that, because there are too many other people who are better at promoting St. what you're doing. Now, the other space, there is a potential other market, and this is the one that has, I think, been the most significant for women, are influencer markets. And frankly, this is new to me, and I don't understand it, but there could be genuine money there. And that would be new because the fact that you're not yet important may be part of your appeal. I want to endorse what you said.
SPEAKER_08:Okay. So actually I was, I'm going to follow up. Let's just stick with the influencers for a second because there were a couple of follow-up questions about that. And I'm going to start with Madison who sort of did a little bit of internet digging on this. And so Madison, I'll let you pose your question.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So the question kind of started out with these two different types of NIL deals, the collective deals, and then the sponsorship deals. And it seems like most of that collective money is going toward male athletes. It's going
SPEAKER_04:toward football.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. Yeah. Primarily football. But where women sort of have found their footing in the NIL market is through sponsored social media posts. And I've read some things saying that that's a really good thing because it allows women to build up this market and be paid for their name, image, and likeness. But I've also read that there's a lot of racial disparity in how much people are getting paid for those posts. And quite frankly, yeah, it was saying that like the women who get the largest sponsorships for blonde white women, it's about$1,200. The two
SPEAKER_07:twins at San Jose.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. Yeah. And then, For non-white women, it caps out around$200 per post. So you see a huge racial disparity in how much money is being put in towards those influencing positions. So I was just curious if you could talk a little bit about how NIL may deal with these sort of racial disparities, and again, with the gender disparities as far as the collective money going all toward football, and then the sponsorships having to fill in the gaps.
SPEAKER_07:Okay, so how they can deal with the collective money going toward football. There is one regulatory hook, and the NCAA has already threatened that. Where the institutions are organizing it, that could be a problem for them. And I think that triggers all kinds of Title IX issues. So that's a hook where the institution is involved. The rest of it is market response. And so there it would be basically what regulatory tools do you have to interfere with the market? And it would be like any other racial disparity or gender disparity in the society. That's essentially the... the tools you're
SPEAKER_08:going to have and have to work with.
SPEAKER_07:Got it. It's so much bigger. It's more people. It's greater interest. When you sit in Durham or Chapel Hill, you might think basketball is the center of things.
SPEAKER_08:Yes, the students make fun of me about this all the time. So it's okay. They're all football people.
SPEAKER_07:So basically, I think that's the question. core answer. But I also think you're right. The NIL of a basketball player is actually you. Well, some of you said you're not interested in sports, but I assume most of you know what Paolo Bancaro looks like, right? He has been on all kinds of I think it's likely you might not be entirely clear what the quarterback at UVA looks like. He's always got a helmet on. If you are trying to pick out an athlete, it's a lot easier to promote an athlete. that people recognize. I mean, some of these get ridiculous. Johnny Bench was promoting a men's clothing store and in all the ads, he's walking around with a bat. Now, I don't generally see people walking around with bats in men's clothing stores, but the problem was people didn't know who he was. And it is the big advantage that basketball players have.
SPEAKER_08:So I'm going to turn to Tom, who had a follow-up question about some of the pros and cons associated with these different sources of NIL funds?
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, so it does kind of go to that. I mean, in a certain sense, do you think that some are more desirable than others in terms of, say, ensuring the overall long-term success of college sports? Or do you think that likely schools perhaps want a little bit of distance or would like some distance to be able to have plausible deniability in certain situations that play to their advantage? How do you think of that?
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, it's a really good question. And it's interesting to see how the regulations come in. So there are a couple of different interests. One is that the schools get a lot of money from basically selling access to their marks, traditions, whatever. So the legislation in Connecticut requires a clearance of that you're not interfering either with existing or prospective deals that the University of Connecticut might have. The real value of Paolo Bancaro's name, image, and likeness goes way down if you can't have something about Duke there. He needs, and so you've got a potential conflict between two Mark, On the deals, some deals clearly violate NCAA rules. You know, if you were promoting cannabis or, you know, steroid use, or then it starts to move into tobacco, things like that. Gambling might conceivably be a pretty serious issue. And so there's a lot of discussion about that and whether that needs to be regulated. Schools are right now taking one of two approaches. They're being quite active in advising, controlling, or they're doing hands-off. One of the students who's doing research with me is really concerned about on the issue of women's NIL. She believes that female athletes are disproportionately subjected to social media harassment, particularly around a sexualization of them. And she thinks that part of, she's trying to put it under Title IX, you have a responsibility to counsel your female athletes, what they may be getting into when they raise their profile as an influencer, as a endorser, whatever, that it's gonna subject them to this crazy world of people commenting in just bizarre and hateful ways. Which, of
SPEAKER_08:course, is not limited to the sports world, but
SPEAKER_07:I see your point. It is not
SPEAKER_08:limited
SPEAKER_07:to the sports world, absolutely. But just whether, in fact, there is any additional set of concerns. So Title IX, up till 2010, most of the cases actually dealt with sports. Since 2010, they've dealt with sexual harassment. And maybe this is bringing the two together, you know, the sexual harassment of athletes.
SPEAKER_08:Interesting. This, I think, is a good spot for a question that Alex had about sort of the regulatory reach and the ability to oversee these collectives in particular.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, my main question, I guess, is does the NCA have any power to regulate these collectives? I sort of thought of them as like political super PACs in a way. They're sort of distinct and independent from the candidate, but operating in the candidate's interest. It seems to me like most of these collectives are doing the same thing. They're independent from the university, but they're largely operating for the university's interests. But at the same time, they can say, look, we're not the university, so the NCAA can't tell us what to do. Yeah, they can't.
SPEAKER_07:what they can do is say that these are basically boosters. And you regulate boosters as if they are doing things which are violative of NCAA rules, you can sanction the university. So there's a collective in Norman that's funneling money to the linemen, and it is not a legitimate third-party kind of thing. It's merely a booster payment. The NCAA, at least in theory, could come in and say, this is a disguised direct payment to athletes. So am I predicting that they'll be effective? Not particularly. They have sent out a letter basically reiterating that the rules still apply. And could they get at it? Yeah. Now, if your collective is doing a good job of explaining why it helps the Chevrolet dealership in Norman, yeah, now they're in school. But if they're not even attempting to do it, yeah, you got a case.
SPEAKER_08:Let me turn to Jackson with a follow up that actually he and I discussed before you got here.
SPEAKER_01:I just wanted to ask if Duke has created a collective or if you've had any personal work with that happening, because I know Duke's not as into football as other places. So maybe it's not as useful at Duke, but. We couldn't find anything online about potential Duke
SPEAKER_07:collective. So Duke's basic approach to date is to say, these are third parties. We're not having anything to do with that. Will they eventually be forced by various competitive pressures to change that stance? I don't know. Do Duke athletes in men's basketball have an enormous advantage Yeah, you know, Duke's the biggest draw in basketball. It is, right? And a number of years, they outdraw a lot of the NBA teams. Were that to change, then their high-mindedness might change as well. So... Just to
SPEAKER_08:clarify, have they said, no, stay away from us with your money collectives, or have they just said, you do what you want to do, we're not involved in
SPEAKER_07:any of it? They haven't commented even on the fact that there are collectives. Okay, got it. So, you know, this is opposed to Ohio State, which has an entire foundation now that is... to promote NIL. So you're going to see a lot of shifting. Now, when I've said a variety of things, the basic thing we all ought to recognize is, do I know? No. Does anybody know? I think the answer is no. The opinion came down eight months ago. Prior to this, it was not possible. A lot of people are scrambling. There's an enormous amount of disinformation, hopeful information, uncertainty, shifting markets. So it's a little bit of Wild West right now. And where it's going to shake out, I don't know. I think NIL is ultimately unstable because it's going to be less money than people imagined, and then they're going to be looking for other kinds of money. But That's my speculation.
SPEAKER_08:Interesting. I think that's actually a good segue into a question that Autumn had. A couple of other students had it as well about the possible effects of NIL money on competitiveness. And perhaps your answer will be less than you think, but let's hear. So let me turn it over to Autumn.
SPEAKER_09:Yeah. So hi, I'm Autumn Adamshack. I'm a 3L. So I'm It seems like NIL money right now kind of keeps the same hierarchy that exists with, you know, the already more funded and popular sports teams receiving more NIL money for their players. But it seems like March Madness, though, allows some of these schools with lower budgets to get more publicity. So it's Do you think by having these NIL deals that it's giving schools the possibility to get new popularity from stuff like March Madness and they'll be able to receive money and make them more sought after teams?
SPEAKER_07:Okay. I think my basic belief is that it's not going to make a huge amount of difference one way or the other. So I don't know if you saw Mike Krzyzewski commented that St. Peter's success was going to lead to hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to them and that this had happened at Butler. The research suggests no. It's a short time blip. So is it possible that St. Peter's is going to have a jump? The quick analysis by some econometricians was that it might lead to a jump in applications, but 98% of St. Peter's students don't pay full tuition. So it could be$800,000 in new revenue, but that's going to go with expenses. So my guess is a lot less, except to the degree that what it does is prop up this special market for college basketball. Gets people interested in college basketball. Will it change the hierarchy? Maybe. But as Georgia, Clemson, Alabama, Florida get a wildly disproportionate number of the top football players right now. Could that shift to USC because there are so much better media markets in LA? Maybe. But the real media interest is in the ramps. It's not in USC. So I'm not sure. Does it lead to the concentration? Duke has three of the top five players in high school coming in next year. They've done that at least every other year for the last, five or six, is it going to get worse than that? Well, it doesn't seem likely. I mean, how much worse could it get? You get all five? So what do I think? I think what it is likely to do is have a very powerful influence on the public's acceptance that these are people with a right to market themselves independently. of their teams, and that the institutions that are willing to respond to that are likely to be disproportionately successful.
SPEAKER_08:Okay, I'm going to turn it over to Samantha, who had, I think, a general question about this competitiveness. And this question Questions sort of fell into two camps, as you can see, with some people saying, as you have said, Paul, that's like, how much more can we make the rich richer? And with others pointing to perhaps some specialized opportunity, including March Madness, as you have pointed out. And Samantha was one of the people who did both of those things in her question.
SPEAKER_07:Yes. And so part of it is, I don't know. That was there before. And the real, so think of yourself, you're looking for an influencer. Do you think that you're much more interested in Eder now and you will follow him? Or were people interested in him, I think literally for 72 hours? Okay. Do you now at least know where St. Peter's is? Yes. I suspect most of you now know it's in New Jersey, and I'm not sure how many of you could have told that before. That's a big deal. 63% of the press mentions of Duke University relate to its athletic programs. We have Nobel Prize winners, but it's the athletic programs that get attention. Is this a way to even heighten that attention? Maybe. But for how long? I don't know. So the big issue is whether social media trends in promotion are actually going to make it possible to do a variety of things that have not been possible before and that we're going to see big shifts in marketing. as a result of that. And, you know, talk to the people at Darden. I have no insights on that.
SPEAKER_08:Samantha, did that answer your questions or do you have a follow-up to that?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think it answered my questions. I was just wondering if you believe that the same schools with large budgets will just continue to be the most competitive regardless of any changes that they're going to be with NILs and potentially paying players just because they already have such recognition and their athletic budgets are already so much higher than other schools that all these other things won't let them compete with the bigger schools already.
SPEAKER_07:So there is another, at least, possibility in here, and I don't know when this kicks in or if it kicks in. Schools like to tell stories about themselves, right? So your institution tells stories about Thomas Jefferson and Milan and, you know, that kind of thing. If they start paying players substantially more than the professor of surgery, are people at UVA going to choke? Are they going to say, we don't want to be part of this? We know it's happened before. And we also know that a lot of things have been swallowed that are pretty extreme. But I think at core, your question is going to go to what are people ultimately willing to pay for this temporary kind of glory? Or are they going to try to withdraw and take their ball and play in the Ivy League? And
SPEAKER_08:Paul, do you see that as being a substantially different question? Because in some ways, I feel like at least many schools already answered this once the athletic director and basketball coach and football coach started getting paid a lot more than any head of any academic department. And they sort of made their piece with that. But perhaps, so do you view the the actual students getting paid more than other people on campus as being a different in kind type of issue for many schools.
SPEAKER_07:In furtherance of your point, in 40 of the American states, the highest paid public official is a football coach or a men's basketball coach. In Connecticut, for a period of about three and a half months, the highest paid public official was the women's basketball coach. But that was because they didn't have a men's basketball coach. They were in a search. You know, we've had a couple deviations. Several New England states, the highest paid public official at times has been the hockey coach, the men's hockey coach. So, yeah, Kim, you might be right. We've already swallowed that one. When I was hired, Mike Krzyzewski got paid about$220,000 a year. He's now... in excess of 8 million, I think. You know, we've gone a long way. And I think this is basically the theme that Jay Billis has hit on over and over again. I don't know. I think it probably feels different to people, but people predicted that in professional sports, that they would, you know, when salaries went crazy. Right.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:But again, somewhere between 50% and 70% of professional athletes get paid the minimum. Whatever the minimum is, they get paid that. And so it could be that we can choke this down if you're paying Boncaro. When somebody wants to pay Kihei Clark, maybe people say, what are we doing? this money should be going to Professor Kravik.
SPEAKER_08:Well, that's certainly what I say.
SPEAKER_07:Yes, it should be going to more financial aid. We certainly in the 1990s had a very serious set of claims. At Yale, there was a big movement. Why are we bringing in all these athletes? That money should be going to bringing in African-American students at Wake right now. Something in excess of 60% of the African-American males on campus are scholarship athletes. I think it's possible that this could trigger that kind of a response. I'm not predicting it. I really don't know. You're right. Big payments have been choked down. We are now looking at, I think in many of the football powers, there is no professor outside the medical center who gets paid as much as assistant coaches. We've got strength and conditioning coaches up in half a million dollars a year. So in furtherance of your point, Maybe we can choke down anything. Right. But I think it's possible it'll be different. And it's possible it will trigger a bunch of visceral race kind of reactions. And people won't want it for that reason. Right. I don't know. Right.
SPEAKER_08:Well, Paul, thank you so much. This has been really a lot of fun. We, we did not get through all the questions as I expected because we were, we had, we had, no, no, we had so many, we've been, we have been eagerly awaiting your arrival all semester. So, and you know, I'm of course committed to getting this, this episode edited and posted prior to the weekend for obvious reasons.
SPEAKER_07:Okay. Yeah. All right. I think every question I got was a good question. I think I have a lot of uncertainty about where things are going. It does feel like an inflection point, but inflection points can go backwards. There's no inevitability there. Francis Fukuyama, that history will end. I certainly didn't think we were going to see the first land war in Europe in 70 years. This is a space where there are a lot of interests that could figure out how to regroup and have a better second half, but the pressures are enormous. The lever is antitrust. The lever is also... raised early on that the underlying moral justification for a lot of what's going on has been lost because it's not any longer lining up with the goals of the society. What then comes next? I don't know.
SPEAKER_08:Yeah. Well, thank you so much. It was great to see you again. Thank you.
