Fenster writes:

You may recall the historian Taylor Branch got a lot of attention for his call, in The Atlantic, for college athletes to be paid.  His long article was, in my view, longer on sermonizing than it was on financial specifics.  I presented my own (long) critique at my now semi-defunct blog here.  Those interested in a link to Branch’s article as well as my comments are directed there.

Some months back, Sports Illustrated weighed in with its own article on the subject.  It is an interesting counterweight to Branch’s piece.  Branch is an advocate on moral grounds, and never really feels the need to get specific about how a plan for payment would work. By contrast, SI maintains it is not actually advocating athletes be paid–merely that it can be done.  So in theory you ought to be able to read the two articles together to make a coherent whole: Branch for the moral necessity argument, SI for the how-to.

How does it all add up?  SI makes some interesting and provocative arguments but I remain unconvinced that it has come up with the right formula.

SI’s argument consists of two parts.  On the revenue side, it favors market forces to enter into the picture in a bigger way.  If a star athlete can warrant an endorsement, perhaps there has to be a way to manage that revenue flow in appropriate ways.  On the cost side, SI would both trim expenses in the top sports (mandated smaller rosters for football, say) as well as shift a lot of now-varsity sports to club status.  The latter would free up the subsidies now flowing from the big-time sports to non-revenue producers like volleyball and golf.

Does the numbers add?  Yeah, on paper I think they have done a good job nipping and tucking.

But will it actually work?  Now that is another question.  It is kind of like someone coming up with a deficit closing plan on paper, expecting Washington DC to take to it.  Yes, the numbers can be made to fit, but is there any hope given the power relations in play in the real world?

Here, I am a lot more pessimistic. As SI points out, athletic departments’ financial reports are cooked, cooked, cooked to the point of falling apart sogginess.  Why is that?  I think one of the main reasons is that–while you would never know it–they are in fact joined at the hip financially to the universities that are supposed to be their homes.  Books are cooked in large measure because universities don’t want key constituencies–like the faculty, for instance–to know what the financial relationship actually is.

What we have is an asymmetrical relationship, one in which the university professes to be the senior partner, but which is in most cases the junior one, or at least powerless to manage athletic spending.  Given that state of affairs, SI can go on all it wants about cost cutting and new revenues.  As long as a mini-NFL is grafted on to the side of an institution of higher education, the books will always be cooked enough to permit silent subsidies to flow from students to the athletic program.

The best one can say about the SI plan: in theory, IT COULD WORK.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10KObAQFmlY

But most likely you end up with more of the lumbering monster.