“The thing I would change about college football is to let the talent share in the ever-increasing revenues,” Harbaugh said. “We’re all robbing the same train, and the ones that are in the position to do the heavy lifting, the ones that risk life and limb out there on a football field are the players and not just, not just football players, student-athletes.”
Same as most other professional players' unions, I imagine, minus salary discussions. Maybe some mechanisms of taking some percentage of NIIL money and putting it into something akin to a pension fund for permanently disabled athletes.
It does seem like college sports are destined for the dustbin of history, at least as we know them. The academic aspect is so superfluous at this point and the youth development leagues a la international soccer seem like a much more realistic future. It'd be nice if we could all stop pretending that the stars are there to get a degree.
America kind of stands alone in doing this as well. When you look at sports development in Europe especially, it's not connected to secondary education at all for the most part. Most soccer clubs have an academy whose sole focus is building local talent for the first team.
Yeah. It makes much more sense, frankly. Kids should either pick whether they want to be a pro athlete or get a college degree. Practice schedules, especially for revenue sports like football, are way too intense for people to reasonably invest the time needed to get a meaningful education and succeed on the field. Which is why you see so many fake majors and football stars basically have surrogates to attend classes for them.