The college governing body wants to maintain control over players.
It must be difficult for the people who run college and university sports to watch their business lose control of student-athletes. You know the people who perform and get just a scholarship for their efforts while attending school. Student-athletes can now get paid through a third party and those payments are a problem according to people like the National Collegiate Athletics Association President Charlie Baker. The problem is that various states have laws governing the payments and the laws vary across the country. Baker, the former Republican Massachusetts Governor, is literally begging a dysfunctional United States Congress to come up with a federal law regulating the third-party payments to the student-athletes because if Congress does nothing college sports is in peril. The fear, student-athletes could become school employees and that would take away the veneer that these performers are playing for the love of their game and are just hired hands. That cannot happen even though schools are aligning themselves in various conference configurations in order to get the most television and video streaming money possible.
Baker in pleading before the Senate Judiciary Committee said. “To enable enhanced benefits while protecting programs from one-size-fits-all actions in the courts, we support codifying current regulatory guidance into law by granting student-athletes special status that would affirm they are not employees.” In other words don’t let them become employees because that will cost us money and it would be professionalism in an amateur world. Baker claimed that student-athletes don’t want to be school employees and if Congress did not act, Division II and III schools would drop sports. The student-athlete word play was an invention to deny that athletes getting scholarships made them employees and an effort to deny benefits to students playing sports for a school. The school poohbahs want to keep the old status quo.
Evan Weiner’s books are available at iTunes – https://books.apple.com/us/author/evan-weiner/id595575191
Evan can be reached at evan_weiner@hotmail.com
