NCAA is still trying to get Federal help..

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Sign up now at ChumbaCasino.com. So last week we talked about it. The Congressional Subcommittee on Keeping Kids Poor decided that they were going to once again have an NIL hearing on Capitol Hill. It's the eleventh one that won't make a difference.

And Matt Brown from Extra Points, it's his newsletter, at Matt Brown EP on Twitter joining us on the Adam Gold Show. I always think these things are an exercise in futility, but often they give us something to kind of latch onto. And I thought you wrote about the most important thing, and that was the scare tactics the NCAA is using to avoid student athlete employee status by basically saying that if we do this, then we're just going to get rid of a whole bunch of non-revenue or Olympic sports. It's probably true, but it doesn't have to be true, right?

Yeah, that's exactly what I wrote. I mean, these kind of subcommittee hearings are not useful or interesting about predicting policy. I mean, you're right, this is another bill that's not going to pass that probably won't even get out of committee. But for these kind of hearings, you do get experts to testify, and sometimes they do say things interesting. Charlie Baker was part of this hearing, and any time the NCAA president talks, it has the potential to be newsworthy.

And his concern here, I wrote, is actually something I think everybody needs to grapple with, right? What Baker said in Washington is, if all athletes are deemed employees, then we will lose half to two-thirds of Olympic sports programs. And I actually think that's true. The math doesn't work, particularly in Division I, where so many smaller schools in D1, including probably a couple in North Carolina, are using college athletics as an enrollment management tool. They're not trying to sell tickets.

They're not even really trying to win championships. They're trying to get students, particularly men, to pay partial tuition and show up to campus. And if those guys are employees, even if it's only making $15 an hour, the calculus changes. Presbyterians not sponsoring so many sports, right? That's true.

But it doesn't have to be that way. The three major legal challenges right now are not necessarily stating that employment should extend to all athletes. Sometimes it's just Power Five football and basketball players. It might just be Division I football players.

That's open for interpretation. And also, even if they do, there's lots of other ways to potentially fund Olympic sports or to keep costs down. And those aren't the things that the NCAA or other lawmakers are really talking about. If we lose half of Olympic sports in the next three years, which I will tell everybody, that's a real possibility. That's not complete fear mongering.

If that happens, it's due to a lack of imagination. A bunch of other people screwed up to get us to that point. Matt Brown is joining us here on the Adam Gold Show at Matt Brown EP on Twitter. You should get the newsletter extra points if you are interested in stuff like this as it pertains to college sports. It was funny. We had an attorney on Friday to talk about this and the Florida State issue. And he basically quoted your piece. I'm like, yeah, no, we talked to that guy.

And I actually also quoted from that piece like the previous day. What about the waste? I mean, there's monies to be had to fund a lot of things if we simply got rid of the waste. I always say this about college football coaches specifically, that every single coach in football is either underpaid or overpaid. You could pay Nick Saban 30 million dollars a year and it still might not be what he was worth to Alabama. But almost every coach making eight million dollars a year, and there are tons of those, is wildly overpaid. Not to mention all the coordinators. What if we just got rid of the waste in college football?

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That's ChumbaCasino.com. So that would work for many schools, and it's part of what frustrates me. You know, I wrote this a little while ago and I heard Dave Doran after the bowl game, you know, give this impassioned plea for people to start giving to state NIL funds, right? If you are a, you know, a typical P5 football program right now, and you want to be, maybe not win a national championship, but you want to be competitive for a playoff bid or a conference title. Your NIL payroll for athletes is going to be somewhere between like six and nine, five and $9 million a year. A couple of schools at the very high end or above that, but really not that many. And you can come up with $8 million simply by cutting salaries from the, from a head coach, from assistant coaches, from coordinators, from administrators, from analysts.

And a little bit from the AD, and that's going to get you 80% of the way there. There's no reason for a good, but not elite college football offensive coordinator to make substantially more money than an NFL counter. You only do that, but, so that works for the States and the UNCs and for Duke and for, you know, for 40 other schools.

But then what about Campbell, right? Or then what about even ECU? We could cut football coach, you know, salaries by 50% across ECU, and that alone is not going to come up with the money to pay for salaries and payroll taxes and social security and these other things across their whole athletes. And when you get even lower than that, the math just doesn't work there. I mean, you, you, I'm sure you know this, maybe your listeners don't, but like, if we get a little bit farther down the line to like the low majors, you and I are making more money than some of those coaches are.

And, and, and I don't know about you, but like media is not the place you go to get rich. No. Yeah. At some point it's like, there's, we can't cut any more money from the person making $54,000 a year, who's already making, working 70 hours a week. Right.

That's what, that's where things get complicated. Matt Brown is here with us to talk about the NCAA scaring, really, really scaring fans. Into thinking that the, you know, all of these sports are going to go away.

And I agree they likely will because that's what they're going to do because it's the easiest thing for them. But I have so many questions and I know we don't have a ton of time. But a good friend of mine who did not grow up here, who grew up in the United Kingdom, lived in my cul-de-sac when I lived in a cul-de-sac, said to me, why does, why does, why do your sports, like why do colleges have major sports? We don't have that. Like it's foreign to people who are not from the United States. That we have colleges that are essentially the feeder systems for professional sports. When they grow up where it's all the club teams and academies, whether it's football or basketball or whatever the sports are, they're not used to those being attached to major universities. Isn't there a better way to do this?

Yeah. I mean, the reason it happened that way in America is kind of an accident of history. And you're right, nobody else in the world does this. Even the handful of countries that have college football or have college sports like Canada and Japan and some places in Mexico, none of them are being used for elite sport development. And I think that the biggest difference and the thing that we need to grapple with in the United States isn't how do we train people to play in the NFL or the NBA without college sports?

Because the NFL and the NBA can figure those things out and there's all between it whether European leagues or the G league or starting up other clubs, that's not a major issue. The bigger concern is how do we train Olympic caliber swimmers? Because right now in the U.S. our ability to build an Olympic feeder system that's used not just by the United States but by countries all over the world is delegated to our universities.

The treatment and the facilities and the coaching and experience that you will get at the University of North Carolina is going to be better than what a lot of people in developed countries will get from their elite sport development in Germany or in Belgium or somewhere else. What most industrialized countries do, like the U.K., like Brazil where most of my family is from, like lots of other places in Western Europe and South America, is that literally the federal government pays for that. Yeah, and sometimes it's the military, sometimes it's part of like they have a minister of sports and you have national academies for these things or our equivalent of U.S.A. basketball is like a literal part of the U.S. government and it sets those things out. We don't have to do that because we got Stanford and UNC to do it and they're able to do it because of football money. If we take that money away, then I think as a country we have to decide, do we care enough about winning gold medals to fund for something different? And if we don't, okay, that's a decision this country can make and we'll finish ninth and that's fine. But if we care about this, somebody's got to pay for it.

And the way that almost everybody else does it is with the government. I don't think we can get Microsoft and General Mills and Kickstarter to pay for us beating Russia and China in the Olympics if we move towards this system. My final thing, and I was curious about this, how is it without great media contracts and wild amounts of money coming into the athletic department coffers, can Harvard afford 30 sports, Penn 25 sports, Princeton 28 sports? How can the Ivy League have so many sponsored sports, but Charlie Baker is saying we're going to lose, I don't know, 50 to 75 percent?

Yeah, I think it's this kind of funny thing, right? I've made this joke before that most other universities have NIL collectives to get their alumni together to support something. Harvard doesn't need an NIL collective. Harvard's NIL collective is the World Bank. It's the global elite and their endowments and their boosters and their alumni are so rich that they're not subject to the same financial constraints everybody else is. Harvard could decide tomorrow that we're never going to charge tuition for anything and we are just going to fund a university with a 10,000 student enrollment just based on our endowment, which is the size of a medium-sized European country's GDP, and you could do it. They don't because they want it to be selective and elite, but they have the money, right? They don't need to balance the athletic budget the same way that NC State does or that virtually any other school does. Even some of those sports, it's the same thing.

It's a way to help with tuition money. If somebody's uncle who runs a jet company is really passionate about squash, then congratulations, you've got the squash team. It's not the same world that the rest of us peons live in.

No, no it isn't. There's like two rowing teams. There's two men's rowing teams from all the Ivy Leaguers. I mean, my high school, because we were right near a river in New Jersey, we had a crew team, right?

But you just don't see a lot of crew anywhere. No, just as a way to get around Title IX, right? If you look at a roster and you're like, why does this crew team have 92 women on it?

That's why. Somebody's trying to avoid a lawsuit. It's not the same thing as what Harvard's doing. They work hard. They work hard. They do?

You got to carry the boats down to the to the river sometimes. Matt Brown. It's at four in the morning.

Yeah, totally understand. It's freezing and it's freezing. Matt Brown, extra points. Go check out the newsletter. I wish you will.

At Matt Brown EP on Twitter. Thanks, man. I appreciate your time as always. You bet. Appreciate you guys.

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