UNT will determine COA stipends soon

FirefightnRick · July 27, 2015

RV was never a scholarship athlete and Mac played before NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma (1984). The money in the sport was entirely different before the schools themselves could sell their TV rights.
Coach Mac played for Frank Lauterbur, now I can't find any salary info for Coach Lauterbur, but I can tell you that in 1973 Barry Switzer was being paid $24,000 by the University of Oklahoma.
This is now a BILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY, it's not the same sport. Billions are being made, the players deserve a little tiny piece of it.
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Just to add:
Barry Switzer's 1973 $24,000 salary is CPI inflation adjusted to $128,993.51 in today dollars. Bob Stoops current salary is is forty one times higher than that CPI adjustment. Even Coach Mac at little ol North Texas gets paid five times as much.

The money is completely different now. Yes, in the sixties getting a paid education was probably a fair trade. Now, with everyone else but the players making a ton of money, it's not.

RV and Mac and every other college employee did their time, paid for their education in some way, and used their experiences to cut their way to their current profession, just as so many before them did. And every player today has the exact same opportunity to do the same. We have 4 or 5 players under cuRrent NFL contracts, 3 or 4 grad assistants currently on this roster who seem to be getting ready to make the sport into a profession, and numerous others coaching now from Chris Hurd to Derek Thompson. All gained a profession without the need of a stipend.

Rick

Edited July 27, 2015 by FirefightnRick

Mean Green 93-98 · July 27, 2015

Walk-ons will not be receiving stipends, correct? What is the argument in favor of giving stipends to athletes who are already receiving tens of thousands of dollars in benefits, but not to walk-ons, who receive nothing other than the honor of donning the green and white?

untjim1995 · July 27, 2015

so all walk ons have rich parents? Life is hard. Suck it up and do what you have to do in order to do what you want to do.

And let's be crystal clear. I don't oppose it because I think athletes are lazy. I oppose it because it will be used eventually as a way to pay a salary to college players and drive G5s to a lower division.

Jeez, next thing you know people will want to give college athletes welfare payments.

That's already happened, but the P5s still pay us to play them. When that money faucet stops, the G5s will face teh music. Its why Benson of the Sun Belt has actually been speaking the truth about the fact that their schools are "addicted" to the easy pay games at P5 powerhouses. He knows, since he used to run the WAC with Boise State, and Fresno State, that with the right scheduling, you can get a BCS Bowl bid and make more money. But it takes risk and investments. Marshall did that last year and fell short of a BCS Bowl, but probably helped them with their fanbase to donate more to the program.The Helwig approach of 3 bodybag games away from home was impossible to overcome, but RV's 1 or 2 bodybag games a year hasn't been much better. As crazy as Benson is, his point on these P5 bloodbaths is dead-on. But those opportunities are going to go away soon enough and there isn't a thing that non-P5s will be able to do about it. Those schools control the networks, the NCAA, the state and federal legislatures, and the bowls.

When the schism occurs, which I think will be within 10 years, those of us sitting outside of the gate are going to have to decide something very important. Will football continue to be worth playing? Its a question that will be incredibly difficult to answer for sure. Will folks show up to watch us play SMU, UTSA, UTEP, Tulsa, UH, etc...or will they just stay away, like they did when we were 1-aa, as if the current G5 teams are basically the same as Nicholls State and McNeese State. Its not hard to imagine schools like SMU and Tulane flat out dropping the program versus keeping it going, but I don't know about the other public schools in the region.

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, for sure.

GrandGreen · July 27, 2015

so all walk ons have rich parents? Life is hard. Suck it up and do what you have to do in order to do what you want to do.

And let's be crystal clear. I don't oppose it because I think athletes are lazy. I oppose it because it will be used eventually as a way to pay a salary to college players and drive G5s to a lower division.

Jeez, next thing you know people will want to give college athletes welfare payments.

Many athletes already get welfare or Pell grants. Not sure what your comments have to do with my statement. College scholarship athletes already get a salary (scholarship) and now it is going to be more.

Cerebus · July 27, 2015

RV and Mac and every other college employee did their time,

I guess if everything should stay the same and we should never change, then Mac's contract should be rewritten to pay him $24,000/yr... Hell, that's really generous, that OU money right there.

Army of Dad · July 28, 2015

I guess if everything should stay the same and we should never change, then Mac's contract should be rewritten to pay him $24,000/yr... Hell, that's really generous, that OU money right there.

The value (in dollars) of the education has also risen dramatically.

Ben Gooding · July 28, 2015

Whatever we're going to do we need to announce it publicly. I'm starting to think holding out on the announcement may be hurting our recruiting. At minumum, it will all but help.

UNT90 · July 28, 2015

I guess if everything should stay the same and we should never change, then Mac's contract should be rewritten to pay him $24,000/yr... Hell, that's really generous, that OU money right there.

I'd have no problem if the NCAA took a percentage of the profits and divided them equally among all NCAA college football players, not just those in the P5.

Do you honestly think THAT will happen? Really?

Ben Gooding · July 28, 2015

It's not the money. Pay them, pay them all. But how and why Tech, Alabama, Tennessee etc. gets to pay their athletes 5600 while schools similar to us, Houston, SMU, Wake, WVU, etc. only pays half that is clearly a competitive disadvantage. And don't come at me with the guidelines that are in place that "dictates" how much they get paid because of the areas economy and true cost of living. You and I know that's BS. Ever been to Tuscaloosa? Auburn? Knoxville? Lubbock? These places aren't Dubai by any stretch of the imagination.

Cerebus · July 28, 2015

I'd have no problem if the NCAA took a percentage of the profits and divided them equally among all NCAA college football players, not just those in the P5.

I would be happy with that system. But this post is undermining your own position.

You don't have a problem with players getting paid. You have a problem with P5 players getting paid more than G5 players. You think it will hurt UNT's ability to recruit.

So you would rather NT players get nothing, than run the risk of a player at UT getting more. Well guess what, the P5 schools can already out spend us. Their recruiting budgets are bigger, their locker rooms and players lounges are nicer, they can afford better coachs and trainers and equipment... it's really not changing anything.

NT1978 · July 28, 2015

Interesting to see the discrepancy between Tech and aTm

It is for Cost of Attendance. Does aTm require their players to actually attend?

ChristopherRyanWilkes · July 28, 2015

The value (in dollars) of the education has also risen dramatically.

Glad you clarified with the (in dollars). Definitely risen in dollars, but the actual value of a college degree then and now certainly has not.

UNT90 · July 28, 2015

I would be happy with that system. But this post is undermining your own position.
You don't have a problem with players getting paid. You have a problem with P5 players getting paid more than G5 players. You think it will hurt UNT's ability to recruit.
So you would rather NT players get nothing, than run the risk of a player at UT getting more. Well guess what, the P5 schools can already out spend us. Their recruiting budgets are bigger, their locker rooms and players lounges are nicer, they can afford better coachs and trainers and equipment... it's really not changing anything.

that's not my position at all. My position is that this has nothing to do with the athlete and everything to do with the P5 manipulating an issue to widen the competition gap with G5s and force them to another classification.

P5s are already able to pay more than G5s. That gap will only widen.

That is why the G5 should file an anti-trust suit against the P5 and the NCAA.

You perceive the issue to be about compensating players, which is exactly what the P5 wants you to perceive.

You are simply lost in the smoke.

Edited July 28, 2015 by UNT90

Cerebus · July 28, 2015

You are simply lost in the smoke.

Listen. I know this is hard to hear. We lost. It's over. If we had 100% support from the administration and community when we first came back up in the 90s it might have been different.

Maybe.

Look we can all look at schools like TCU and wish we had done what they did, the fact of the matter is that it still might not have been enough. For all the glory Boise St has had they are still going to end up outside the new P5 (or P4, or whatever they are going the shrink to), it's highly likely that even schools like Iowa St are going to end up on the outside.

The NCAA legislation they pushed through last session sealed it. They can do whatever they want to football and it won't effect the NCAA tourney. The last thing holding them back (risk of losing the tourney money) is gone. P5 is gone. No one has enough guts to try to anti trust them. Those school have all the lawyers in the legislatures anyway. And it hard to argue against them when the lesser conferences have allowed the playing field to be so unbalanced for decades already.

What we can do now is become the best G5 team we can. The P5s want to pay their players, so guess what? It will be legal to pay players. It already is. SMU just did it too early.

So we can pay the stipend and become a top competitive G5 program, or we can sink back to the SLC. I know which I want.

UNT90 · July 28, 2015

Listen. I know this is hard to hear. We lost. It's over. If we had 100% support from the administration and community when we first came back up in the 90s it might have been different.
Maybe.
Look we can all look at schools like TCU and wish we had done what they did, the fact of the matter is that it still might not have been enough. For all the glory Boise St has had they are still going to end up outside the new P5 (or P4, or whatever they are going the shrink to), it's highly likely that even schools like Iowa St are going to end up on the outside.
The NCAA legislation they pushed through last session sealed it. They can do whatever they want to football and it won't effect the NCAA tourney. The last thing holding them back (risk of losing the tourney money) is gone. P5 is gone. No one has enough guts to try to anti trust them. Those school have all the lawyers in the legislatures anyway. And it hard to argue against them when the lesser conferences have allowed the playing field to be so unbalanced for decades already.
What we can do now is become the best G5 team we can. The P5s want to pay their players, so guess what? It will be legal to pay players. It already is. SMU just did it too early.
So we can pay the stipend and become a top competitive G5 program, or we can sink back to the SLC. I know which I want.

Ah, that good ole UNT spirit, I see.

You always lose when you don't try to compete.

Sue the NCAA and the P5 for creating a monopoly. That's fighting. Whoring out your players to compete against 20 plus pounds players per position is rolling over and taking it up the rear.

Which is what we do here.

Cerebus · July 28, 2015

Ah, that good ole UNT spirit, I see.

I am having a hard enough time getting a board of UNT diehards to even consider that a AD who has been here 14 years no longer gets to use "alumni and community apathy" as an excuse for why he can't hit performance goals 10 years past their deadline. But you want this fan base and administration to rise up and demand all other G5 sue the NCAA?

You have to deal with reality.

Have you never been a project manager before? Set a goal, plan out the steps, take the first step. Suing the NCAA is somewhere around step 458, right after we regularly go undefeated but can't get voted into the playoff system.

forevereagle · July 28, 2015

The ~~value~~ cost (in dollars) of the education has also risen dramatically.

Fixed.

Army of Dad · July 28, 2015

Fixed.

If we are comparing coaching salaries from different eras and comparing tuition afforded to scharlaship athletes from different eras then we are talking about value.

forevereagle · July 28, 2015

If we are comparing coaching salaries from different eras and comparing tuition afforded to scharlaship athletes from different eras then we are talking about value.

So we went from an era where a lower percent of the population went to college and got a degree, thus making a degree very valuable due to scarcity, to an era where a much higher percent of the population went to college, driving down scarcity and thus lowering value. I stand by what I said.

Ben Gooding · July 28, 2015

I am having a hard enough time getting a board of UNT diehards to even consider that a AD who has been here 14 years no longer gets to use "alumni and community apathy" as an excuse for why he can't hit performance goals 10 years past their deadline. But you want this fan base and administration to rise up and demand all other G5 sue the NCAA?
You have to deal with reality.
Have you never been a project manager before? Set a goal, plan out the steps, take the first step. Suing the NCAA is somewhere around step 458, right after we regularly go undefeated but can't get voted into the playoff system.

There is room for expansion in the P5. All conferences will eventually sit at 16. What we do now can ensure that we are in the group of 12-14 that get the invitation to the party. There are already 5-6 slated into those voids in Cincy, UCF, UCONN, Memphis, Boise, etc. So there are really only 5-6 voids to fill. The next 5 years of institution improvements paired with on the field/court performance will be imperative. There is room for North Texas, our administration just has to capitalize.

Cerebus · July 28, 2015

There is room for expansion in the P5.

The B12 does not have 12 teams because UT doesn't want to split the pie. Why does any of the really powerful schools want to split the pie any further? Every single team TV is willing to spend big bucks on is already in the P5, there are just some teams TV doesn't care about at all, those will get culled.

Yes, if the P5 only play P5 (or are allowed one G5 game a year) that will mean they lose more. TV will just sell that as being because of the higher competition. They already do that: "Sure that SEC team has two losses, but they deserve it over someone else because they play IN THE SEC."

Change that to P5 and it the same tune, people buy it all day long.

untjim1995 · July 28, 2015

I am having a hard enough time getting a board of UNT diehards to even consider that a AD who has been here 14 years no longer gets to use "alumni and community apathy" as an excuse for why he can't hit performance goals 10 years past their deadline. But you want this fan base and administration to rise up and demand all other G5 sue the NCAA?
You have to deal with reality.
Have you never been a project manager before? Set a goal, plan out the steps, take the first step. Suing the NCAA is somewhere around step 458, right after we regularly go undefeated but can't get voted into the playoff system.

This.

Thinking anti-trust suit here is about the same as USFL vs NFL...it won't end well for the G5s. Look, we blew it decades ago. We decided to play football at a level that killed the chance of ever getting the program up to the P5 level of today. We are behind ever school in the MWC and AAC, as well as a school or two in the MAC, for ever getting a P5 spot. In our own market, it took pissant SMU moving to the AAC just to get us into CUSA or else we are stuck still in the SBC. You can bitch about the truth, but the leadership here didn't care about big time athletics, so Cerebus' point about becoming the best G5 team we can be is all you can hope for now. And if you believe that we are going to eventually be playing in a conference above us right now, its just not happening. Right now, we are an underachiever in G5. Let's aim to just be an achiever at this level first, then look at becoming an overachiever at this level, like Boise State, Fresno State, Nevada, Northern Illinois, UH, UCF, and others have been in recent years.

Those of us on the outside are officially out after the last legislation passed. This COA BS will be the end of college football amateurism. There's no way we can pay what the P5s pay or even the high dollar G5 institutions. We think Dan McCarney and Tony Benford have colossal contracts...they aren't anything compared to the coaches in any P5 school and a lot of G5 schools.

UNT90, we see eye-to-eye on a lot of this stuff, but the courts and the legislatures are full of P5 graduates and their pockets are lined by P5 money and their media. Our only chance now of ever being nationally known for anything athletically is in basketball, because of the current setup of the NCAA Tournament. Assuming that doesn't change radically from its current setup, you can become a Gonzaga-type program from outside the P6 in basketball (includes the Big East). But we have severely crushed that hope with the hire of and retainment of Tony Benford, who's colossal $325k salary is apparently too much to buyout beyond a year (shocking...).

The P5 is probably, at best, stay at its current number of 66 if you include BYU, but there are more schools that are liable to get drop-kicked out (ahem, Baylor, TCU, and ISU) than get a chance to move up (UConn and maybe one of Cincy, UCF, and Memphis). We aren't going to be in that group, for one big reason--we chose not to fund a winning program. Everything else we have endured and dealt with all come from that decision.

Arkstfan · July 28, 2015

No. Paying players money is dumb. Most of your oponions are likewise.
These dudes (specifically at football factories, but not exclusively though) can't seem to stay out of serious trouble as is. Now we're going to start giving them money to use for their shanannigans? It's bullshit. Universities do not need one player. Every single one of them are replaceable at the drop of a hat. They (the players & universities) need to realize that. If a player doesn't like it, bye Felicia.

Players received a cash stipend until 1973. It was taken away because schools weren't sure they could afford Title IX and it wasn't until the mid to late 80's that revenue really caught up with the new expenses that came from Title IX. Rather than give the stipend back, schools raised salaries.

If players are interchangeable widgets, I presume you don't care if UNT puts its future at QB in the hands of a one star recruit rather than trying to sign a three star.

The B12 does not have 12 teams because UT doesn't want to split the pie. Why does any of the really powerful schools want to split the pie any further? Every single team TV is willing to spend big bucks on is already in the P5, there are just some teams TV doesn't care about at all, those will get culled.
Yes, if the P5 only play P5 (or are allowed one G5 game a year) that will mean they lose more. TV will just sell that as being because of the higher competition. They already do that: "Sure that SEC team has two losses, but they deserve it over someone else because they play IN THE SEC."
Change that to P5 and it the same tune, people buy it all day long.

Pac-12, SEC, Big 10, and ACC all agreed to split the pie, but they brought in schools who made the pie so much larger that splitting 14 ways gave them more pie than splitting the old one 12 ways.

In no way shape nor form did TCU and WVU make the Big XII pie bigger per slice than TAMU, Mizzou, Nebraska, Colorado made it. Fox and ESPN basically tossed money at the Big XII just to get things to settle down and not drive their costs up even more.

BYU is the only school out there that could come close to increasing the value of the Big XII per member. I like your neighbors in Houston, I hate my neighbors in Memphis, I liked the Cincinnati fans I met at the Final Four, but no combination of those schools makes the Big XII worth more per member.

No one is in the business of reducing their revenue unless they can somehow reduce expenses even more and right now the Big XII is stuck because they cannot add anyone to make them more money over all.

Arkstfan · July 28, 2015

A few thoughts from Vito:
First off, it’s not going to be the end of the world for UNT — and it could help the program. UNT is in the position to offer full-cost-of-attendance scholarships to all its athletes. There is a good chance that the scholarships UNT offers will come in with a higher value than some of its competitors in Conference USA and beyond.
read more: http://meangreenblog.dentonrc.com/2015/07/coa-stipends-my-take.html/

I'm with Vito.

When I rode my dinosaur to classes, college football players reported in mid-August, usually didn't have a game until the week after Labor Day. Finished the season before Thanksgiving. They meandered back in for a few weeks of spring practice. They went home after spring semester finals. Most of them worked over the summer and a regular part of the media guide or game programs would be "what the players did this summer". Some worked in factories, some in farms, there was always someone who got a lifeguard gig, a handful didn't do much other than go on a family vacation with their parents.

Today players leave after spring finals but they are back on campus three to four weeks later. They pick up some hours in the summer but they are spending time every day either in the indoor practice facility working on routes and such or they are in the weight room or they are running. They usually get another week off between second summer term reporting for fall camp the first week in August. They are in practices past Thanksgiving. Make a bowl game if it is pre-Christmas they get released after the game. If it is post-Christmas they maybe get some time off for Christmas if it is NYD or later. If it is between Christmas and New Year's Day they maybe get of Christmas Eve and Day if they aren't at or traveling to the bowl site. They generally get two to three weeks off and report back to the S&C coach for "voluntary workouts". Then they have spring drills, get a week or two before resuming training.

A college football player 30 years ago worked football for about six of the nine months of school and had three months off. Today, they are rarely home more than six weeks of the year.

DeepGreen · July 28, 2015

Can't disagree with Arkstfan. You hear about the B12 actually expanding and going to 12 teams, but who are they gonna get? BYU would be the closest. Those that think Cinci and Memphis are going to be anointed into the B12, well, I still view those teams as Missouri Conference mats. Good basketball but nothing more.