IrishBoognish
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It's the rub of semi-pro vs student athlete. College ball was supposed to be a means to get a degree for free in exchange for your work as an athlete. The goal for 99% of them was to get that degree and then move on with your life. Now the incentives are reversed where it's a genuine financial opportunity for many of them and everyone wants to stick around as long as they can. Most who stick around for longer are not pursuing an advanced degree, they are just treading water and making money. I don't begrudge any individual for wanting to make money, but there is a societal question of whether the system should be incentivizing people to tread water in college. But even if you think "the market sets a worker's value so they are simply staying where they have the most value" there's also the simple fact that for every super senior at Notre Dame, there's one less freshman coming in. So this isn't "Hooray, more people are making more money." It's a zero sum game.
Agreed for the most part.
If we could count on every university to prioritize education and make the diploma valuable to student athletes, it would be much less of an issue.
It also lays bare that the idea of a "free market" is a myth. Systems have always picked winners and losers. NIL needs guardrails and regulation or we'll keep seeing the ludicrous shit we're seeing