I see lots of concern that the ability for recruits to get money is going to upend the competitive balance. Although with the same 3-4 teams making the playoffs every year you could argue we didn’t have great balance before anyway.
I think the most obvious way to even the playing field if we need to is to lower the number of players you can have on the roster so no program can stockpile all of the good players.
Thinking about the ways professional teams try to ensure a level-playing field, most don’t really apply today. I guess once schools can pay players you could have a salary cap, but you can’t really have a salary cap for NIL money. And without looking at the numbers, is the competitive balance of MLB that different from other sports? It certainly doesn’t seem worse than college football has been.
I guess theoretically you could have a draft at some point. The idea of it sounds crazy at first but at some point when the money is big enough and everyone is used to the idea that big-time college football players are really highly paid professional athletes then maybe it’s not such a crazy idea. I think a draft would almost be worse for Iowa because we would never be bad enough for a really high draft pick and never quite good enough to win the championship. You obviously get some weird incentives with drafts because teams that can’t win the championship are better off losing to get better picks.
I think the most obvious way to even the playing field if we need to is to lower the number of players you can have on the roster so no program can stockpile all of the good players.
Thinking about the ways professional teams try to ensure a level-playing field, most don’t really apply today. I guess once schools can pay players you could have a salary cap, but you can’t really have a salary cap for NIL money. And without looking at the numbers, is the competitive balance of MLB that different from other sports? It certainly doesn’t seem worse than college football has been.
I guess theoretically you could have a draft at some point. The idea of it sounds crazy at first but at some point when the money is big enough and everyone is used to the idea that big-time college football players are really highly paid professional athletes then maybe it’s not such a crazy idea. I think a draft would almost be worse for Iowa because we would never be bad enough for a really high draft pick and never quite good enough to win the championship. You obviously get some weird incentives with drafts because teams that can’t win the championship are better off losing to get better picks.