sounds exactly the same to me.

Having a top 5 star recruit endorse that business might lead to more attention on the business which would lead to more consumers.

If you happen to think that there are bag men floating all about the deep dark south ready to drop a million dollars on every 5 star recruit, than I guess you and I just disagree.

The market will take care of itself.

In a normal business transaction for someone's likeness and image, the amount they are paid is rationally related to the value that the person using their likeness and image expects to get from its use. I.e., they're paid what their image and likeness is worth. When Nike pays Tiger, they're not paying him for anything other than the benefit they expect their association with him to bring Nike.

In a college athletics situation, without enforcement mechanisms, one can imagine an image and likeness payment being used to hid bribery. I don't think anyone thinks a booster should be able to pay a guy $1M to go to their school (I'm using big round numbers for simplicity, no I don't think there are tons of guys out there willing to pay high school kids $1M).

But one could easily imagine someone making a payment to a kid for the use of their image and likeness that is far greater than what the use of their image and likeness is actually worth to essentially cover up a bribe. You say "having a top 5 star recruit endorse that business might lead to more attention on the business which would lead to more consumers." Absolutely, and the payment to the 5 star recruit should be rationally related to expected increase in business. If you expect his endorsement to get you $100k more business, pay him $100k, not $1M. But if he gets paid $1M for an anticipated $100k bump in business, we're not really talking about paying him for his image and likeness.

I just don't see how you can say "let kids get paid for their image and likeness and we don't need any rules, the market will sort it out," unless you're just fine accepting that there will be some non-zero number of instances in which bag men and boosters are paying kids "for the use of their imagine and likeness" not for bona fide business purposes (i.e. the value they expect to get from the kid's endorsement), but to bribe the kid to go to their school.

in order to maintain your idea of "fairness." I would imagine that you would feel differently if it were someone willing to pay you for your image and likeness.

Why should I care what your employer pays you? Should I start to discuss how unfair it is that you make more than someone else? Is your employer bribing you to stay with him/her/it? I suppose if what you provide is extremely valuable and a rare skill set, perhaps that is the case.

Why should you care what someone is willing to pay someone for their image and likeness? Who cares if it is a million dollars? Do you think that there is just an unlimited amount of money that would tip the scales? Don't you think that someone would have to be very talented in order to justify that kind of investment? Who are you to dictate how much someone else can make off of their talent?

You basically just want to control what money other people can make.

If we're opening up college football to a world where alumni and boosters can just flat out pay top recruits in order to get them to come to their school, we should just blow the whole thing up. So yeah, in that regard, I do want to limit what college athletes can get paid. Do you disagree?

I'd be fine with some sort of increased stipend system. I'm fine with bona fide image and likeness payments (e.g. some sort of organized licensing model like the professional players associations have). I'm fine with letting top recruits who want to get paid go straight to the NFL (I like the baseball model better than the basketball model).

But you've utterly failed to respond to my example where something couched as an "image and likeness" payment clearly is not, because the amount of the payment far exceeds the economic benefit that one could reasonable expect to obtain through the use of the image and likeness. That's like me hiring a company owned by a local politician to do some work on my house and paying them 10x what the work is worth, not because I want my house fixed really well, but because I want the politician to do me a favor. We could just say "hey free market, he's willing to pay it, that must be what it's worth." But no rational person would look at it that way. We know the payment is for something other than fixing the house. A payment to an athlete for the use of their image and likeness in an amount that far exceeds the potential benefit from the use of the image and likeness isn't a payment for the image and likeness, it's clearly a payment for something else.

if someone is willing to pay a kid a million dollars for his autograph, then who the hell are you to tell him he can't get that money? Do we do the same thing for child actors? Child music prodigies? Child math geniuses? What makes athletes so unique that we have to monitor their income?

Are you willing to have your own compensation held to the light in such a way? I think your employer is paying you more than market rate and you should be paid less. Feel free to prove me wrong.

Let me help you out here--by giving everyone the right to profit off of their image and likeness, only a select few actually will, because the demand for everyone will be minimal. By giving a stipend to everyone (as you foolishly suggest) you would actually spend a lot more and still have the same corruption problems that now exist.

We don't have child millionaire actors walking around all over the place for a reason, in other words. You have to have unique skill and talent to be able to demand that kind of pay at any age.

The answer is less bureaucracy manofdillon, not more.

Do Taylor Swift and Katy Perry have their free market value subject to a salary cap due to competiveness reasons? I don’t disagree with all of your points but let’s recognize that sports is its own animal without comparison to other industries.

"for competitiveness reasons."

Who does that salary cap protect? Certainly not the fans; ticket prices have been going up for years.

I bet you movie studios sure wish they had salary caps in place for actors. Would you argue that there isn't the same amount of competition in show business as in professional sports?

There's a reason the MLBPA has never agreed to a cap, and there's a reason why they never should have changed from having an attorney leading their union to having a former player lead their union.