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Post being replied to

I want to say you can't bribe kids to come to your school by manofdillon

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.