Chase Starr

Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

Forty years of season tickets, third generation in our seats. Here's what the employment crowd misses: minor-league baseball pays its players and draws 4,000 fans on a good night. We draw 100,000. The product is the school. People pay because those are OUR kids, wearing OUR colors, going to OUR classes. Turn them into university employees and you've built Triple-A football with homework, and Triple-A football doesn't sell out stadiums or move TV needles. The amateur tie, real or romanticized, is the entire business model. Kill it and you don't get fairer football. You get emptier stadiums.

Teacher here too. My students have sportsbook apps sitting next to their banking apps. They did not find those on their own; the ads found them during Monday Night Football.

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The smoking analogy is the strongest argument here. Nobody thinks a single quitline call ends smoking; it is the accumulation of boring infrastructure. That is exactly what is missing for digital habits.

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