Sports Agents for High School Athletes?
If college football players are paid, as some hope will happen eventually, surely they will need sports agents, right?
This article notes that famed athlete-broker Sonny Vaccaro is traveling the nation trying to convince the future generation of American leaders that college athletes should be paid.
Unfortunately, as with most schemes dreamed up by Vaccaro, the concept may be sound in theory, but sorely lacking in details and in practicality.
Here are two of the biggest problems with the scheme. First, you would not know how to choose which players get paid and it would be impossible to create an equitable system. Second, when some players are paid, the ones who don’t get paid will inevitably fall by the wayside, leading to dramatically scaled back athletic departments and lost sports:
How do you choose how players are paid? Are they all paid the same?” McCann said. “Do you have a tiered system based sort of like a market? Then you can be creating stars who get paid a lot of money. I could see why some people find that inconsistent with college model of amateurism.“(If revenue-producing athletes were paid) colleges would start cutting sports considerably. You would start seeing reduction in the size of athletic departments…. Particularly male team sports that are expensive and don’t generate a lot of revenue.”
The residual economy which would inevitably emerge if high schoolers could be sold to the highest bidders as free agents might sound like a good business practice for sports agents looking to expand their clientele, but in the big picture, this seems like a sure-fire disaster. Can you imagine the chaos which would emerge if high school athletes planning on attending college needed agents? The only benefit that I see is that this may force the federal government to step in and create a uniform agent registration process so that agents need not face the same process in all 50 states.
