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What do you think?

Last week a number of us were talking about comrade Ralph's proposal to eliminate football scholarships after a full 30 seconds of discussion, a number of us felt that one of this biggest threats to college football has been the "agent" system and large signing bonuses given to NFL rookies. There is no question that a number of schools have "special relationships" with sports agents and athletes are tempted to take money and benefits from agents in anticipation of signing them as NFL agents. We thought that if the first round players were limited to say a fixed bonus of $4,000,000, as suggested by the NFL owners, why would an agent even be necessary until the first contract period, say two years after signing? Would that help cleanup these special relationships with college programs and the abuse by agents?

4,000,000 is still a lot of money and the pay for play issues mostly affect the most high profile players that often need/want the money because they are poor or think they deserve it (and they're kids, let's face it)...i dont think it will change anything w/ regard to agent abuse.

to a kid who can barely feed himself and his family is in dire straits or may have health problems, do you think that he can really conceptualize the difference between 500k and 2 million?

if agents don't develop a relationship as early as possible then they won't have a shot at getting a piece of that pie when that player gets the big contract.

Why even hire agent if the contracts are uniform? Wait two years (in my example) and hire one when the real negotiations begin? At a minimum a h.s. senior would have six years before an agent could recover his advances, etc.

uuugh

because people don't want to deal w/ the legal particulars, especially when they don't have a good grasp of what is going on.

and how many college football players do you know who know how to read a contract and really understand it?