You’re going to think I’m making this up, but I’m not. There is a state legislator in California who has introduced a bill that would require all Division I schools would be forced to pay all of their scholarship athletes their “fair market value.”

California Assemblyman Chris Holden (D) who represents Pasadena, has introduced legislation that he is calling the College Athlete Protection Act. This act would in effect eliminate all non-revenue raising college athletics and severely limit the ability of the state’s universities to compete in football on the national level.

How is each athlete’s fair market value supposed to be determined?

According to Holden, each student athlete is worth an equal share of half their team’s annual revenue, minus the cost of their scholarships.

For example, let’s say a football program earned $100 million and the team had 50 scholarship players. That would mean every player would get $1 million. That’s their “fair market value,” according to Holden’s formula.

According to an article in Sports Illustrated, in 2019, if Holden’s legislation had been law, UCLA men’s basketball players would have gotten $389,000 each, football players $185,000 each, women’s gymnastics $5,500, women’s volleyball $871. And no one else would have gotten anything — not even women’s basketball, which did not earn revenues high enough to trigger payments under the legislation.

Wait. What? That doesn’t seem fair, and good luck getting this approved by the Title IX regulators.

Did Holden not hear about the recent uproar by the U.S. women’s national soccer team regarding being paid less than the men’s national team? The U.S. Soccer Federation’s reasoning was the men’s team generates more income, thus they should be paid more. That didn’t fly, and the women were given a raise.

In college athletics, it is well known that there are some sports that earn the bulk of the money spent on the overall athletic budget, and there are some sports that just reap the benefit of the revenue generating sports. Football and basketball revenues go to pay coaches’ salaries and subsidize the non-revenue earning sports.

So for every dollar Holden’s legislation transfers from the athletic department to revenue-raising athletes, that is a dollar taken from either a coach (like Lincoln Riley at USC) or a fellow athlete — perhaps a women’s softball player or a wrestler, the Sports Illustrated article pointed out.

So, Holden’s answer to this is to limit coaches salaries at $500,000 a year, and his legislation would suspend the athletic director for three years if sports are eliminated at the university to help pay for the new player revenue sharing system.

Riley is making almost $10 million per year at USC, and UCLA’s head basketball coach, Mick Cronin, is making $4 million per year. If Holden’s legislation became law, athletic directors would face a tough choice: either get suspended, or cut all coaches’ salaries to just $500,000 a year.

Yeah right.

To you and me, $500,000 is a lot of money, but for major college football coaches who build programs worthy of competing for nation titles, it’s pocket change. If Holden’s legislation becomes law, and survives Title IX scrutiny, coaches will be packing their bags and leaving California.

If that happens, Lincoln Riley just might be interested in returning to Oklahoma.

TULSA BEACON WEEKEND

My guests this week on the “Tulsa Beacon Weekend” radio show will be Mike Sowell, author of the book The Pitch That Killed which has now been made into a documentary, and local author David Day who has written a book about the COVID pandemic from the viewpoint of a hardware store. You’ll just have to tune in to figure that one out. The show airs on Saturday at 12:00 p.m. CST on 970am KCFO.