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[QUOTE="Bone Dog, post: 4365614, member: 12088"]
$25k is a lot to your average college kid, but peanuts to the big NIL earners.

I can see how folks can have thought that college athletics needed to be distinguished from pros. Ultimately, this is an incoherent distinction. After all, most of the cream of the crop of kids who end up in D1 schools were trained at special prep schools. These are probably excellent high schools, but there’s nothing casual about the bb prep they get there. Are these kids still amateurs even before they get to college?

I remember Chariots of Fire, in which Harold Abrahams is thought by some not to be an amateur because he employs a professional trainer. My mom was a competitive swimmer who was excluded from the US Olympic  tryouts in the 40s because she had won a turkey at a church swim meet in high school. By that standard of amateurism, very few D1 athletes would qualify.

Beyond whatever qualms we may have about professionalism, I don’t think we have any strong sense for why we think amateurism  matters. This is a distinction that has been drained of meaning for us, and maybe it never really had much meaning to begin with.
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First name of men's bb coach