I think $50k loans against future earnings would be a bad idea. Giving the players access to large amounts of money while not actually paying them (stipends in the mid to low 4 figures are okay) would cause more problems than it solves. I just see so many ways this can be taken advantage of.
Maybe it will be 50k “loans” with no interest and no worries to pay them back ever. Hasn’t this already been going on for years in the seedy, amateur underbelly? How many agents or boosters have told a kid: it’s not a gift, it’s a loan, you can just pay me back when you make it big or you don’t have to worry about paying me back at all. Seems like a very shady way to pay players.
But even putting severe regulation and strict terms around the loans, I see many more loans then NBA roster spots available. Only 30 first rounds picks getting guaranteed money (along with a handful of 2nd round picks and undrafted players ending up with full year deals) every year, and I just see so many more loans than college kids really getting paid. This will lead to one of 2 problems: 1) now the athletes who don’t make it big (which is most of them) will be buried under loans just like the regular kids are buried under student loans with no hope to pay them back. Or 2) because they were star athletes and the VP of the bank is an alum/booster, they’ll just write the loans off and not hound the kids/ruin their credit over it, or wealthy alums promise to pay off the loans for the kids once they leave school (and no longer under NCAA jurisdiction) so really it’s another shady to pay players $50k without a dime coming from the school or NCAA.
Not that I have a problem with paying players, but you know how the NCAA is, there’s the schools that are on a golden pedestal that never get punished or just a small slap on the wrist, and then there’s everybody else. UConn gets banned from the tournament for a year, while the UNC kids have been handing in these A quality papers for years.
And even though that might seem unfair to UConn, they still get off easier than probably all but 10 other schools would have.
I don’t like the idea of setting up rules that create more oversight and selective punishment by the NCAA that will ultimately just end up creating even more cheating, which I think giving players access to large loans would do. Either that or a lot of players who don’t make it will suddenly have $50k (plus interest!) holes to dig themselves out of. Big loans sounds good in theory, but I think it would be a bad idea in reality.