California Governor Gavin Newsom made history when he joined LeBron James on the set of James' HBO show "The Shop" to sign a bill that allowed college athletes to be paid and sign endorsement deals, known as the Fair Pay to Play Act (SB 206).
NCAA athletes would able to profit from their likeness, name and image under SB 206. It's something that's been a hot-button issue and has been at the center of debates for years. But won't go into action until 2023. With Newsom signing the bill, WFAN's Mike Francesa says that the NCAA is on a deadline to come up with a resolution to its current model.
"The NCAA will have to come up with a system it can control or it will die," Francesa said. "It will come up with a system, but I don't know if it will come up with one that will work. It will try to come up with one in its imminent greed because they're going to try it for survival. Because it knows by 2023, it's done. If this law is enacted, the NCAA as you know it is over. If the kids allowed to make an appearance in his uniform for money, how are you going to legislate how much money he's allowed to get? Not going to work."
Francesa doesn't believe that system will work in the long run. He questions how is it possible to regulate an entire team for a specific appearance.
"There is no way the NCAA can legislate what they just allowed," Francesa said. "Now, it has to do with the college's greed and the sport's greed because they should not have been able to use likenesses of players in games and not get paid. It's wrong. But paying college athletes will not work. It is a system that cannot work. It does not end corruption. It adds to it. Once you do that, then the players have to be unionized. There will be more bidding, not less bidding, for players. There will be no way that the institutions will want to have these guys in a position where they don't have to go to school and they are really just employees of the university.
Francesa says it's time for the student athletes to receive compensation moving forward.
"You're making billions of dollars' on their backs. You can no longer keep this money away from them ... You had players who would walk across a cold campus on a Friday night and his coach left the arena in a brand new $150,000 sports car. That kid walked across the campus and couldn't take his girlfriend to the movies because he didn't have any money and he scored 35 (points) that night in front of 18,000 people. That's wrong."
Click the audio player above to listen to Francesa's entire comments.
