David Shields Quotes

The NCAA makes so much money off of their kids, and they put ridiculous - absolutely ridiculous - restrictions on everything that they can do.

College players make money for the colleges. You think they spend all that recruiting money to get the best students? Come on.

I think one of the most immoral things is college football and basketball, where everybody is making money except the players.

The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out.

College athletics are so entrenched and enjoyed by so many people that they will never be discontinued or substantially changed. I know that. I just pity the people caught in that tender trap. And most of all, I pity those kids.

If you offer athletes stipends, then you're into pay-for-play, and that's the ballgame. People should realize that, and they should realize that amateurism never has been a sustainable model for a sports-entertainment industry. It wasn't in tennis. It wasn't in the Olympics. And it's not in big-time college sports.

The NCAA model is outdated. If Steve Serby's a great player in high school, and an agent wants to represent you and wants to advance you money as a loan based on the fact that you're gonna be a high draft choice, so be it.

The difference between the National Football League and college is this: In college, you are a broke college student.

It's different in the NFL because you're getting paid to get hit. In college, you're taking hits for someone else to make money.

NCAA is looking at how to do a better job enforcing their rules instead of looking at why the predatorial environment is created. There's a predatorial environment that their rules have created, which makes people feel undervalued.

Some college athletes don't want to turn pro, they don't want to take the cut in pay.

If the NFL can keep getting away with forcing players to wait three years out of high school before they're drafted - three! - the NCAA should be made to do away with its rules against paying players beyond room, board and tuition. I'm not talking about some token, $2,000-a-year 'spending money' stipend for every player.

I have long been one of those tedious people who rails against the coronation of 'student-athletes.' I have heard the argument that big-time athletics bring in loads of money to universities. I don't believe the money goes anywhere other than back into the sports teams, but that's another story.

All an agent is going to do is buy things for a player, damage his eligibility, and make the player dependent on them.

I worry when athletes are simply used by their universities to produce revenue, to make money for them, nothing to show at the back end. I grew up with a lot of players who had very, very tough lives after the ball started bouncing for them. And that's why I'm going to continue to fight.

The NCAA has to establish their own rules and enforce their own rules.

As soon as you take money for playing sport, it isn't sport, it's work.

I have zero interest in sports of any kind - professional, college or international.

We got to think of other ways to help these kids out because there's a lot of kids who get hurt in college and then don't make it to the NFL and don't have insurance, and their entire lives are changed when they put their bodies on the line for their school.

We should not go to a baseball rule. If a kid goes to college and, after a year or two, wants to go to the NBA and is good enough - and he grew, he got bigger, he got more confidence - let him go. Why would you now force a kid to go two years?

The problem with the NCAA - it's slow-moving.

Athletes are still exploited. If they blow out their knee, if they somehow don't meet the mandates of a coach, they lose their scholarship. They don't get their degree.

I was a piece of meat. I was betrayed by the business of football.

Mark Emmert, the head of the NCAA, makes millions. Coaches today are making millions. Who's not making anything? I don't want to hear about they get scholarships. Yeah, they get scholarships all right, they earn those scholarships.

I got some cash from agents. I've talked to the NCAA. I think that should be legal. I want some money, too; everybody else is making money. I want to go on dates. I want to go buy myself some new suits. I want to buy myself some new sneakers, and I paid the agents back.