The notion seems absurd, but according to ESPN’s Rod Gilmore, NCAA football players deserve some kind of compensation for drawing in millions of dollars for their schools.
The way I see it, players for the top schools are already receiving spectacular benefits. They receive free room and board. They get to dine in 5-star restaurants and stay at 5-star hotels. They get to appear on national television. And under current NCAA rules, athletes are able to accept gifts valued up to $500 dollars. That translates to a neat little PDA or a shimmering new Rolex.
I don’t think college football players should be paid. Where will it end? Although Gilmore only addresses football, what about NCAA baseball players? The college world series gains significant media attention. Shouldn’t the players get a portion of the earnings? College swimmers? Bowlers?
Do not open the flood gates, or pretty soon every college athlete will want a piece of the pie.
In theory, anyway, there’s already a mechanism in place to pay students, called “work study”. Students who work at the student union or do other jobs around campus get paid. Why not “football workers”?
I did my undergrad and worked in a tutor center at a major, major football school. One of those schools where fans think there would be better parking if those classroom building were torn down.
In my experience in the tutor center, I would say 50% were not at all serious about school, and 80% of the starters felt the same way. They had no business being in a college classroom (both in attitude and preparedness). Why bother, they all thought they would be millionaires at the next level (even though maybe 10% would get drafted).
I guess the NCAA believes in the good old days when actual students would try out for the football team as an extracurricular activity.
I’ve always thought it was better to make a minor league team represent the school. Recruit the same way, but don’t demand they take the classes or study. They can have a choice between getting paid or a college scholarship (or a combo of both). The ones who are serious about college will continue to do so. Prep the others for the NFL, while they don’t have to worry about completing their recreational leadership degrees.
You mean besides the under the table payoffs. They are a minor league for pro football and basketball should be sponsored by them. We should quit pretending they don’t get paid . The hypocrisy is ridiculous.
I think that all college athletes should get paid a small wage. In the case of Division 1-A football, the schedule is grueling and there is little time for a side job. This wage should be the same for all players in all positions.
This is not a “piece of the pie”, but a wage for services rendered.
Of course they should be paid. College athletes are the only people in the U.S. forced to receive wages via the barter system instead of cash money. Books, room, board, scholarships are great, but the player should get paid too. They should be taxed on their income (except for books and tuition) and they should be allowed to receive money from boosters as taxable income.
Why should they be? They don’t have to play football, they can just go to school and get a job like the rest of us. Its basically a privilege to be able to play on the team, and you want to pay them on top of that?
Granted, my school is just going D-1 and we don’t give free rides for athletics (yet), but more (%) of our athletes have over a 3.0 GPA than the general students population does.
You know the problem with this approach? The fact that suits at the University and NCAA make millions, if not billions, off of these athletes.
Let’s start with this basic premise: Say that you are one hell of a mathmetician. You crunch numbers in your head, you solve amazing equations, etc. You’re 16 and you get a full ride to the State University. That’s a privilege - akin to a football scholarship as far as I’m concerned. Here’s where the problem comes in:
(a) if mathboy wants to get a job slinging pizzas while he’s in school, he can. NCAA scholarship athletes are not allowed to make extra dough like that (excuse the pun) - because of concerns that they will get illegal payments from boosters.
(b) if Microsoft comes to mathboy and says “Mathboy - you are sooooo good at math, everyone loves you. They’d absolutely buy calculators with your name on them. Heck, we’ll even pay you $50,000 to do commercials for our Mathboy calculators” - there’s absolutely nothing stopping Mathboy from cashing in. He can make that money and go to school with no problems. Yet, an NCAA scholarship athlete could not accept the same licensing/advertising deal. Even worse, many schools will sell T-shirts and other merchandise using the names and pictures of the players… who don’t see a dime of that money.
We can sugarcoat it any way we want — oh, these players are lucky to be in school getting a college education for free. Oh, these players are making memories of school pride, etc. etc. But the fact remains that they are making tons of money. They’re just not allowed to make it for themselves.
Personally, I think that - unless college athletes are allowed to work/license themselves - they should all be paid a more than generous stipend.
Not compensating the players for the revenue they generate via the college athletics’ programs is simply immoral. It is no more a “privilege” to play for a college sports team than it is for TA’s to toil away for professors, yet most colleges pay TA’s a stipend.
Let’s not forget that many of these football factories have federal tax-exempt status, something Congress is reviewing based on the vast disconnect between what the NCAA says it’s purpose is and the de facto money grab it promotes. Furthermore, the supposed “compensation” of a college scholarship is questionable when only 55% of football players and 38% of basketball players graduate (average student rate is 64%); one can legitimately question whether the rigors of participating in the sport and the steadily increasing number of regular and post-season games are in and of themselves reducing the value of this supposedly fair compensation.
That said, I don’t believe college players should be paid outright; but I do believe they deserve a taste of what rich boosters are doling out to their schools. As such, I would endorse three changes that the NCAA should implement immediately:
Require schools to set up trusts for each college athlete in a revenue-generating sport; these could be monitored by the NCAA or funded in part from a general pool such that established programs can’t overwhelm the ability of smaller schools to pay into it. The athlete vests into the trust with each year he stays in school, with a 100% guaranteed payout upon graduation.
Set up a central fund to provide insurance to all Division I athletes that takes into account not only risk of personal injury, but the potential value of any future professional career. If a kid is injured or dies playing the sport, bills are handled thru a private insurer rather than the university. The cautionary tale of Rashidi Wheeler and all the subsequent ugliness would have been settled long ago if this had been the case.
Allow student-athletes to hire agents without jeapordizing their amateur status, and allow those agents with anyone who wants to use the athlete’s likeness, name, etc. as part of an advertising campaign, including the university. I recall Grant Hill in an article in the Sporting News saying how low he felt when he walked into the Duke bookstore, saw replica jerseys with his name on the back on sale for $80, and neither he nor his mom could afford to buy one (he also was not allowed to hand over a game-worn jersey for fear of violating some arcane eligibility rules). That is simply wrong, and although there are many pitfalls with this final suggestion (i.e. wqhat’s to stop agents from starting a bidding war among colleges for his red-shirted star?), it is at least a step in the right direction.
Yes, I went to college, paid for most of it, and worked sucky jobs to maintain a borderline lifestyle of six-packs and mac 'n cheese. And it doesn’t seem fair that these athletes seem to get all the breaks. But let’s face it, they are essentially serfs in the NCAA fiefdom, and it’s time someone started the revolution.
Great post, but let’s not forget that the vast majority of college athletes are essentially working a sucky job (practice 2 hours a day, plus weight training, plus weekend practice, plus time away for competitions) and squandering what little money they have on six-packs and mac n’ cheese.
As for it not being fair for them to get all the breaks? Against the vast majority of college athletes only got a scholarship because they put in the time. That means practice 2 hours a day, maybe weight training, maybe weekend practice, and time away from competitions while in high school. I’ve always been of the mind that they’re there because they earned it. Sure, you can point out the superlazy, supertalented athletes. But for every single one of them, there’s at least ten more that busted their ass to get where they are.
I think they should relax the restrictions on athletes being allowed to get outside jobs. As it is, in exchange for free education, they have to forgo potentially huge earnings based on their personal popularity. I hardly think that’s fair. How about if a student takes an outside job, they forfeit their scholarship or a portion of it?
He pays his own way, earns a living, just like any working student does, and plays sports for his school. Make it 100% above board, all moneys declared, taxed, and audited by the school/NCAA to ensure there are no under the table payments for on-the-field shenanigans.
It should be tolerated to make money for the school. Right now, it manages to be profitable by paying the players peanuts relative to their market value. The NCCA is essentially a school-union that keeps wages capped at tuition, room, and board. If this union is broken, then the schools will suddenly enter into a massive bidding war that will make football only marginally profitable, if at all.
Basically, I don’t see any purpose to the school taking the risk on the football program if it is likely to only just barely make any returns.
There seems to be no shortage of players willing to play college ball right now, so why should the NCCA want to increase wages into a competitive bidding system?
I thought the NCAA has rules regarding the use of the names and images of players. For example I don’t think any NCAA football videogame includes images or the names of real players from the colleges.
My goal is not the destruction of intercollegiate athletics. However, I fail to see how a profitable football program improves the academic mission of a school; if anything it is an incentive to reduce the academic mission–at least for those marginal students who star on your team.
That may seem like a small point, but remember universities get federal tax-exempt status, so the profits they snare from athletic programs are tax-free. But that tax status is based on their academic mission, and I applaud Congress’s initiative in reviewing whether the NCAA is committed to that mission or to maximizing university profits (e.g. is the enforcement of the ban on players receiving money from boosters intended to protect the athletes from corruption, or to ensure as much of that booster money as possible goes to the university).
The NCAA currently has rules on the maximum hours/week players are required to attend practice. Most schools, however, get around this by staging “voluntary” practices; yes attendance is not required, but everyone knows that the players who show up are the ones who will get to play. This is why players can’t really hold down outside jobs; “legal” practices take up at least 10 hours a week, and add another 10 for “voluntary” practice.
The NCAA should ban this practice immediately and set specific hours during the day when it is legal for athletic programs to conduct practice (e.g. 3-9PM weekdays only, no more than four hours at a time, no more than three days a week).
NCAA football is in essence a feeder program for the NFL, just like minor-league baseball is a feeder program for MLB.
So get rid of the ‘in essence’ part. Instead of a team of “student-athletes”, let them just be athletes wearing the colleges’ jerseys, playing in the same stadiums, and getting paid for it. If it matters to anyone, require that part of their payment be a deferred 4-year full-ride scholarship to the school in question.
Same thing for men’s college basketball.
That’ll get the athlete-students out of everyone’s hair. The college won’t have to pretend they’re students, and the players and coaches won’t have to deal with the occasional pesky TA who insists an athlete actually earn a grade he gets.
I agree with much of what Doctor Who said. I’m an academic. I was a swotty kid in college, I never played sports in HS or in college (even our intramural team sucked). I got to know a lot of athletes. Like the commercial says, “Most NCAA athletes are going pro in something other than their sport.” I’ve know football players who were pre-med, baseball players that were business honors majors… and of course the less prominent sports often have the smartest kids (swimmers, for instance).
I knew tons of guys in frats who got cushy jobs clerking for Dad’s firm in the summer, stuff like that. I actually had a pretty well paying job before college working for Motorola. It was based on my academics, but also I knew people who worked there and hooked it up. The bottom line is, in all of my work during college, I never was at risk of injuring myself, and the greatest beneficiary of my time and effort was me. I got experience and cash that I would build my career upon. That’s not the case for an athlete.
Students and alumni want to see Joe Athlete play hurt, to sacrifice his body for the pride of the school. As a TA, or RA, or any job I had in college, I never had to risk permanent injury, disfigurement, or pain in the execution of my duties. If you’re working in a lab and feeling badly, you can take the day off. You don’t have to deal with thousands of people who don’t know you scrutinizing your every move. That’s not to say that some of that stuff comes with the territory. There are some great perks that go with being an athlete in a prominent program.
It should be regulated so there aren’t egregious abuses, but what’s wrong with an athlete who is not headed to the pros getting some face time in a law office or a car dealership? They might actually end up doing something in that field. I don’t want to see stuff like what went down at oklahoma, where two starters got paid for a job they didn’t even show up for. But I worked at the state capitol with Brian Jones, who played pro football for a while after graduating from UT. We worked for a legislator and we both worked hard at times, but also had a lot of down time to hang out in the corridors and meet people. Why shouldn’t an athlete have access to the same opportunities?
It’s kind of like the legalizing drugs argument. If it’s going on in the shadows, if you make it legal it becomes easier to regulate and monitor. Let’s stop pretending that every college athlete is a dumb, 'roided-up monster and realize that they’re rowers with high GPAs, softball players planning to go to medical school… the whole gamut of all college students. And college students pretty much have free rein to seek out employment in all sorts of fields. Within reason, why shouldn’t that right be extended to all students?
A profitable football program means a few things. It can support the athletic programs that don’t generate revenue. When I was a student at UT, I sat on a student fee committee. Every sport at the university lost money - especially the women’s sports. Think about how separate facilities were built to comply with Title IX, and the fact that the fan bases are much smaller for, say, women’s soccer. (Obviously at some schools it’s not the case - Tennessee women’s basketball probably earns a lot of money, maybe more than the men’s!) Because football makes a profit, women’s soccer can afford better facilities, hire the best coaches, and give those student athletes a real opportunity to benefit from the leadership opportunities that come from playing a sport.
It also means that your school is more prominent in the media. You can run ads about how you have great athletics, but also great labs, residence halls, and a sense of community. It’s mostly anecdotal, but admissions officers often talk about the spike of applications after a major sports season. Kids who might never visit your campus at least know you exist. Let’s face it - people are more likely to watch a basketball game than read the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Last, the student athletes can become prominent boosters - in the academic arena. My wife was awarded a scholarship from a very famous UT football player. After he retired from the NFL, he donated money (and because of who he was, encouraged other alums and boosters to contribute and making it an endowed scholarship). My wife, an avowed anti-athletics booster, was able to finish her degree and not have to work or go into debt because of collegiate athletics!
You must be thinking of someone else. Grant Hill’s father was a star running back in the NFL and a Yale grad. His mother went to Wellsley. His family was extremely well off.
