Should College Athletes be Paid?

My dear reader. Now that we are the apex of the NCAA’s “March Madness”, perhaps there is no better time to discuss the thing that the NCAA surely does not want us to. College athletes and the money they generate. Some folks in this money debate do not consider them students at all but we’ll get to that. In 2017, the NCAA generated at least 1.1 billion dollars in revenue according to the association’s own financial statements. That same year, the top 30 biggest sports programmes in the country each generated over 100 million dollars in revenue. As we get into this debate, I will grant you that these athletes do get a “free” college tuition and room and board so let us get that out the way though we are talking thousands of dollars here per student. Not the hundreds of millions the schools rake in!

Rules

It goes without saying that the backbone of this revenue juggernaut are the students themselves who put out a product that is not only as good as the “pros” but arguably better sometimes. However, the students don’t get a slice of this billions of dollars that they are able to generate for their schools. They cannot go out and sign a sponsorship deal with the likes of Nike or Adidas who are blitzing your airwaves with sleek ads this week as they always do this time of year. Never mind that there are no such restrictions for high school athletes. (Think LeBron James’ over 90 million-dollar contract with Nike circa 2003). College athletes cannot sign autographs lest they get a financial benefit from that. In fact, they can’t even autograph their own college jerseys! Not only that, students are required to get written permission from their current school’s athletic directors in order to transfer to another school. Also, another school may not contact the student-athlete about possible transfers if not granted permission by the current school. At the new school, the student-athletes are further “punished” by being required to sit out an entire year of competition following their transfer unless exempted by the NCAA. Do those rules sound a little onerous yet?

Schedules

Now let us examine what it is that these students actually do on campus. The following is a typical day in the life of a Division I college football player. The schedule appeared on alligatorarmy.com by way of Andy Hutchins. The school is the University of Florida. Wake up time is between 6am and 7am, with breakfast served between 7:00am and 7:45am. (some schools serve breakfast at 6am). Classes are from 8:00am to 11:30am. Lunch is all of 30 minutes from 12 noon to 12:30pm. Does that 30-minute lunch break remind you of a regular 9 to 5 job? 12:30pm to 1:30pm is gym time. The players then get an hour to “fuel and recover” followed by team meetings from 2:30pm to 3:30pm. 3:30pm to 5:30pm is practice time. After that there is another 30-minute “recovery” break followed by dinner from 6:30pm to 7:00 pm. After all those physical activities, study time is from 7:30pm to 9:00pm. I don’t know about you but after just an hour of intense activity is enough to make me real sleepy.

As you can see, those are 5.3 hours of scheduled “football activities” for the day. That is the so called “in-season” schedule. So, what happens offseason? While the rest of the students are out of school for the summer pursuing jobs or internships, most Division I football athletes spend most or all of that time at school. They are expected to work out and practice with their teammates to stay in shape. The students of course cannot opt out of this schedule. Its not like a student can go up to the coach and say “Hey coach, I’ve chosen this really challenging engineering class. Can I get a couple of weeks off?”

Risks

This is the part where I remind you that only about 2% of all college athletes ever get to play sports professionally. You might have even seen the NCAA’s own television ad featuring Jerry Rice. Here is what Jerry says;

“There are over 480 thousand college athletes. Only 2% will go pro. That means over 470 thousand will not get a shoe contract. No autographs. No private jets. No fan clubs. No Hall of Fame inductions. Instead, they will walk away with something more valuable”

Therefore, those are a whole lot of kids that will need to get “regular” jobs after their playing days are over. The implication in the ad is that the more valuable thing here is education. I wish that was the case. For most athletes in high contact sports like football, reality is a little different. For example, what happens when a player gets injured? You see, scholarships are awarded from semester to semester. There are no requirements that a college honor an athlete’s scholarship for the full four years if they are not active members of the team. Considering a sport like football that has a 100 percent injury rate, this is a serious matter. There are cases where players were seriously injured and could no longer play their sport. These players often dropped out of college entirely with no other options for obtaining their education. There is also the risk of brain injury. Every day we are learning that this is an issue that is impacting retired football players at an alarming rate.

Remedies

The NCAA will claim that all sorts of chaos will ensue were colleges to start fairly compensating their student-athletes. There is no clear reason why this “purity” of amateurism must only be applied to college athletes. This does not seem to impact college coaches, for who pay seems limitless. Never mind that coaches at elite sports programmes make many times more salary than their ultimate “bosses”. College presidents and athletic directors. In fact, in some states, the football or college coach is often the highest paid government employee. Never mind states’ governors or award-winning faculty.

Considering the risks that some of these athletes take, and the gobs of money they generate for the schools, I’m for paying them significant stipends that fairly compensate them for their efforts. At a minimum, an athletic scholarship should be guaranteed for the full term it takes for a student to complete their undergraduate education. Even for those lucky ones that get to play professionally, the door should be open for them to come back to their schools and complete their education. This is should be the beginning of what I hope is a march towards treating these athletes fairly.