Payment of College Athletes

Payment of College Athletes

College athletics are a multi-million dollar industry in which those who produce the revenue never see a penny. College athletes bring in millions of dollars to their universities on a yearly basis and never receive monetary compensation for the risks they take on the field. Some may argue that a free education is payment enough, but when you take into account that scholarship players are not allowed to have jobs and many come from families well below the poverty line, does a free education really seem like a sufficient payment? Specifically, college basketball and football teams can generate millions of dollars of extra revenue for their university just by making a football bowl game or qualifying for the NCAA basketball tournament. Even though students are solely responsible for their team’s success, they never see any of the money they generate by excelling at their sport. Due to the massive amounts of revenue that college athletes generate for their schools on a yearly basis, they should receive monetary compensation for their service.

Scholarship athletes receive a free education and are not charged for room and board while staying at the university. Not only do the athletes get to attend a top notch school for free but their families don’t have to pay for any necessary expenses while on campus expenses. Who would be the ones paying these athletes certainly not the paying parents of students enrolled at the university, they must already cover the bill for their own child and now they have to pick up the financial slack for the university while scholarship parents sit back and enjoy the ride (LaRose 4).

Many people think that a free education is payment enough for these athletes and that is a viable point. But think about college sports as a business that these athletes are a part of and think about how they must feel annually generating millions of dollars for their universities and never seeing any of that profit. Athletes are allowed to be kept off of the money train under the pretense of amateurism, meaning they will no longer be amateurs if universities finally start forking over the money the athletes deserve (Walter Byers). How must they feel seeing the money they produce being used for the betterment of other aspects of the university? These athletes are cash cows for their universities and the money they make is not even spent on their betterment. The money produced by athletic programs is very rarely dumped back into the athletic program itself; instead the revenue is used to build up other areas of the university while the athletic programs continue to run on the funding of boosters.

College athletes are responsible for the majority of the money generated by their schools yet they never receive compensation for the services they provide. Without the athletes no one would get paid. There would be no advertising of the big game on TV, there would be no top selling jersey of the team superstar, and there would be no boosters to financially help keep the schools head above water (Matt Roberts). Athletes are responsible for producing millions of dollars for universities. Whether it be through ticket and merchandise sales or NCAA post season incentives. Athletes should receive the money that they help raise. Not necessarily on a player salary basis, but more of a team incentive plan. The athletes should be paid by how well their team does not by how well they perform as an individual. That is the only way to guarantee that all members of the team will receive equal compensation for the accomplishments of the team.

When the subject of merchandise is concerned athletes should receive any money that the sale of merchandise related to them generates, such as jerseys. If an athlete’s popularity is being used to create revenue for a university then the athlete should receive some of the profits that the merchandise creates. The NCAA functions like a sweatshop with premiere athletes working hard to get recognition and when they finally become a household name they become nothing more than a golden goose for the NCAA to make obscene profit off of (John Fleck). It is not right to sell the jersey of an athlete and not award them any of the profit. Athletes should also receive some of the profit generated from ticket sales and post season berths. The amount of money a team could generate