College football player = full-time job

And if a university tries to pay only its football and men's basketball players, it will have a Title IX legal headache on its hands faster than Ohio State's defense gives up two touchdowns in a BCS title game.

So what about the other 400 or so athletes, from archery to water polo? Ohio State or Texas might be able to pay them. What about Northern Arizona and Southern Illinois?

 

No payment for water polo. Archery, maybe.

 

Being s most schools don't actualy "reap huge profits" the fact that the players are getting a scholarship while the school's athletics departments are losing money seems as though they are receiving more than their fair share of the "profits."

 

It's pretty simple, really. Top Division I football and basketball schools generate huge revenues and the athletes who generate those profits should be compensated fairly. Athletes in the not-for-profit sports shouldn't be compensated because those sports are not run as businesses.

 

There has to be a line drawn somewhere.
And it has been drawn.
No, the system will not someday collapse. There will always be a crop of kids who choose to play the game as it is scripted now.
Remember, less than 5 percent of these kids will matriculate to the CFL or NFL or even Arena Ball.
They just aren't good enough.
They should sign on for the 4-year deal and enjoy the ride (and the food and the clothes and the "status")
Then, if they obtain the degree, they can enter the real world prepared to make an honest living with the rest of society.

 

Spot on. The revenue generated is the difference maker here. And there's a way to solve the non-major sport issue: give every athlete a set percentage of the revenue that exceeds the value of the scholarship. For the archery and water polo teams, that's going to equal zero (less than zero actually). Factor in the ticket money, TV money, licensed apparel sales, there's some money that would be coming the football and basketball players way.

You have coaches making millions of dollars in salary with unlimited endorsements, but the people actually on the playing field being "paid" a set value, non-cash benefit (a nice one albeit).

Years from now, people will look back on this arrangement similar to how we today might view the reserve clause in baseball.

 

It's not a 4-year deal. It's four one-year deals. Coaches have to agree to renew the scholarships after each year and can yank them at any time. That's why you often see a bunch of players leave when there is a coaching change. It's called running them off. Of course, if a player wants to transfer, they have to sit out for a full year, as long as the school releases them by the goodness of their hearts. If a player wants to transfer to a school that his current one doesn't want him to go to (same conference, archrival, etc.), the current one can force him to sit out for two years.

That's what they said about Major League Baseball for the first 75 years of the 20th century. Look at their system now.
The NCAA has slowly, by piecemeal, started given in on some areas (allowing athletes to work jobs, not that they actually have the time), practice hour limits (not that they are enforced). There was a near-player revolt at Florida State a few years ago when one of their teammates died during a "voluntary" workout.
As I've said on earlier posts, it may take an O.J. Mayo deciding to cover up the Nike logo on his sneakers or something like that, but there will eventually be some sort of change in the system. It may take years, but it'll happen.

 

Major-revenue sports (football and basketball most schools, baseball, hockey and women's basketball at a very few schools) are professional public-relations enterprises conducted by the schools to increase public visibility.

The individuals engaged to perform those sports should be paid for those services, and offered the opportunity to pursue academic programs at the schools, should they so desire and should they be able to qualify (completely on their own merits, of course). If not, tough rocks.

All other (i.e., non-revenue) college sports should be offered on a strictly non-scholarship basis.

 

There is no chance college athletes will ever be paid.

There are many reasons - Title IX among them ("We'd have about 1,000 lawsuits the day after announcing we were playing football players," a Big 10 AD once told me.) - but the biggest reason is simple economics. You don't pay for something you don't have to pay for. There is no one - absolutely no one - with the power to lead a movement that would force college presidents into changing this system. The players turn over too quickly to form any kind of a union. No one associated with the system (coaches, ADs, presidents, faculty) wants the system to change. Politicians make noise every once in a while, but ultimately don't want to increase costs.

So, every once in a while you get a little media "What if" or "These darn kids really deserve more" ... and then it dies.

The whole discussion is bar room verbal masturbation about something that has less chance of happening than putting a man on mars.

 

OK, so when do we cut in the grad students who do research for the university on behalf of pharmaceutical and defense companies? They get tuition, maybe a stipend. The university gets millions in research grants, the professor gets all the prestige and a nice job, the students grunt along for their grad degrees. Where's all the outrage on their behalf? It's the same thing.

 

I agree that the Title IX issue would need to get ironed out before payments. That's why I think athletes should just be able to receive whatever gifts anyone wants to give them, and be allowed their own endorsement deals. 99 percent of the athletes probably wouldn't get a sneaker deal, but the stars would.

The only way that a change would get made is if the stars lead the way (they'd have to stay in school for four years), and the athletes would have to be unified. I read somewhere (and I could be wrong about the specific facts) that around 1985, a guy tried to have the Miami and Oklahoma football teams stage a sit-in and delay their bowl game for 10 minutes, just to prove that they had the power to do so. For whatever reason (fear? some booster money?) the teams decided not to do so.

 

I'm not entirely certain where I stand on this question. There have been strong arguments laid out on both sides, just on this thread. But one of the things I wondered when I was in college was how the athletes were supposed to get practical experience in the professional areas they wanted to pursue. It was an obvious question coming from a journalism major because, like others here, I easily spent 40 or 50 hours a week working for the school paper. Suppose a basketball player or a baseball player wants to write for the paper? How do they manage to do that and maintain their athletic commitments?

The thing we lose sight of sometimes is that we're not just talking football and men's basketball players. I covered a couple years of women's basketball when I was in school -- pre-WNBA years, so even for the dreamers there was nothing to aspire to. And it was a decidedly mediocre team, yet they worked like animals, early mornings, off-season conditioning, mid-week travel, etc.

Yes, they're getting a free education and no way in hell should that get dismissed easily. But the school owns them. If they want to use 20 hours a week on basketball instead of 40 and spend the other 20 working for the paper or the bookstore or doing some sort of business-world internship, they jeopardize their standing on the team. And they probably don't do either the sports or the job as well as they would if their time wasn't divided. So they do nothing but play basketball and they come out after four years with a degree and zero practical experience in their chosen field. To me, that's not right either.