Should NCAA "Student Athletes" get paid?
March 17, 2015 at 12:56 pm
(This post was last modified: March 17, 2015 at 1:05 pm by SteelCurtain.)
So, after watching John Oliver this weekend, and remembering what it was like as a Division I 'student athlete' and taking 3 day seminars on the NCAA bylaws to do work for and make money for an organization that banned me from profiting from any of the extremely risky work I did for it (Not that I would have ever profited from my signature or anything like that, but still...), I'd like to see what you guys think. First, watch this:
It's John Oliver's excellent (and hilarious) take on the subject.
The point is that for the average student athlete, (say the safety at Colorado State or the Center at Georgetown) you make a lot of money for the NCAA and your school. The coach makes millions of dollars and has multiple revenue streams. Most coaches at larger schools have basketball/football camps in the offseasons, they have radio shows and endorsements, but the students have nothing.
Shabazz Napier, last year, a basketball player on the Championship team, told the media that there are nights when he goes hungry. He is from a poor family that has no money to send him. But he cannot even go to dinner at a booster's house or eat with the coaches, because the NCAA forbids it. (They have since relaxed on the food front, but only because of this story.)
Players can get suspended if they sell things that they have signed, or game equipment, even for charity.
But the kicker is--the college can benefit from the players' autographs. They sell tickets to "Fan Days" where people come from all over to get signatures from the athletes. The NCAA sells jerseys with the players name/number on it. The player sees none of that.
Here's my take on it. It's a fucked up system. So exploitative. But college football/basketball would cease to exist as we know it. It would seriously become just a minor league shit show.
My solution is this: Pay the kids a stipend per season. Everyone gets the same stipend. Now the problem with this is that it will kill the cash sink sports. Sports like the water polo team and the gymnastics team that don't make any money for the school will have to pay their players too. So maybe there is a sliding scale based on the popularity of the sport. I don't know. But each player gets a living stipend. Enough for a semester of food and clothes. A couple of thousand. The NCAA makes billions per year on TV rights just for March Madness, much less the College Football playoffs and 75+ bowl games. They can afford that. So instead of finding ways to spend billions of dollars on bullshit in order to keep their 501(c )3 status, they can give some of it back to the players.
Players should be able to profit from their own name/image. So when EA Sports puts out a video game, the players get a cut when you profit from their image. When they sell game worn gear or signatures, they shouldn't be punished.
People say they get paid in education, well okay. I got a fantastic education from the US Naval Academy, but I wasn't a premiere athlete. My situation was vastly different from most student athletes. Most of these guys are not getting the education they are promised. They are a money machine for the university, so the university has a vested interest in making sure they are "eligible." So they minor in "Swahili" or take African American Studies to get easy A's so their GPAs will be at a good level.
Ed O'Bannon is a former NCAA athlete who found out that after 20 years the NCAA was licensing his image for a NCAA Basketball video game and not paying him. He sued and won, and that is (rightly so) why you don't see EA Sports March Madness or NCAA Football video games any more.
It's a fucked system, but college athletics would suck if high schoolers were competing for signing huge contracts.
TL : DR, should college students make money?
Vote in the poll.
It's John Oliver's excellent (and hilarious) take on the subject.
John Oliver, in what may be my favorite line in recent TV Wrote:[The NCAA has a] 400-odd page manual of rules. The only other thing that has that many finicky little rules would be a sex party at Wes Anderson's house. "Guests are required to wear lingerie of only a pre-war Andalusian vintage, fellatio may only be accompanied by music from The Kinks and early Cat Stevens, and condoms shall be found nestled in a small diorama of the sinking of the Lusitania." Now EVERYBODY FUCK!
The point is that for the average student athlete, (say the safety at Colorado State or the Center at Georgetown) you make a lot of money for the NCAA and your school. The coach makes millions of dollars and has multiple revenue streams. Most coaches at larger schools have basketball/football camps in the offseasons, they have radio shows and endorsements, but the students have nothing.
Shabazz Napier, last year, a basketball player on the Championship team, told the media that there are nights when he goes hungry. He is from a poor family that has no money to send him. But he cannot even go to dinner at a booster's house or eat with the coaches, because the NCAA forbids it. (They have since relaxed on the food front, but only because of this story.)
Players can get suspended if they sell things that they have signed, or game equipment, even for charity.
But the kicker is--the college can benefit from the players' autographs. They sell tickets to "Fan Days" where people come from all over to get signatures from the athletes. The NCAA sells jerseys with the players name/number on it. The player sees none of that.
Here's my take on it. It's a fucked up system. So exploitative. But college football/basketball would cease to exist as we know it. It would seriously become just a minor league shit show.
My solution is this: Pay the kids a stipend per season. Everyone gets the same stipend. Now the problem with this is that it will kill the cash sink sports. Sports like the water polo team and the gymnastics team that don't make any money for the school will have to pay their players too. So maybe there is a sliding scale based on the popularity of the sport. I don't know. But each player gets a living stipend. Enough for a semester of food and clothes. A couple of thousand. The NCAA makes billions per year on TV rights just for March Madness, much less the College Football playoffs and 75+ bowl games. They can afford that. So instead of finding ways to spend billions of dollars on bullshit in order to keep their 501(c )3 status, they can give some of it back to the players.
Players should be able to profit from their own name/image. So when EA Sports puts out a video game, the players get a cut when you profit from their image. When they sell game worn gear or signatures, they shouldn't be punished.
People say they get paid in education, well okay. I got a fantastic education from the US Naval Academy, but I wasn't a premiere athlete. My situation was vastly different from most student athletes. Most of these guys are not getting the education they are promised. They are a money machine for the university, so the university has a vested interest in making sure they are "eligible." So they minor in "Swahili" or take African American Studies to get easy A's so their GPAs will be at a good level.
Ed O'Bannon is a former NCAA athlete who found out that after 20 years the NCAA was licensing his image for a NCAA Basketball video game and not paying him. He sued and won, and that is (rightly so) why you don't see EA Sports March Madness or NCAA Football video games any more.
It's a fucked system, but college athletics would suck if high schoolers were competing for signing huge contracts.
TL : DR, should college students make money?
Vote in the poll.
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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