College athletes are held to a high standard, to act, perform and live like professionals. Why not pay them like professionals to? Sure you don’t have to pay them as much as professional athletes but there are a lot of reasons why student athletes should get paid rather than just the scholarship itself. When fans watch these student athletes play there is a major profit in money that the NCAA gets from the millions of people watching. Also, the students are the one playing the sport; so paying them would seem reasonable.
To make it fair there are multiple ways that students could get paid and the NCAA could regulate the amount each student gets paid. Student athletes deserved to be paid in some way because the NCAA gets large amounts of money from fans watching it, it would cut down on players receiving improper benefits, and there are multiple ways that every student athlete could get paid fairly. The NCAA earns too much money from fans watching the sports that they need to pay athletes. March Madness, Bowl Games, and other events in college sports generate millions of dollars that go straight to the NCAA and its universities.
According to Michael Wilbon, an ESPN expert, the NCAA has a contract with CBS and Turner Sports that pays them 10. 8 billion dollars through 2024 for March Madness alone. That being the tournament in men’s college basketball in March with 64 teams competing on the biggest stage. Wilbon has always stated that he strongly regrets college athletes getting paid until seeing these TV networks paying the NCAA this amount of money. With this money, why not pay the athletes who performed? In some cases, pay the players more for example if they won a national championship.
That gives the players an extra incentive to win and propels them to play better on national TV. I’m not saying use all of these profits to pay players but some of this money could easily go to the athletes. A tiny bit of money from these revenues of huge television deals that pays to colleges and NCAA itself could easily be sorted out to some of the players that play for big name colleges that produce this money. To say that paying players would totally demolish athletes getting improper benefits is absurd, but it would drastically help.
Some of the reason players take these benefits is because they can’t afford to come to college and not have a job. Bleacher Report’s Quinn Thomas states that paying college athletes would lessen the opportunity of boosters coming in and proposing improper benefits. He also says that coaches wouldn’t have to worry about players doing work study program rather than training to be a professional athlete in the future. These benefits that college athletes have been caught with have ruined programs for years causing them to lose scholarships and the chance to play in the post season.
For example, Reggie Bush is now an NFL football player but received improper benefits while playing for USC. As a result, “the school lost the chance to play in the post season two years in a row and lost 30 scholarships in that span”(Paskwietz) . This ruined the school for two years and the life of the current USC athletes in the time of this ban. Not only ruin the program but Bush lost his Heisman trophy that he won while playing for the Trojans. To say this all could have been avoided by players getting paid wouldn’t be fair to say.
But you could conclude that if he had already known he was going to be paid somewhat in college it could have helped with the issue and maybe prevented it all together. Just the slightest idea that these college players would be paid might scare them away from getting improper benefits and could actually propel them to look past these boosters looking to give things to these high school students. When saying improper benefits, this means players receive money or items from colleges or people who want them to go to colleges called boosters.
There are multiple ways that these students could be paid, and benefit those players who deserve it. One way is to have players sell their memorabilia (jerseys, shoes, and other merchandise) to fans who would buy them. Colleges already sell the popular players in stores but these players get no money from all of them getting sold. These players deserve to be paid. They do everything that a professional athlete does but doesn’t get paid for it. The NCAA could propose a salary cap that would allow mid major colleges the hance to recruit top athletes and not allowing big name teams get every player. In the New York Times article Let’s Start Paying College Athletes by Joe Nocera, “A salary caps equalizes the amount every team can pay to recruit players. ” This kind of levels the playing field for all of the lower level schools that maybe couldn’t have afforded top name players without this salary cap. Mark Emmert is the NCAA president and he proposed a 2,000 dollar stipend that would pay college athletes outside the scholarship money some of them already is offered.
Even this small amount of money would be the starting point to which would help college athletes not have to worry about getting a job while in college and playing sports at the same time. This is the stepping point in which would eventually become college athletes getting paid a fair share of money that they create by playing the game at a televised level. With every argument of course there is going to be the opposing side, but the benefits of paying college athletes outweigh the benefits of basically not giving them anything.
In reading this article of why student athletes should not get paid by Todd Pheifer, he came up with points that were easily refutable. One college proposed 4,000 dollars per year for athletes, but Todd said that this isn’t enough money for how popular these players are. These players as of now are not getting paid at all; students would be satisfied with any money being given to them let alone 4,000 dollars. He also says that this would not stop the corruption of improper benefits and this small stipend won’t do anything. To refute that, in anything you do it’s not going to stop it completely.
For example drugs are illegal in this country but that doesn’t stop people from getting them. To solve players still receiving these benefits, make the punishment bigger. Now that these athletes would be getting paid, anything extra should be a major punishment and made known that anything extra would not be tolerated. There are good reasons that are against college athletes being paid but I believe the NCAA needs to step and take some of their profits from all of these television companies and start giving some of it to the athletes.
When deciding on which side to choose on this topic of student athletes to be paid I took to light both sides of this argument. Reading a lot of articles of both sides the clear choice to me was that athletes should be paid. Now I do not think they should be paid a substantial amount because they are already getting a free education in these colleges but something on top of that is needed. These college athletes spend a good portion of their college career making sure that they are the best athletes they can be so they have a chance to turn professional. They do not have time to have a job outside of studying and being an athlete.
A little amount of money would allow these students to have some money to have fun and still manage a decent living while in college. These athletes play on some of the most watched sporting events in the country and generate billions of dollars yet don’t get any of it handed to them. That is colleges and the NCAA that get all of this money and they need to give some of it to players. The NCAA and its players need to step up and fend for change, let these college athletes have some of the money that they generated, that they made possible by their play on the biggest stages of them all.
