Discussion On Whether College Athletes That Play Division 1 Should Be Paid

Growing up, all children are told that one of the keys to living a happy life is to find something they love to do and do that for a living. For many children, including myself, that meant dreams of getting a scholarship to play sports at a University and then one day getting drafted and playing professionally. Unfortunately, my childhood dreams, along with many others, were not met as I was not one of the few offered a Division 1 scholarship to play football or basketball. But playing sports as a child taught me many lessons and instilled a passion about athletics that still resides in me today. This passion for sports is something shared by millions of people all throughout the world and is why the issue that I am going to analyze is so important. The issue at hand is whether or not college athletes that play Division 1 football or basketball should be paid.

College athletics, especially football and basketball, have a huge market in America and are just as popular as professional sports. The only difference: the pros are paid millions while the college athletes are broke. The issue of paying college athletes has picked up steam in recent years as more and more people are advocating for paying the athletes. There is even an HBO series called “Student Athlete” that is meant to show the world the exploitative nature of the NCAA. The schools profit heavily off of the athletes, so shouldn’t the players in return be compensated? That exact question is going to be thoroughly analyzed throughout the rest of this essay. After reading this, hopefully you can answer that question for yourself. Before I get into the details, I will provide some background information.

First, I will touch on the NCAA. The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) is an organization that regulates American college athletics. Its main purpose is to “govern competition in a fair, safe, equitable and sportsmanlike manner, and to integrate intercollegiate athletics into higher education so that the educational experience of the student-athlete is paramount”. In 2016-2017, the NCAA took in over $1 billion in revenue. One of the NCAA’s main focuses in recent years has been preventing players from being compensated. Since the players cannot be paid by the schools legally, many schools try to secretly pay players under the table. Any school that is caught doing this is subject to penalty by the NCAA. A famous example of this is when the University of Miami was found guilty of illegally paying their football players during the 1980’s and 1990’s. The NCAA punished them by taking away scholarships, banning postseason play, and putting their entire athletic program on probation. Paying players is something that the NCAA clearly takes very seriously. Another topic that you must be knowledgeable about in order to understand this issue is scholarships and the college recruiting process. Colleges recruit standout athletes from all over the world trying to get them to come to their school. Recruiting is essential to having a good team and coaches will do whatever it takes to get players to sign. While schools do not have the ability to outright pay the players, they can offer them scholarships, essentially paying them in tuition. The best players receive full scholarships and instead of having to pay thousands of dollars to attend college, they get to go for free. Schools are limited in the amount of scholarships they can offer, with football having the most at 85 and basketball second with 13.

I’ll start my analyzation by looking at reasons why college athletes should not be paid. The first reason is obvious: they are getting paid! While college tuition is not something that athletes can put in the bank or use at the grocery store, an education is extremely valuable. Over the course of 4 years, a full scholarship from a University can be worth as much as $300, 000. When the numbers are crunched, some college athletes are making over $100 an hour just to go to class and play the sport they love. Furthermore, this education will gain the college athletes more money down the road. Fewer than 2% of college athletes end up going pro. So for the other 98%+, this education will be the basis of what they make a living off of for the rest of their lives. The expected lifetime earnings of someone with a college degree is over $1 million more than someone without a degree. So they may not be making millions in college, but down the road they will be making up for it. Furthermore, the NCAA fears that “paying college athletes undermines the university’s primary purpose – education, something far more valuable than a modest annual stipend proposed by many”. When it comes down to it, the true reason why any student is at a University, regardless of how talented they are athletically, is to get an education. It's not an internship or a minor league for professional sports teams, but a chance to attend college, gain a degree, and grow as a person. Yes the University can make money from the sports programs; however, for those that do, the money simply goes back into the athletic program to fund the non-revenue sports.

One final reason why college football and basketball players on full scholarships should not be paid comes directly from the definition of amateur and the NCAA's mandatory rules of amateurism. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines an amateur as "one who engages in a pursuit, study, science, or sport as a pastime rather than as a profession. " So full scholarship basketball and football players would be defined as students that play basketball and football as a pastime to education, making them amateurs. The NCAA takes amateurism a step farther and NCAA Bylaw 12 says to be certified as an amateur; an athlete must refrain from the following activities: Contracts with a professional team; Salary for participating in athletics; Prize money above actual and necessary expenses; Play with professionals; Tryouts, practice or competition with a professional team; Benefits from an agent or prospective agent; Agreement to be represented by an agent and Organized-competition rule.

The full scholarship commitment letter, in which bylaw 12 is included, clearly states that student athletes cannot make money from participating in athletics or accept gifts from agents. So the NCAA already has in writing a promise from student athletes that they cannot be paid to play by the schools or by outside interests. To opponents of not paying college athletes this may sound like a way for the NCAA to handcuff the players from getting paid, but economics professor, and author Thad Williamson, brings up the valid point in his article about the downfalls of paying college athletes, "Bad as They Wanna be [sic]", he states "The appeal of college athletics has long rested on their ‘amateur’ status, the notion that the kids play mostly for the love of the game, without the pressures and influences that suffuse professional sports". What Williamson is saying is that the NCAA would be jeopardizing one of the main reasons college football and basketball is so popular if they were to pay the players and this would likely lead to a drop in fans.