A longtime issue in college athletics has been whether college athletes should be paid. I heard debates over this when I was a college athlete and, decades later, I still hear them. One addition to the debate has been over branding deals, such as the use of likenesses in video games.
One classic argument is that in the big money sports (football and basketball) the athletes already receive compensation in the form of scholarships, coaching, medical care, etc. Given the cost of higher education, a full scholarship can be worth $27,000 a year or more.
Even athletes in the other sports (such as track, cross country, field hockey and volleyball) can receive compensation in the form of scholarships, coaching, and medical care—although they usually get much less than the star athletes in the big money sports.
Following this reasoning, it can be claimed that college athletes have always been paid—in that they receive valuable compensation for their contributions. In fact, college athletes have been recognized as being employees with the right to unionize. As such, the dispute is over the amount and nature of the desired compensation, which is a classic employee-employer dispute.
Obviously enough, the NCAA and colleges want to keep player compensation as low as possible, since the less the athletes are paid, the more everyone else gets to keep. However, the fact that they would rather not provide better compensation is not proof that athletes should not receive more.
While the NCAA and colleges have been on board with specific sorts of compensation (such as scholarships), they have often been very draconian about college athletes receiving other benefits. Based on my own experience at road races, college athletes were forbidden from accepting gift certificates they won. While the NCAA and the college can license the likeness of a player for use in a video game, athletes were not allowed to share in the profits. Because of these practices, most of the money made in college sports flowed to the NCAA and the colleges, rather than the athletes.
On the face of it, athletes should receive compensation commensurate with their contribution. For example, if a player’s likeness is licensed for use in a video game, they should receive a suitable percentage of that deal. As another example, if selling the TV rights to football games brings in millions of dollars, the players who appear on TV should get a proportional cut. Obviously, the value of what the players receive in terms of other compensation must be factored in as well as part of their pay.
In some cases, the athletes might have been receiving fair compensation. However, the star athletes in the big money sports were probably being exploited.
Over the years, the main argument advanced by the NCAA and colleges for not providing commensurate compensation is based on the view that a college athlete should be an amateur who competes “for the love of the sport.”
This has some appeal. When I was a college athlete, I competed for that reason—I loved to race. I still do, although I am much slower. In terms of compensation, I did get some shoe money and boxed lunches when we traveled. I understand the idea of the amateur athlete who is not sullied by crass commerce nor driven by greed.
Of course, the true amateur athlete who is unsullied by greed must also be in an amateur environment driven by the love of the sport. When I was a college athlete, I was in that situation. I competed in cross country and track, both of which are not big money sports. I also went to a division III school—so there were no athletic scholarships. The coaches at the college generally followed the same model that is usually seen at public high schools—they had a primary job at the school and coaching was secondary. For example, my first cross-country coach was also an exercise physiology professor. The football coach also taught classes. So, we were all amateurs competing for the love of the sport—although we did get those boxed lunches and the coaches got some pay.
When everyone is an amateur and the compensation is modest it makes sense to not pay athletes and to hold them to the standards of being an amateur athlete (versus being a paid professional). However, this is not the case with the big money sports at the big schools.
First, the top coaches enjoy truly impressive salaries. The top coaches can make millions each year. Interestingly, the highest paid public employee in some states is a college football or basketball coach.
Second, college football is a multi-billion-dollar industry and college basketball brings in millions for the colleges and NCAA. While the players did get some of this in the form of scholarships and other compensation, the bulk of it goes to others. A cynical person might note that this is a good lesson for the student athletes: the workers do the work and others reap the profits.
Given the money involved, these college sports are not amateur in any meaningful sense and it is not defined by a love of the game. Rather, this is a big money industry in which those doing most of the work receive very little while very few benefit greatly from their efforts. In short, college sports mirror the larger society. The lie that was long used to avoid justly compensating athletes was that they are amateurs who are supposed to play for the love of the game. Thus, there has been an inconsistency between the reality of the situation and what is expected of the athletes.
There is the option to make the ideal a reality and recreate college sports as amateur sports played for the love of sport. This would require following the model of amateur athletics I mentioned above: minimal compensation for everyone, coaches who are professors (or staff) first, athletes who are students first, no big money deals, and so on. Some schools already follow this ideal, such as the school I attended.
There is also the option to accept that big money sports are professional sports, and they should follow that model: the big money remains, but the athletes are recognized for what they really are—professional athletes.
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