As a student athlete, I have experienced many situations that have led me to believe that student athletes should be compensated. I am a student athlete here at the University of South Carolina, and as a SEC football player, I decided to put my body and health at risk to play the sport of football. Not to mention, once you are at a major university to play sports, you also have to be involved in academics as well. One of the main reasons I feel like college athletes, football players in particular, should be compensated is because when you take a look at and discover a regular day for an athlete, you will then consider it as a full time job. The schedule of a football player consists of waking up at 5 o'clock every morning, being at workouts by six in the morning, working out from six to eight, and then going to class after workouts until late afternoon. After classes there may be an hour to two hour break. Finally you are in the academic center for homework or to pick up on good study habits. So this shows you that as a college athlete, we are basically full time employees. Aside from all of our time and work, we bring in a lot of money to our universities and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), so therefore we deserve to be compensated. 

There are more than 460,000 student athletes in the NCAA (NCAA, 2016).There are many different divisions in the NCAA, but the main complaints and problems come from major universities within divisions such as SEC, ACC, PAC 12, and many more. In addition to pointing out major divisions, there is about two to three sports that mainly call for compensation. These sports consists of football, basketball, and sometimes baseball. With football, this sport brings in a lot of money to universities for various reasons. For one, they have their own video game so that money goes to the NCAA and also brings much attention to the players that are on the video game. Football is also helpful to the NCAA because it brings a lot of national attention, corporate sponsors, and money from fans from all over the world. College football became more known when they invented the division championship and then the national championship. As for basketball, the March Madness tournament became popular because it allowed different basketball teams from other divisions to compete against each other. People were interested because they most likely believed that their team could compete with the best. The NCAA sold broadcasting rights to CBS for 6 billion dollars for 11 years (Davis, 1995).

Ed O'Bannon was a former student athlete that played college basketball for UCLA. He was drafted to the pros and played for a couple of years then decided to end his career in basketball. The whole issue of paying student athletes began with the Ed O'Bannon law suit. Ed O'Bannon owned a car lot and was far from the mind of his days of playing basketball until he got a call from an old friend. Ed O'Bannon had found out that his name was being used on a video game which was interesting to him, but after thinking about it, he felt as if he should be compensated for his name being used on video games without his permission. Long story short, this situation was taken to court and Ed O'Bannon ended up winning the court trial with the help of famous sports marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro ("Sonny, Ed, NCAA", 2015). This situation of college athletes being paid for their likeness continues still. Since the Ed O'Bannon case, the NCAA has gotten stricter with their judgement and rules expressing that college athletes will not be compensated. 

The rules that the NCAA have in place prevents athletes from being compensated for athlete's likeness. After reading the article, I saw a rule from NCAA by laws stating that "Bylaws 12.5.2.1 and 12.5.2.2 preclude the name or picture of a currently enrolled college student athlete from appearing on commercial item" (Matzkin, 2001). This specifically talks to those athletes that are still eligible at their universities. Another important fact that was mentioned in the text was why they came up with the rule. "These purposes clarify the NCAA's goal of maintaining college athletics as an integral part of the higher educational experience, and of distinguishing college athletics from professional sports" (2001). This shows everyone that they want to lock down on college athletics and make this a serious situation so that athletes will start to take these things serious. 

As people take a look at this, some realize that student athletes could really be known as employees. When you look at their everyday life, you can see that they are busy 90 percent of the day. In the article, "Give Them What They Deserve: Compensating the Student Athlete for Participation in Intercollegiate Athletics" it said "Van Horn provides a proper analysis of athletic scholarships in the employment content. Overall, both Van Horn and Nemeth support the proposition that a scholarship athlete should be entitled to workers' compensation since scholarship athletes can be employees under traditional concepts of employment law" (Tiscione, 2007). This was a statement to support all student athletes. With a non-athlete, they work, but they are nowhere near the physical stage of an athlete. We are risking our body to get where we need to be for the future. Most athletes wonder when the NCAA and other powerful staffs will notice that we are employees and we should be paid way more then what we are getting. 

While reading the article "NCAA's Latest Argument Against Paying Players Is Nonsense, 'Economists Say", this showed some statistics which said that "The NCAA brought in nearly $1 billion in revenue on its own in its most recent fiscal year, and many athletic programs bring in tens of millions on their own as well" (Strachan, 2015). This money could possibly be coming from ticket sells, fundraising, and also television deals with different networks. In the article talking about workers compensation, the court ruled that because the universities do not receive extra benefits, athletes are not considered employees (Schott, 1996). When you look at the statistics, you can see that student athletes, particularly football players, are beneficial to the NCAA because we play on the field for them, which leads to fans wanting to see us play, which then leads to college fans paying their money for tickets to the games. That money goes to the NCAA, so therefore student athletes are beneficial to the NCAA and universities.  

As mentioned in the paragraph above, college athletes put much pain and stress on our bodies. In the article, "College Athletics and Workers' Compensation: Why the Courts Get it Wrong in Denying Student-Athletes Workers' Compensation Benefits When They Get Injured", Frank P. Tiscione talks about how if student athletes get injured and that injury is life lasting, they should receive workers compensation through the university. Student athletes should receive this through the university because before anything was put into place, student athletes had to sign a letter of intent to sign themselves over to the university, basically saying that we want to work for you (2007). For example, it's the same situation as if a guy is working for a warehouse and is ordered to moves a set of crates from the floor to the truck, if he does that and in the process, slips over and breaks his back, he will then receive worker compensation for the rest of his life depending on the severity of the injury. 

There are many arguments as to why student athletes should be compensated. One of the toughest things to go through as college athletes has to be trying to provide for yourself, in other words, cost of living. As a student athlete, our everyday life consists of running, walking, and more running. We burn off a lot of calories so therefore, it is important that we eat to balance things out. Athletes use a lot of their money for food. The reason we use our money is because from the time we get out of practice and head over to the cafeteria, all the food is either gone, or they will be closed. Keep in mind that they close at seven in the evening every single day. This forces us to use the money that we want to save up so that we will not have to beg and ask over and over again. We are college athletes and we should not be in that predicament. The NCAA does not want us to work, so that should be a specific reason that signals that student athletes need more money. 

In the article, "African-American Student-Athletes: Marginalizing the NCAA Regulatory Structure," this was an important topic because it gave a good example as to how the restrictions on student athletes affect them.  In this article, the author used African Americans as an example because they are the majority of today's athletics. This affects African American athletes because they are the ones receiving extra benefits as far as clothing, money, transportation, and also spending money. A factor that plays a role in this is economic status. A sociologist that studied university athletics said "Because black student-athletes come from poorer families and because their support systems are more likely to be located away from campus, it is more difficult for them to access their support systems personally. This problem is exacerbated by the NCAA's financial restraints which forbid student-athletes to work during the school year and yet do not provide them with any money beyond tuition, room and board" (Davis, 1995). This is a violation of NCAA rules so they are trying to stop it, but they should address it in a different way instead of trying to totally release it. 

All of the information that has been presented is very important, but the main topic of this whole paper deals with rights of publicity and using these athletes likeness. In the article, "Getting' Played: How the Video Game Industry Violates College Athletes' Rights of Publicity by Not Paying for their Likeness", there are a couple situations that have dealt with rights of publicity. As mentioned earlier in the essay, there was a situation where Ed O'Bannon and a video game. Before reminding you of the situation of what happened between O'Bannon and the NCAA, I want to give a brief definition of what rights of publicity means. This was defined in the article as "the right of an individual, [usually] a public figure or celebrity, to control the commercial use of his or her name or likeness" (Muller, 2004). O'Bannon filed a case against the NCAA basically saying that they should get permission from him to use his name in a video game, and he should be compensated for that as well. However, "the ninth U.S. circuit of appeals agreed with the lower court's decision that profiting from college athletes' names, images and likenesses used in video games and Television broadcasts violated antitrust laws, but still vacated a plan that would pay athletes up to 5,000 per year in deferred payments" (Wagner, 2015). This basically meant that if the NCAA started to pay student athletes, they would no longer be known as amateurs.

As a whole, amateurism is not being supported. A big reason of this outcome is because of commercialism, broadcasting rights, bowl games, and also video games. This money mostly goes to the NCAA, coaching profits and universities, so this takes a toll on student athletes because they could be getting a bigger cut from all of the money that they are making (Schott, 1996). Amateurism is defined as "someone who participates, and always has participated, in sports for pleasure and for the physical, mental, or social benefits." Amateurism was implemented in order to prevent student athletes "from being exploited by professional and commercial enterprises" (Schneider, 2001). This is a problem that will continue to be presented until it is handled correctly. 

Why a lot of people say that it is impossible, here are some ways that student athletes can be paid. As we see, college coaches are getting huge checks that are more than what they should actually get. For one, college athletes should get part of their head coaches, and staffs pay checks. Another way that college athletes can be paid has to be through fundraising and their sporting events. My sport in particular holds events that bring money to the program and the university. When we play a game, people are forced to pay to get in the game, both home and visitors. We should be compensated for these things, because at the end of the day, all the attention is around us athletes, so nothing goes through without us. 

In the article, "No Control over Their Rights of Publicity: College Athletes Left Sitting the Bench", the author gave several specific strategies for how to pay student athletes as well. The first one was creating a trust. The whole idea of this was that they are modeling after the International Olympic Committee. Their job is to collect all the money from endorsements and sponsors for the athletes. They place the money in the trust that the athletes can collect once they are no longer in amateur status. Once they are out of amateurism, the money will be given to them after graduation. Another strategy is revenue sharing. Revenue sharing distributes the net profits generated by each sport in order of seniority. In order of seniority, forth year students would receive 1 percent while third year players would only receive .75 percent. For post season games, 65 percent of the money goes to the universities, and student athletes would get the other 35 percent, but it should be distributed based on the role of the athlete in the game. The third strategy is that if universities and the NCAA do not agree to compensation, then they should allow part time employment (Schott, 1996). Because student athletes already have a busy schedule, being employed will make it harder for them when involving academics. 

In conclusion, we as a society should be able to help each other and prevent all of these problems from happening. Not paying college athletes could lead to problems such as the ending of college athletes careers by choice, and it could lead to fans wanting to argue with the NCAA and protest against the NCAA so that they can pay the student athletes. Fans would do this because they want to continue attending and watching the sport that they love.  When you think about college athletes and their fans, there are many facts to show how much college athletes should be compensated such as cost of living, food, and also the time put into their sport. If we do not pay student athletes, then this problem of them not being compensated could lead to the end of college sports as we know it. 

