This research question is a very popular argument involved with college sports.  I personally am interested in the topic because I enjoy college sports.  I think coaches and universities take huge advantage of college athletes and make millions of dollars from them without giving the players a share of the wealth.  This research question does not directly affect me, but it could affect the way college sports operate and impact me in that way.  My personal experience with the topic is that I have watching college sports all my life and I attend a university that has the college sports in question.  I am qualified to write about the topic because of my experience watching and attending athletic events and because of my research sources.  These sources strengthen the ethos of my paper because they give specific facts and come from credible people.

In "Pay or Don't Play", Louis Barbash makes the statement that college athletes should be paid and should have to attend the school they play for.  The article talks about how the NBA uses college basketball as a free minor league to draft its players from.  According to the article, the NBA takes advantage of college basketball and more specifically the athletes of college basketball.  Players are basically giving millions of dollars to the universities they play for with little to no reward in return.  People could make the claim that college athletes are rewarded when they are paid in professional leagues, but some athletes get career ending injuries and are never rewarding for their contributions.  The author of this source is very biased towards making college athletes paid.  Because of this bias, some ethos is taken away from the author.  Even though it is biased, it still makes some good points and is very persuasive.  

"A Game Change: Paying for Big-Time College Sports" is a very fact based source.  The author is credible as she is the director of athletics at Penn State Abington.  The author is barely biased at all.  By using mostly facts, the article gives a lot of specific evidence regarding the money in college sports and where the money goes.  This information can then be used to argument another point such as that college athletes should be paid.  The article is informative and covers information on college sports revenue and funding.  It states that the Big Ten network gives each Big Ten school about 9 million dollars per year.  Schools get so much money from partners like Big Ten network, but barely give any money to the player who made the money in the first place.  

"O'Bannon Ruling Debate Over Pay for College Athletes" is an article regarding a court ruling that confirmed the NCAA has violated antitrust laws.  In the lawsuit, a former college basketball player claimed that NCAA benefits commercially from its athletes who don't give them permission to do so.  An idea was also proposed to pay college players 5000 dollars per year, but it was struck down.  The NCAA argues that much of the enjoyment people get in watching college sports is through what they refer to as amateurism.  That is the idea that watching unpaid 'amateur' athletes is more appealing than watching millionaire professionals.  However, $5000 per year would still potentially satisfy this amateurism, serving as some sort of a compromise.  This lawsuit was a major step for college players towards getting paid.  The source is not very biased because most of it is simply stating facts about the court case or about college athletics.   

The research topic of paying college athletes is very arguable.  One could argue not to pay athletes at all, to pay them proportionally to the revenue they earn, or paid an equal fixed amount.  All the sources seem to agree that there is an issue with the current policy regarding athlete pay.  They differ in that some sources are much more informative or more argumentative than others.  It is a good thing that they differ so much because it allows a researcher to look at the topic from many different viewpoints and allows a new opinion to be formed based on these viewpoints.  I could revise my research question to cover a specific sport or a specific policy the NCAA should adapt.

