There is much controversy among the American public regarding the issue of whether or not college athletes should be paid.  Being a college sports fan myself, I am naturally drawn to this issue.  The NCAA and its university's athletic programs take huge advantages of college athletes, making millions of dollars 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 as a viewer. I have personal experience with this topic because I watch college sports and attend a university with college athletes who are not paid. Since my sports watching hobby does not make me an expert on paying athletes by any means, I can strengthen my credibility by using a wide variety of outside sources.  These sources strengthen the ethos of my paper because they give specific facts and come from people with more knowledge on the matter.

In "Pay or Don't Play", Louis Barbash states that college athletes should be paid and should not 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.  This should not be the case; players should be devoted to their college athletic team and not always be looking forward to a professional league.  According to the article, the NBA takes advantage of college basketball, 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 rewarded for their contributions.  The author of this source is biased towards paying college athletes, so some ethos is taken away from the author since the source is more persuasive than informative.  Even though there is bias, the author still successfully gets across what is trying to be said.  

"A Game Change: Paying for Big-Time College Sports" is a very fact based source.  The author is credible because she is the director of athletics at Penn State Abington.  The author knows all of the policies, rules, and regulations the NCAA has regarding paying players.  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 argue that colleges can in fact afford to pay their athletes.  The article is informative and covers information on college sports revenue and funding.  More specifically, the Big Ten network gives each Big Ten school about 9 million dollars per year.  This goes to show the amount of money athletic departments are dealing with.  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 do not give them permission to do so.  An idea was also proposed to pay college players five thousand 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, five thousand dollars 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 whether or not to even pay athletes, or argue smaller details such as the source of the money or how much to pay athletes.  All the sources seem to agree that there is an issue with the current policy regarding athlete pay.  My stance on the discussion is that scholarship football and basketball players should be given small stipends during their time playing sports.  The sources 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.  As I formulate my argument and research paper, I will take into account these sources use them to defend my position that players should be paid.  I could revise my research question to address only a certain portion of college athletes or a specific policy the NCAA should adopt.

