In the world of so called amateur sports, there's been one topic that's been constantly debated by anyone who even slightly cares about or watches the NCAA: the issue of whether Division 1 college athletes should get compensated in some sort of way. The answer is yes; some division 1 college athletes should get compensated for their major contribution to the billion-dollar industry that they continue to drive forward. Whenever this debate comes up during conversation, no matter what group of people are talking about it, the same reasons are always said as to why the athletes shouldn't get paid, usually pertaining to their scholarship and all the money they'll most likely end up making in the pros. Most people don't know all the facts though, and are very misinformed when it comes to this. The NCAA has been repeatedly found to be a majorly corrupt and hypocritical organization that is exploiting these athletes for their own personal gain, and even though this issue hasn't been making much progress, countless athletes and their families continue to be affected by their oppression, but recently certain steps have been taken in the direction of finding a possible solution and fixing the problem.  

The NCAA constantly hides behind the guise of saying that these athletes are amateurs and student athletes, therefore they should not receive any compensation. Yet all while they're saying this, the NCAA is pocketing billions of dollars of revenue from TV deals, bowl games, tournaments, merchandise, players' likeness, etc. Within the last 5 years, since 2010, the NCAA has struck two major deals. It most recently sold the rights to broadcast the college football playoff to ESPN for the next 12 years for a small fee of $5.64 billion dollars which is roughly $475 million per season (Strachan). They also sold the rights to broadcast March Madness to CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting for 14 years for another measly fee of upwards of $10.8 billion dollars. Other men's and women's sports barely generate any revenue at all. 

The NCAA regularly uses antiquated logic in order to make it seem like they're doing the right thing. NCAA Executive Oliver Luck came out with a strong statement when he was asked why there was an open market for coaches pay and not athletes and he simply answered, "Coach's are adults." Luck is one of many who work for the NCAA who have given this reason when asked about student athletes getting paid, and it just simply isn't true. According to Luck, when an 18-year-old goes to college he's still a kid, yet when students turn 18 they're considered to be enough of adults to enter the draft and fight for our country. Also, based off of Luck's outdated blunt logic, any student athlete in the NCAA is considered a kid and not an adult. So say if Oklahoma State quarterback Brandon Weeden, now on the Dallas Cowboys in the NFL, wanted to get an endorsement, or sign an autograph, or lobby to be paid a salary, according to the NCAA he could not do that, because he's still a kid, even though while he was playing for Oklahoma State he was 25 years old. This is an extreme example, but it illustrates the fact that these student athletes are adults, most of them are between ages 18-25, so if they ever get charged with a crime they're not tried as juveniles just because the NCAA has placed an obscure amateur label on them so they can continue to exploit them. No they're tried as an adult, because that's how they're viewed in almost every other aspect of society. The NCAA wants to make it seem to the public like they're protecting these so called kids, but in reality they're restricting the wealth of adults. 

The same arguments are used over and over again to dispel any notions that certain division one college athletes should be compensated in some sort of way, but they can all be easily countered. Another very common reason that's designed to sway people against paying division one college athletes is the idea that the schools and their athletic departments simply don't have the money to compensate all these kids. The NCAA constantly says that only about a dozen of division one athletic programs are profitable revenue wise. This argument is gravely misleading, because the NCAA and these schools all have non-profit status. So just because most schools aren't profitable doesn't mean that they don't have money; it just means that they spent all their money. As non-profits these schools are designed to spend their money almost as fast as it comes in, so they can keep the status. This is why all these top schools like Alabama and Michigan build these lavish training facilities that have saunas, hot tubs, cold tubs, flat screen TV's, etc. These grand stadiums are more advanced and seat more people than the pro teams do, because the money has to go some where. This is also why 40 out of the 50 states in America's highest paid public employee in their state is either a football or basketball coach, like Coach K at Duke, Coach Cal at Kentucky, or Coach Harbaugh at Michigan all making millions of dollars, and more than their professional counterparts. The Huffington Post asked five sports economists if the NCAA could afford to pay their athletes, and they responded by saying "I don't see any reason why they wouldn't be able to, in fact" and "that's a silly argument." All the Division 1 schools would have to do is reallocate their funds and move money around in their budgets. Instead of their athletic directors and coach's making millions of dollars off of the exploitation of these athletes, they'd be making a little less money, so the athletes can afford to an extra side or two with their meal (Strachan). The coaches and athletic directors would go from making say four million dollars to three million, and they'd still be able to live their same lavish lifestyle, in their big house, and stay in their one percenter tax bracket. The only difference would be that one million they gave up would be redistributed between the players, so they're no longer toeing the poverty line. Nowadays schools even have assistant coach's making millions of dollars just to keep them around in case their head coach leaves, yet the NCAA continues to say that they don't have the revenue streams to compensate the players in any way? The NCAA just continues to illustrate its corruptness and hypocrisy to the public (Peebles). If it is truly about "the romance of amateurism" like many NCAA executives continue to say, then don't pay anyone at all, and give up all the TV deals and endorsements, making things fair.

The NCAA goes to great lengths in order to maintain their world of fraudulence and crooked behavior. Before officially becoming a student athlete, an athlete must read and understand a 440 page manual full of rules. This manual is full of things that the athletes aren't allowed to do. A 440-page manual of rules for student athletes is just insane and ludicrous in principle alone. There should not be enough rules that pertain just to athletes to fill 440 pages, unless like in the NCAA's case, they're deceitfully and dishonestly exploiting these athletes. When Keith Van Horn's (a player on the Utah basketball team) father died, coach Rick Majerus took Horn out to a small lunch to console and counsel him over his loss before he sent him on a plane back home for his father's funeral. To most people, this would be a story about basic human decency. A coach just consoling his player after he lost a loved one, but to the NCAA this was a rules violation. The NCAA actually penalized the Utah basketball team for this, because he gave his player an "excessive meal". The NCAA has since changed this rule, which shows some progress I guess, but at the time they penalized Utah's team for this simple, decent act. This is just one instance that speaks to the general corruptness that the 440-page rule book and NCAA represents. The main reason for all these restrictions though, all goes back to the money. Walter Byers, the NCAA's very first executive director, has on many occasions described how the term student athlete came about. Coming straight from his mouth, the truth of the matter is, in the 1950s the NCAA and Walter Byers crafted the term "student athletes" specifically so they would not have to pay workers comp for injured athletes. Even though his was a long time ago, this is when the base of their exploitation and corruptness started. At the time, Walter Byers could have never known what the business of the NCAA would look like today, yet he still found a way to not compensate the athletes by coining that phrase. The issue of workers comp for injury is still prevalent in the NCAA today. This was just during the basic formation of the NCAA and their so called business model, today 60 years later, Mark Emmert and the NCAA continue to use the term student athlete to restrict players, and essentially line their own pockets. Emmert, the current President of the NCAA, makes just under $2 million a year, and he has been quoted on numerous occasions when referring to student athletes saying, "they're not employees". In fact, there are so many clips of him saying this exact phrase, John Oliver from HBO likens him to a person/company who runs a sweatshop. The very same basis of corruptness stands between the two of them. Mark Emmert has been the face of NCAA's hypocrisy for so long that sports website BarstoolSports actually sold a t-shirt on their website making fun of Emmert and the NCAA's ridiculous rules pertaining to players' likeness. The shirt, pictures a cartoon of Emmert in front of stacks of cash and the word likeness inside the NCAA's logo. Barstool's satirical t-shirt makes light of the fact that the NCAA makes billions in profit from the player's likeness on merchandise, yet the players make none. Barstool was then ironically forced to take down the shirt by the NCAA, because of their unauthorized use of Emmert's likeness. Student athletes are very aware of how they're being exploited, and the inequality of wealth between them and the NCAA. In a video for Grantland, Jalen Rose (former NCAA basketball star for Michigan) talks about the imbalance between them and the coaches, saying, "The revenue stream for coach's people underestimate. You get paid from the school, you get paid from camps, you get paid from apparel companies, you have a TV deal, you have your radio show. That's five revenue streams for the coach." Coaches are specifically allowed by the NCAA to pursue endorsement deals in any sort of way, just like Dabo Swinney trademarking his name, so he gets paid for its use on anything. Coaches play a huge part in college sports, but the fact that they're allowed to profit off of themselves in any way they see fit, yet the students they're coaching who actually play the games, don't get any money or any benefits at all, is one of the prime examples of the NCAA's hypocrisy. The NCAA continues to restrict the athletes in an attempt to keep their money making machine alive.   

People opposed to division one college athletes receiving benefits believe that it will eventually destroy college sports. Epitomizing this view, Ekow Yankah writes for the NewYorker, "Our connection to the athletes is deeper ...  If a high-school football prodigy reported that he chose Michigan not for its academic quality, tradition, or beautiful campus but because it outbid all other suitors, a connection to the university's values would be lost." (Yankah). Many people agree with this view, that if students start going to schools based on the highest bidder then the school's values and fans connections to the players will be lost. So, to appease the fans and satisfy alumni's school pride, student athletes are supposed to be exploited and taken advantage of? Seems inherently selfish to me. Fans connections to these athletes won't change, they're still going to be on TV able to be seen by millions of fans. The only difference would be that these athletes are getting compensated for their hard work and performance. Another major point for the opposition of paying players is the stance that the athletes are getting paid in their scholarship and free education, but this notion is just flat out wrong. The average scholarship for an athlete in division one sports is about $25,000 per year which covers the bare necessities of school and nothing more, after all the school's extra fees. A prime example disproving and devaluing the argument and overall value of most division one athlete's educations is the UNC football team scandal. A lot of big NCAA D1 schools provide athletes with a fake education, and paper classes to make life easier on them to just focus on their sport. At UNC, referring to their flimsy educations, Yankah reports, "their scholarships are cynically undermined by the schools themselves. Coaches steer students into empty classes (what one recent report from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill characterized as a "shadow curriculum") or supply so-called academic support that amounts to cheating." (Yankah). Most people just assume that these students are receiving the same diploma and education as regular students, but in reality they're not. This UNC scandal represents widespread corruption in D1 athletics. Schools are constantly investigated for academic fraud pertaining to their athletic programs. The reality is just simple, athletes are pushed towards easy and even fake classes by the schools, so they can focus on what they truly went there for, which is their sport. They're being "paid" with a fake education. The last major point people make is the idea that the athletes don't need to be paid in college, because they'll all go to the pros and make millions. This again, just simply isn't true. Only 1.6% of D1 basketball players make it to the NBA, and only 1.2% of D1 football players make it to the NFL. It is such a long shot for these college athletes to make it to the pros that John Oliver jokes, essentially saying college athletes have a better chance of becoming an actual Viking or Wizard than playing for the Vikings or Wizards. Most people don't realize this though, because the players who are always on TV are the one's who will likely get drafted, yet they represent the minority. College sports will be fine if the athletes start getting paid, just as the Olympics stayed the same after the pros started participating. 

The reasoning behind paying college athletes is honestly very elementary. Every athlete in the NCAA is making nothing, but the kids who sell the athletes jerseys at the campus bookstore are making $10 an hour, because they actually have enough time to get a job like every other college student. When talking about the experience of his roommate and himself in college, both college athletes, Tyson Harnett of the HuffingtonPost describes, "being an athlete is a full-time job. On a typical day, a player will wake up before classes, get a lift or conditioning session in, go to class until 3 or 4 p.m., go to practice, go to mandatory study hall, and then finish homework or study for a test." (Hartnett). In an interview, after describing everything Hartnett did, All World NFL cornerback and Stanford graduate stated, "I would love for a regular student to have a student athletes schedule during the season, for just one quarter or semester, and show me how you'd balance that." Most of these players are constantly burdened with the work of a full time student along with the work of a full time job, but it's a job they aren't getting paid for. During the offseason student athletes can get real jobs, but they also have to keep up with school, and they're grueling offseason workouts. So they're essentially working two jobs, intensely training and preparing for a long season for one, getting paid minimum wage for the other, and working hard getting everyone's precious degree, and then eventually going home exhausted. But once the season starts, they have to quit any money making opportunity they have, because there's no time in season for that. Shabazz Napier, the star player of the NCAA basketball champion UConn Huskies, in an interview after a game stated that he's had multiple "hungry nights" in which he hasn't been able to eat dinner, because he and his family simply can't afford it. If not for anything else, these players should be compensated for the simple reasoning of being able to feed themselves on a daily basis. Even if a person doesn't believe college athletes deserve to be paid, they should be able to come around on the fact that D1 college athletes at the very least deserve workers comp incase of getting injured. In 9th grade, Oklahoma offered Kyle Hardrick a full basketball scholarship. After injuring his knee during his freshman year though, they took away his scholarship, and due to his piling medical bills he was forced to drop out of school, because his family couldn't afford it. The NCAA just doesn't care about their student athletes unless they're making them money. If they at the very least had workers comp for injured players, Hardrick and countless other players, wouldn't have had to sacrifice their educations, as a result of the cruel world of college athletics. Famous former NCAA Duke basketball player, NCAA commentator and analyst for ESPN breaks it down to an even simpler reason in an interview for Complex Magazine. He bluntly states, "I think it's actually immoral to restrict only one class of person from benefiting to their level of worth." (Peebles). The only people that are restricted financially in any way at all during college are athletes. Every other college student can make money off of their skills. He's shedding light on the fact that what the NCAA is doing, from its most basic of ways pertaining to right and wrong to its most complex, is corrupt and wrong. Bilas later equates the life of a music student playing shows in a band or just playing on the street and having bystanders give he or she money, to what student athletes should be able to do. Music students aren't kicked out of school or forced to pick a new major just because they profited off their unique skills. Their academic or scholarship status isn't affected in any way, they're actually lauded for their entrepreneurial ways. The amount of money made in college athletics from Men's D1 basketball and football is so much now, it isn't okay anymore to financially limit the athletes. They deserve to be compensated in some way, shape, or form.

Even the people who agree that college athletes deserve benefits, differ on what they believe those benefits to be. There are multiple solutions to this problem, and contrary to what the NCAA wants you to believe, it would be quite easy to institute a benefits or payment plan. The NCAA can put together a brand new college football playoff in a matter of months, but they continue to say "it's too complicated" when it comes to the payment of student athletes (Peebles). There are essentially four schools of thought when it comes to how the players should be paid. There's the free market approach, the Olympic model, the salary cap approach, and the strictly benefits model. Jay Bilas believes in an open, free system where Universities can pay what they see fit for certain athletes. Every player would have 4 years of eligibility, but colleges could offer 1-4 year contracts. Students would have to remain in good academic and legal standing as a term of every student's contract as well in Bilas' plan. But the players could negotiate for independent grade auditors to maintain no shady business by the school in case of bad play. He envisions negotiations going something like "'We think you can be a great player for us. We will offer you a three-year contract -- $100,000 a year plus room, board, and books' ...  And then your side would say, 'I think I'm good enough to leave in two years. So, I'll take a two-year contract (even though it would probably be for less money) but I want the opportunity to leave or renegotiate after two years.'" (Peebles) It would operate just as a free market would, and then they'd negotiate the rest of the terms. The Olympic model of pay for play is pretty simple; players would be able to profit from endorsements, jobs, their image and likeness, and autographs. The benefits system is also very basic; players would only receive workers comp and standard benefits just like a standard office job. The salary cap approach is a little more complicated. Every team would have a set salary cap that would come from their athletic departments budget, and they'd have this amount of money to spend on players. There'd be a minimum salary for each player, and there'd be contracts just like the free market approach (Nocera). I believe in some way student athletes need to be paid. No matter what way it is they need to be paid. If I had to choose a specific way though, my ideal pay for play plan would be a mixture of the Olympic, benefit, and salary cap model. D1 college athletes should be able to profit off of their own likeness, endorsements, autographs, etc., because it just makes sense. They deserve workers comp benefits from the school incase of injury, no matter what, so their entire life isn't ruined if they get hurt, and they should be paid anywhere from $1,000-5,000 a semester from the school on top of their scholarship, so they have something definite and extra due to the immense amounts of revenue they bring into the school. Though this is what I deem is truly fair for the athletes, it is going to take a long time for it to ever come to this, if ever.    

The NCAA has been so good at keeping their system of corruption and hypocrisy alive that it won't fundamentally change for at the very least 5-10 years. There has been some recent progress about the payment of players though. In 2015, former UCLA basketball star Ed O' Bannon won his lawsuit against EA Sports and the NCAA for their use of his likeness in their NCAA Basketball 09 video game. The courts awarded him $40 million, and that "that schools be allowed to offer athletes full cost-of-attendance scholarships." (Fox). This is big step forward for what it could bring in the future. It gives Congress the ability, if they see fit, to use commerce and antitrust legislation as a way to create a more equal landscape on behalf of the players in college sports. I took a Facebook poll of college students. The question read, "Do you think D1 college athletes deserve to be compensated in any way?" I gave three options for responses, they were, Option 1: "Yes they should get paid by the university and be able to profit off their likeness (endorsements, autographs, etc,)", Option 2: "Yes, but just on they're likeness (endorsements, autographs, jersey sales, etc.)", and Option 3: "No they shouldn't get paid; their scholarship is enough". Option 2 received the highest total of votes with 43.3%, option 1 received 23.3%, and option 3 received 33.3%. This means that 66.6% of the vote that believes in some way or another, the athletes deserve to be compensated. They represent the majority which is also why I believe that in the somewhat near future, the NCAA's corrupt reign of exploitation in college athletics will come to an end. The people who are affected by this issue the most see the real problem. Until this happens though, and the athletes start to receive a form of payment, the NCAA will continue to use their corrupt and deceitful ways to maximize their profits that they exploit from their student athletes. There's hope for the future that at some point these athletes will get their fair share of compensation, but the NCAA will do anything they can to fight it until that day comes.


