For a few years, the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) has had some flaws in the way they do things. The NCAA is a non-profit organization who are in charge of all college sports at each division to keep the student athletes in check. The main argument about college sports is whether or not the student-athletes should get paid. Student-athletes are so busy with workouts, practice, games, and on top of all that they have to do the same amount of academic work if not more than a non-athlete. With their busy schedules, student athletes do no not have time to get a job during the school year so they do not have any way of getting money. I think there would be pros and cons to paying athletes because not everyone would be paid the same in different sports and within the same sport which could cause problems with teammates and other athletes. Athletes also cannot get paid for their own name, no merchandise or video games or anything else like that can use their name because they are considered “amateur” athletes. Paying athletes may not be the best way to handle this problem, but there should definitely be a way for athletes to receive money for what they do.

A college athlete is considered an adult due to age, but are considered amateurs when it comes to sports; Some of the older players can buy alcohol legally, but are still called amateurs on the field or court. Those facts just do not seem to add up.  In the film, “Schooled”, a member of the NCAA was asked why they recognize college athletes as amateurs, and his response was simply because the NCAA decided to name them amateurs. The reason they are called amateurs is so that the NCAA has a reason to not pay the athletes, because amateur athletes cannot be paid. There are athletes in multiple sports that get drafted by or sign with pro teams out of high school, these athletes are not considered amateurs because they are not enrolled in school. If you are enrolled in school at all and are still eligible to play a sport, you are an amateur because you are enrolled in school. The athletes are a huge reason for a lot of the money that the school takes in especially the big sports like football, basketball, and baseball and the athletes do not get any money after putting in all of the work to be a good team so more people want to watch them. Sure, there are contracts, deals, sponsorships, and more, but there would not be any of that without sports team filled with “amateur” athletes. 

An argument against student athletes being paid is that they are on scholarships, although most sports do not give out full scholarships because of the limited amount to give out. Football has 85 scholarships which covers most of the team, basketball has 13 available scholarships with a team usually around 15 players, and baseball has 11.7 for a 35-man roster. Those are three of the bigger sports at each school and those numbers give a good idea of how many players are on scholarships, full especially, football has a lot of players on full scholarship, but not many sports do. Even on a full scholarship, student athletes still have to pay for food, drinks, transportation, etc. and a lot of players’ families are not in a good position financially to pay for all of that. Due to the amount of time spent at practice, workouts, games, and schoolwork on top of it all, student athletes do not have time to get a job and make money for themselves.

An alternative way for athletes to get money without being paid directly from the NCAA is to be able to accept endorsement deals. Starting to allow the athletes to accept endorsement deals would be a good and fair way for them to earn money. For the NCAA to make individual endorsement deals happen, they would have to do away with endorsement deals with each university as a whole so that each player could pick their own company. The cons with endorsement deals are that each player would have a different brand on each team which takes away the “team” part of the game, which is a large part in college sports. Another one is that there would not be enough money available for each company for either the professional athletes or the college athletes because they would have to sponsor players at both levels. Endorsement deals also would not solve the problem of certain players getting paid more than others, it would still be based on performance because each company would want the best athletes representing them. This could motivate the players who are not as well known, making them want to work harder so that they could get a deal and get money like the other athletes. This would also hurt the players who are not at D1 schools and even smaller D1 schools because they would not get enough exposure for the companies to know who they are and how good they are. Most of them would not get much money anyway and a big reason for that is because they do not get much TV time to show off the company that sponsors them.

Students in college have a lot of stress with school and just living on their own having a lot more responsibility. Take everything a normal student has and add the time practice, workouts, games, etc. and you have the life of a college athlete. Student athletes have the same amount of school work as all the other students and a lot less time to do it with requirements they have to reach and maintain to stay eligible to play. In season, athletes have to miss some classes to travel to games or tournaments and some professors do not like that. There are teachers who completely understand that it is not easy, but others think that athletes are entitled and do not treat them like they are and get mad about them missing class for a game even though they cannot do anything about it. A lot of people think that athletes do not do any work and are lazy when it comes to school, which is true about some but that is true about a lot of college students in general, but there are plenty of student athletes who excel in the classroom and work hard to do so. Most sports at most schools have study hall and tutors for the student athletes to give them the help that they need, some teams will actually take a few tutors on a road trip to help the athletes when they have free time on the trip.

The NCAA believes that the reason for this imbalance is the want and desire to win. There is the 20-hour rule which puts a limit on the amount of time coaches can spend with their players each week, but most players want to get better and outwork their competition, so some players show up early or stay late and work hard by themselves or with other players on the team to get better at what they do best and basically put school work to the side. This is a problem because the players are doing less and less school work which means their grades are not as good and some are even starting to fail and become ineligible to play the sport they have worked so hard for. The NCAA is worried about athletes not having a balance between school and their sports, they think too much time is spent in sports that the focus is not on academics as well.  

There are many rules on the academic side of things set that student athletes have to maintain so they can stay eligible for their sport, student athletes must be enrolled in at least 12 credit hours and have to maintain a 2.3 GPA. There are still plenty of athletes that are not doing what they need to do in the classroom and some people blame the coaches and how hard they work their players. The NCAA had a meeting with all the divisions and they talked about ways to fix this, they talked about the bonuses that the coaches get and how they should be based more on academic success than success on the field or court. Making the decision to give coaches bonuses for the academic side of things would definitely increase the success in the classroom because the coaches would give their players more time to focus on school and not make anything that is “optional” basically mandatory. The problem they are having about paying coaches based on academics, is that they do not know what to use as a gage for that, graduation rate or GPA. If they based it on academics, the jobs for Ivy League schools would be lined up with coaches wanting to get in there and would probably make them a more respected group of athletic teams. 

The reason people believe that the NCAA is corrupt is because of all the rules they have, there are rules specific to certain sports that do not apply to others and different rules for each division. A lot of the rules do not seem to be fair to most of the student athletes, it is almost like they are thinking about themselves instead of the athletes that the rules apply to. The NCAA should give more power to the student athletes to speak up and have more of a say in what happens to them, this would probably make everyone more happy, especially the athletes. In no way should the student athletes be able to make the rules that apply to them because those would be very biased, but they should be able to be heard by the board and have a chance to explain what they want and why it would benefit the NCAA as a whole. The people within the NCAA think that they know what is best for the student athletes, which is why they make the rules amongst each other without outside input. Things change all the time so even former student athletes do not always know what is best for the current athletes, but those former athletes that now work for the NCAA think to what would have worked for them when they were students. In some cases, things are the same and the way to handle things does not change, but with all of the new technology and advancements in general, there should be new ways to handle things for the current student athletes specifically.

The NCAA claims themselves as a non-profit organization, but they make more money than most big-time companies because of all the partnership and endorsement deals they have. Since they are non-profit, they do not have to pay income tax with any money that they receive and they get funds from the federal government. The NCAA has all these deals and makes all this money from the athletes they rule over, but they do not have to pay taxes and they leave plenty of athletes worried about what they are going to eat some nights because most of them do not have money. Basketball players used to be able to go to the NBA out of high school, but now they have to attend school for at least one year before going pro. For the players going pro after one year, a lot of them go to the D league, which is the minor league of basketball, and the salaries in that league are not enough to live on. People think that there is something that the NCAA could do to help fix that problem, especially with all the money they receive.

The NCAA, like everyone, has proven to be imperfect, they think they no everything and they always do what they what they want to do. There are problems in their system and the best way to resolve them would be to allow the student athletes they control to give their input to make everyone happy and successful. The NCAA needs to be careful the way they do things because making college student athletes and fans mad is not in their best interest if they want to benefit as well.
