In 1906, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) was formed and since then it has become a multiple billion-dollar organization. The NCAA nearly topped $1 billion in 2014 and all this is accomplished from a business built off of the backs of hard working athletes from the age of 18-24. These young adults that are helping produce all this revenue are only seeing a fraction of the money through their scholarships for school. Andrew Zimbalist from Princeton University found that in the mid 1990s a college basketball player revenue’s, on average, $870,000 to $1million per year for their school but they are only compensated around $80,000 per year through scholarships and everything provided through college basketball. According to an NCAA survey conducted in 2011, Division 1 football players averaged 43 hours a week, baseball came in second at 42.1 hours and basketball in third with 39.2 hours for in season hours. These numbers are absurd for a full time college student to have to fit into their schedule not even to mention that they are not getting paid. This means that these young adults have a full time job on top of homework and class work. College athletes put their body on the line every day, generate millions for the NCAA and their college, and practice enough hours a week to have a full time job but still do not have enough money to take someone out on a date or go to the movies with their friends and this needs to change by compensating these athletes for the money the generate. The term college athletes and professional athlete have always been distinguished by whether or not they are paid athletes or not. But as college athletics has grown so do the rules surrounded these athletes. If these athletes were compensated for their sports they would be more inclined to stay in college instead of trying to go professional and this would lead to more athletes with college degrees. Many college athletes report that they are declaring for the draft just because of financial hardships and not because they think they are ready for the professional sports world. With compensation of college athletes, we can help these athletes not accept money from illegal sources because they will have options and we can make it more of an incentive to stay in school, get your degree, then go professional. 

Forty hours a week training for their sport and forty hours a week studying, student-athletes are left with minimal time to do anything but especially not to work. This is something that normal everyday college students are able to do. Even without the work restriction put forth by the NCAA, student athletes wouldn’t have enough time to work even if they wanted to. With 168 hours in each week, these student athletes use 80 of those hours, on average, through studying and training for their sport and 49 hours a week sleeping.  These leave 39 hours a week of free time for a student athlete and this doesn’t even include hours traveling between class and practice, or even eating.  About 5.5 hours per day if they have nothing else to do other than sleep, studying, and train. In season these numbers can be even worse, athletes could be gone all week traveling to play and are still expected to keep up with their school week like they haven’t been their all week. This can add on to the average of 40 hours a week studying. Already at a disadvantage with their sport, athletes still have a restriction on how much they can work. A Division 1 baseball, basketball or football player is restricted to earning anything over $2000 per year. If the college athlete plays another sport that doesn’t have mandatory things all year then the athlete can earn a little more but it’s still not much. $2000 a year is a minimal amount for a college athlete to live off a year, whether or not he has a scholarship. College athletes are already put under enormous stress to succeed in their sport and financial stress is only adding to the fire.

Athletics in the modern day has become what no one in the early 1900s could have predicted. Athletes today are bigger stronger and faster than they have ever been and this puts a toll on their body. These athletics are no longer everyday people like they use to be, the look different than everyday people and it has shown through more competitive athletics in the late 20th and early 21st century. Athletics is no longer a hobby but it is a lifestyle that athletes around the world want to do for their whole life. All the lifting, competing and overall stress that these athlete’s bodies go through can affect their futures. Studies from Dr. Bennet Omalu, who is famously known for the movie Concussion, show that repetitive impact to the head from hits in such as football can cause brain damage that later on affect these athletics. This has led to an overwhelming number of college and professional athletics who have CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy), with over 79% of football players from the South Eastern Conference have been diagnosed with CTE. This may only be one sport in the athletics world but it is the sport that involves the most athletes, revenues the most money in college athletics and has the highest viewing audience. Dr. Omalu has other research that shows the training and competition and what it does on an athlete’s body and this may not be as serve as CTE but it can still leave athletes in discomfort when they are older and even some with severe arthritis. 

The NCAAs budget has been increasing at a rapid rate of 15% per year since 1982 and in 1997-1998 its budget was $270 million. With this budget the NCAA is adding many new things to help compensate its already dominance in the sports world not just collegiate. With this growing budget and revenue adds many new rules that need to be brought into question, such as how the athletes should be treated and how sports should be conducted. In a matter of 25 years (1971-1996) the NCAA manual grew from 161 pages to 1,268 pages with three volumes of books. A jump such as this is evidence that since the NCAA has grown its rules over how things should work within its system are no longer just a means of word of mouth but cases in the NCAA are able to reach the supreme court system. With this amount of emphasis many questions come up about how the NCAA will handle certain situation but this particularly puts a big emphasis on how the athletes should be treated such as if they should receive compensation. A study from the mid 1990s found that a college basketball player produces revenues of$870,000 to $1 million each year, but they are only compensated around $80,000 per year for the scholarships and everything provided for by the college for basketball. This is a huge offset in which the NCAA athlete is doing most of the work but only receiving little which is morally unfair to these young adults. Tom McMillen from the University of Maryland responded to the NCAA’s response in 1991 to the further rules to college athletes by saying “The NCAA’s response to the crisis has been inadequate.” Furthering the rules isn’t in the best interest of the NCAA because it could lead to a decrease in profits but it would be leading to a safer and more far competition. The NCAA has further tried to make the world of college athletes as fair as possible by the Title IX which requires there to not be a gender gap between male and female in college sports but it has yet to come to conclusion on compensation for each individual athlete. 

We live in a world where college football coaches receive higher pay than the president of universities. Many demand to create a reform to restore the morality of colleges to what they were before primetime television was focused around college sports. Now our universities are more known for their sports and not for their education which the tuition cost from the students is what keeps the lights on and not the revenue from sports. The media presents college sports as this million dollar revenuing system for colleges and that colleges are dependent on the revenues from their athletics but this could not be more false. The athletics are dependent on the college, almost all college athletic programs actually lose money every year except for a handful of football and basketball programs such as Dukes men’s basketball, Connecticut’s women’s basketball and Alabama’s football. There are more profiting athletic programs but it is a slim amount. There are many flaws in the correlation between college athletics and college education and this has led to many reform attempts since the very first college athletics event in 1852 between Yale and Harvard in a track racing event. Many questions arose even in this first event on terms of rules for college athletics of these questions the top 4 were: 1) How to create a competitive equity, 2) How to pay for the college athletic events, 3) What to do to ban or restrict unsavory practices, and 4) How to achieve academic integrity. Of these questions, all of them are still considered in today’s college athletics and all are still controversial.

Johnny Manziel was a primetime athlete in the NCAA College Football world when he was with Texas A&M for three years and he was a big time pursuer for paying college athletes. To Manziel and other athletes this sounds like a great plan but there is no fair way across the board to pay all college athletes equally for their work with their program. Just like in the real world, some employees are worth more than others and this is true for in sports too. With this being sad, society needs to stop looking at College Sports as college athletics but as a business because when you come down to it that’s all it is. College athletics is a business and education happens to be their service. Everyday businesses make their living on of the common business man, it doesn’t make it fair but that’s the way the business world is. College Athletes sign up for this when they sign their letter of intent to go to the university, they know what they are signing up for. Being a college athlete is basically taking a big time internship at a big corporation. You are taking no pay now so that you can gain experience and be better off down the road.

The NCAA paying college athletes wouldn’t make it college athletics anymore but now it would be a knockoff of professional athletics. Athletes would now be more about playing to get payed than playing to play for the love of the game. It would destroy the game, every athlete would be too worried about playing all out because they may get hurt and not get paid, instead of playing all out because they want their team to win and that’s the only thing that matters is if they win. Going to a middle school football game you can see the pure love for their sport in the way these young athletes play. They play as if this one game is the last thing they have in their life. They live everything out there and only care about winning the game for their team and anything less than that is not acceptable. Now going to an National Football League game, yes the athletes are the best at what they do but you can tell that they only playing to get paid. They won’t leave everything on the field to win the game if it damages their ability to play the next season. If they can’t play next season, then they won’t get payed. If the millions of dollars weren’t payed to the players and they only received minimum wage, then almost all players would leave and you would be left with the players who really love the game and not just ones who love the money. 