Every child at one point or another, dreams of being in a stadium filled with people cheering him or her on. For over 450,000 young men and women, this dream can be achieved through participating in collegiate sports. One of the first things that people think of when talking of college is sports. Many schools have reputations for being good at a certain sport. Alabama is a school that will always have a good football team on the field, schools such as North Carolina and Duke are known for their basketball dynasties. Today, famous programs such as these draw the attention of millions of viewers. The atmosphere and popularity of a Division I college sports game is very similar to that of a professional franchise. Over the years, as the competition in Division I sports has increased, so has the debate as to whether they should pay their athletes. As the spectacle of collegiate sports has started to reach that of the professional level, it is hard to argue that this level of the sport is still “amateurism” like the NCAA claims. Many experts have long thought that college athletes should be compensated for their efforts. These athletes put forth so much work into their sport that ethics dictate they should be compensated. Student-athletes should be treated as employees instead of students because they have a product that people pay for, they are required to work tirelessly to play at their level, and paying these athletes would make collegiate sports more competitive. 

The debate about whether colleges should pay their athletes or not has been around for years now but a recent story got the attention of the South Carolina community and national news outlets when one of USC’s finest was plagued by bad luck. Marcus Lattimore was an All-American running back for the Gamecocks and was even a Heisman contender, which is the highest recognition in college football. Marcus was a local celebrity and on the fast track to a promising and successful NFL career. He was a projected first round pick if he were to declare for the NFL Draft meaning that he would be offered a contract that would pay him millions of dollars. Unfortunately, just as he was reaching his potential, he was sidelined by a freak accident on the field which broke his leg and tore his ACL. This is not uncommon among athletes and it can be recovered from, which Marcus did. He then returned only to have his heart broken again when another unprecedented play inflicted the same injury on Marcus a second time. Now Lattimore went from being a first round pick who would sign a huge contract and have a guaranteed source of income to having no job and not being sure of what the future holds. If there was a payment method for student-athletes, then Marcus would have been receiving money prior to these injuries which he could fall back on in case of a misfortune. The average worth of a single football player at the University of Alabama is over $450,000 per year (Karaim). If Lattimore was able to be paid half of this sum for the three years that he was on the field for the Gamecocks he would still be in a position to succeed. The reason we should pay athletes is so that tragedies like this do not happen to good, hard-working people like Marcus Lattimore.

Today’s athletes are already treated as employees as they sign a contract with the school when accepting a scholarship and they are required to do the work that a coach gives them. On top of managing the same curriculum as an everyday student, coaches also give these athletes extra work pertaining to their sports. Athletes of today have to go to class, workout, attend practice, study, eat nourishing meals, and get enough sleep. Managing such a rigorous schedule can be very difficult especially if these athletes have the stress of financial struggles to deal with as well. On average a college athlete has 3.3 hours of more work than your typical American employee; athletes work for 40-60 hours per week and sometimes even more than that during training season (Edelman). Even though the National Collegiate Athletic Association or NCAA claims that athletes are just students, they still change these student’s schedules to miss classes in order for the student to go to a game for a nationally televised event that will bring in revenue for the school and the NCAA. If college athletes are actually “students first” like the NCAA claims they are, then the March Madness basketball tournament would violate this concept because athletes that participate in the March Madness basketball tournament miss an average of six classes per tournament which is more than students are usually able to miss on a normal syllabus (Edelman). Many schools also regulate how their athletes speak on social media which would only make sense if these schools view their athletes as employees. And if these athletes were seen as employees than their employer, the school, must pay them.

One of the most popular arguments against paying these athletes is that it would be too expensive. However, this argument can be easily disproved. The University of Alabama reportedly earned more money in sports revenue than every NHL team and 25 of the 30 NBA franchises, just to put revenue’s in perspective (Edelman). Last year alone, Turner Sports made an $11 Billion deal with the NCAA to get the rights for the March Madness college basketball tournament (Sanderson and Siegfried). This revenue is more than the estimated revenue brought in from the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League combined (Edelman). This is a tournament that only lasts 3 weekends out of the year. In just 3 weeks, the NCAA will make more money than the NHL and NBA just by televising a basketball tournament. This information is significant to my argument because if these professional leagues are making less than the NCAA, then the NCAA should have enough money to pay players.. The NCAA is not able to claim that there is not enough money either because in the year 2012 alone they claimed over $70 million in excess revenue (Davenport). Universities claiming that they cannot pay players because they do not have money can also be disproven. These universities say that they will only pay for athletes “expenses”, and one of the biggest expenses that they pay for the athletes, they are essentially paying to themselves (Bilas). Big time Division I athletes are capable of bringing in millions of dollars per year and for schools to claim that paying for these athlete’s tuition is enough is nonsense because it is not costing the university any money, they are essentially covering an open bed that would otherwise go empty. At the start of the NCAA in 1905, coaches were also prohibited from being paid, however they are paid very handsomely today. In 2013, the average salary of a BCS eligible football head coach was $2.05 million and the average salary for a premier Division I basketball coach also exceeded $1 million (Edelman).

Jay Bilas argues that athletes should be paid because college sports are a multi-billion-dollar industry and the only people restricted from sharing in that profit are the athletes that are putting on the performance. Implementing the system to pay college athletes would also be easier than officials would lead you to believe. Really the only difference in the system would be that each school can give out contracts and the players sign the contracts and are thereby bound to perform at a certain level (Sanderson and Siegfried)

 Another popular argument against the payment of college athletes is that if we pay these athletes than the competitiveness of sports will go down. However, this argument does not have any traction either because right now competition is down in college sports meaning that players have started to sit out games or save themselves for the next level. Jared Walch even stated that players shouldn’t be paid because no one is forcing them to play their sport, they are doing so voluntarily. Well this argument has begun to fade as well because elite level players in basketball either go to Europe to get paid right out of high school or they go to college for a “one and done” year in which they play for their freshman year and then immediately go to the NBA where they can get compensated for their skills (Bilas). Football players have also started on this track; players leave for the NFL as soon as possible for the opportunity to profit from their skills while they still can. Some college football players with enough skill have even decided to sit out of games to prevent injuries as of late. This trend became a very popular news story when big name football player Christian McCaffery of Stanford University sat out his team’s postseason game to prevent getting an injury prior to the NFL Draft. If anything, paying these athletes would make college sports much more competitive because athletes would play for more years in college which would make for more matchups between the best players and increased competition. If athletes were given money for their performances then they would be much less likely to sit out games in order to prevent injury. 

The argument against paying athletes for fear that it would make college sports unfair is another very popular approach to this conversation. The claim in this argument is that the bigger schools would dominant all of college sports and the smaller schools with less revenue would get left out without the ability to acquire the best athletes. However, this could not be further from the truth. The power houses of each sport would stay the same as they are today. The other teams could even have the chance to get better if tthey knew how to spend their money wisely. If all schools were able to pay players, then there wouldn’t be very much distinction between the prices to gain a player. The blue-chip basketball programs such as a Kentucky, North Carolina, and Duke who have the best coaches, best facilities, and loyal fan bases would stay the power houses of college basketball because players would sacrifice a little bit of money to obtain these factors that would help them get to the next level. These historic programs would also remain at the top of the sport because players would want to carry on the tradition and excellence of these programs as well as gain the support of their fan bases which are among the most fanatical and loyal in all of sports. The payment of college athletes would even help to clean up collegiate sports. NCAA rules violations have been progressing throughout the existence of the NCAA. Amazingly, 57% of the 106 Division I football programs have been either sanctioned, censured, or put on a probation for rules violations in the last decade (Goldman). This means that half of the programs within Division I football have already moved toward paying players in order to acquire their talent. If programs are already paying athletes to go to their school than there is obviously enough money to give to players. Make no mistake, the payment of these athletes illegally has gone on and will continue to go on until paying players is legalized. It would therefore be more fair on teams to make paying student-athletes legal so that teams would know what other schools are offering the players they are trying to recruit. 

The NCAA is a multi-billion-dollar industry and players are their employees. Interestingly, in 2014, the National Labor Relations Board or NLRB ruled in court that Northwestern football players were, in fact, employees of the university and were therefore allowed to unionize (Davenport). In no other walk of life would people allow others to be exploited for their hard work like the NCAA has been doing to athletes for decades. They claim that these sports are “amateurism”, and you could make an argument for that case if only the NCAA were talking about Division II and III sports. In these divisions, the NCAA does not charge for admittance and there is no profit. But Division I sports is a whole other story, they do charge for attendance, and they charge big money too. Jay Bilas explains this by using his own original scenario to help people better understand the injustice taking place. He says to look at athletes as if they were child actors and the NCAA as if it was a movie studio. Now what if the movie studio said that they would pay for expenses and give the child really nice accommodations, and maybe if they do really well, then the child can grow up to be an adult actor and get paid then. The parent of that kid would not agree with these conditions because the studio is making millions off a product that the child is supplying and is therefore exploiting that child’s skills. After all, without actors what would a movie be, is it not the actors that make the movie possible? The same thing is happening to our collegiate athletes according to Bilas. They are the ones that are putting on a show for all of the millions of fans that are watching, yet they are the only ones not getting recompense. 

Many experts claim that college athletes are already being paid via scholarships, meal plans, room and board and other expenses. First, let us look into what an athletic scholarship really is. Athletic scholarships are essentially, the athletic department of schools paying their own university for a student to go to school there. Using this logic, we can conclude that an athletic scholarship is essentially a university paying itself. In any case scholarships, even if they are counted as payment, are often not enough for athletes to live like they are accustomed to. When interviewed during the NCAA tournament, Shabazz Napier who was the star of a National Champion Connecticut Huskies basketball team said he had nights where he went to bed hungry (Karaim). This was a result of scholarship limits combined with the lack of money that Shabazz had. Napier was a player that brought his school a national championship and was easily worth over $100,000 at the time of this interview, yet he had to go without a meal some nights because of NCAA regulations and limitations. Many of the athletes of today come from poor backgrounds and do not have sufficient money to pay for meals and other expenses they need. In fact, when surveyed, more than 58% of athletes said that the money they were given by the school was inadequate and football and basketball players reported having less money after expenses than nonathletic students (Goldman). There is a fundamental issue with a system if that system is taking in billions of dollars per year and yet the star of a national champion basketball team cannot get enough money to eat a meal every night. 

Collegiate sports also build school recognition and are essentially advertisements for their universities. Imagine what Boise State would be without college football or Gonzaga without basketball? Unless someone comes from the states of Washington or Idaho, they probably would never even know that these schools existed. Without the enterprise of college sports, these schools would have to spend much more money each year to advertise their school in order to get students to apply. The number of students that apply to a school is very important because more applications typically mean better selection of students for the given school. Marc Edelman notes that the year that Doug Flutie won the Heisman Trophy while playing for Boston College, the university’s average SAT score by admitted freshman increased by a staggering 110 points. But this correlation isn’t just a football phenomenon. Patrick Ewing’s stellar 1982 basketball season propelled Georgetown University’s average SAT score of admitted freshman by 40 points (Edelman). 

The “student athlete” in college sports of today is a rare case in that they are taken advantage of completely and are unable to protest this mistreatment. There is no other instance in our society where people are taken advantage of and exploited for their services as much as college athletes (Bilas). These young men and women provide a service that run billion dollar industries and go without compensation for their efforts. They are given scholarships that, more often than not, are not enough to cover the cost of their living. The NCAA claims that they are just students but these athletes sign contracts when they accept a scholarship to a school just like an employee would and have to do the work that their coach expects or they could be fired which comes in the form of losing that scholarship.  Athletes even average over 3 hours of more work than the typical American employee. Paying these players will also help to increase the competition in college athletics. The one and done era of college basketball would virtually seize to exist because players would spend more time refining their skills in college if they were able to make some money. Football would also become more competitive because players would not sit out games for fear of getting injured, instead they would want to play because it would help them provide for themselves. Paying student athletes would also make the game fairer because all teams would be able to offer similar sums of money to the best athletes. This would eliminate NCAA rules violations from effecting programs because violations only occur because teams try to get the upper hand by paying recruits illegally or by promising them other royalties. College sports help the universities participating because it helps to market their university to the viewers of the game. This conversation should not only be important to sports fans, it is a problem that everyone needs to address. Student-athletes today are essentially treated as an indentured servant. If we are willing to sit still as a country while the future generation is being exploited, then we have not grown from the days of old where this mistreatment was accepted. Paying college athletes will enrich collegiate sports and solve a major injustice in today’s society. 
