College sports have been a staple in American life for many decades and they will continue to be one but not without major changes. Over the last 10-15 years-college sports have grown exponentially large and the NCAA is implementing new rules, extra games, and many more hours for the student athletes to work around. College sports have never been as big as they are today and the players should be getting rewarded for that. We now have an issue of whether the college players should be getting paid that nobody even 20 years ago would have thought could be a possibility in collegiate athletics. These players must go to school first and still work around the same number of hours that professional athletes would work. College athletes deserve to be compensated for their play in their respective sport. There is much controversy on this topic as many people want to keep the tradition of college sports but now many want the NCAA to catch up on the times and give the players what they deserve for each of their individual sports. That is what the Pay for Play system will give these players.

These student athletes are bringing in thousands, even millions of dollars to the universities that they are representing. There is so much money being brought into these programs that it seems unethical to not pay these athletes. One specific reason why this is a big issue in sports right now is because of major TV deals that the NCAA is receiving. When the organization(NCAA) is using its athletes to create a market that has never been seen before and many of the public did not realize how much money was being brought in by the NCAA until a TV deal was signed in 2010. That specific deal done in 2010 was an $11 billion deal between the NCAA and CBS/Turner Sports for March Madness between 2011 and 2024. This is a massive $11 billion for three weekends of television per year. (Wilbon) This is the problem. You have the NCAA making billions and these students are struggling to eat and do things that normal students can do. This hunger issue first became National News during the 2014 March Madness tournament when UCONN basketball captain explained to reporters he would go to bed starving on most nights, "He says he's going to bed hungry at a time when millions of dollars are being made off him. It's obscene," Lesser said. "This isn't a Connecticut problem. This is an NCAA problem” (Ganim). The big issue is trying to distribute the money equally between men and women but also between the big market sports, like football and basketball, compared to lacrosse and baseball. This is where the Pay for Play system would come into place. This system would be set up so that whatever the revenue that a specific program is bringing in, get split between regular expenses, coach’s salary and finally they would pay out the players a percentage of leftover revenue. This would be different amounts for each sports program but that is how professional sports operate. Some teams make much more money and can pay their players more while some teams make less so they would have to pay their athletes a little less. This is how it has always been in the professional leagues and it has not created any major issues between sports and it would be the same for the NCAA.  Therefore, the Pay for Play system would be the most beneficial as it will rid of any Title IX issues because the players are getting paid only for revenue their sport brings into the university. Women’s programs would also pay their athletes the same percentage so it would not violate this Title.  It is a very intriguing discussion point and the fact is that the markets for certain sports are bigger than others and the Pay for play system is trying to benefit all athletes, at all universities.

This issue of whether the athletes get paid is one that casual sports fans have been introduced to more recently due to expanding schedules, 24-hour social media coverage, and many other contributing factors that have caused interest in fans. This was not a problem in 2007 because there was not that constant coverage that we now have and it has exposed itself on a bigger scale now that we are all connected all day, every day. Casual fans now have inside access to the college athlete’s life and get the chance to see how they live compared to regular students. This is through the social media aspect that we now have access to and the fact the fans can follow their favorite athletes on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and see what they are doing and where they are every day. This problem would not be as relevant today if it weren’t for that constant coverage and with that a change must occur because everyone can now see the problem from the first-hand viewpoint.

The system that has been in place forever has a strict policy on paying players, giving them gifts, and selling an article of personal belonging for profit. Many athletes cannot accept any gifts or anything from fans and it creates internal issues that the NCAA has taken players to court, suspended them, or have them kicked out of the league completely (Panim). These players are working with their sport, as long, if not longer than some professionals, the schedules keep growing, in 2015 the College Football Playoff was added and expanded CFB schedules by 2 games without any consent from players, and now the stakes to win a national championship are higher than ever. Throughout the last couple of years, a lot of new information has come out against the NCAA and an interesting statistic that shows the corruption of the NCAA is outstanding. In 2010, despite the faltering economy, a single college athletic league, the football-crazed Southeastern Conference (SEC), became the first to crack the billion-dollar barrier in athletic receipts. The Big Ten pursued closely at $905 million (Branch). Having this linger in the student athlete’s minds is not what the NCAA wants especially in today’s constant coverage. There is an immense amount of pressure that universities and the NCAA place on these students without helping them out in payments, except in scholarships that can only be put toward school tuition, room, food. There needs to be a positive change that will not only pay the players but help the NCAA continue to make the money it needs to operate. Overall the entire college athletic system is flawed and it really should be looked at and changed in some ways. There are plenty of ways to resolve this and the NCAA should take a closer consider how it can fix itself.  

There is a system that would not only pay the players but it would also make sure that each university and the NCAA were also making their money. This system, Pay for Play introduced by Joe Nocero is his NY Times article in 2016, would be a revenue based system that would set up the players with money from revenue brought in from previous seasons and promotional events. Obviously, this would apply to each sport at the schools but this article focus on the big market sports. Every Division I men’s basketball and football team would have their set amount of money from their revenue. The numbers are not going to be accurate now because it has never been done before but this would set up the teams to pay out each of its players from a set amount of money that is from previous seasons revenue and any extra money that the teams have, which they do because many Power 5 schools are paying their head coaches millions of dollars. The Power 5 are the 5 biggest and usually best conferences in college sports, consisting of: SEC, BIG 10, BIG 12, PAC 12 ,and the ACC. They should be able to use about half of this salary cap from the current players and use the rest as a recruiting tool to be able to get highly touted recruits to give each school a look to how much money they could receive compared to other programs. One university might want to offer a star halfback $40,000, while another might offer him $60,000 (Nocero) “The player would make a choice based not on a recruiter’s sweet-talking promises — or not solely on that — but on cold, hard cash” (Nocero 17). The system comes full circle unlike the current day system. This not only helps bring in better players but eventually leads to more money for the programs because the team is getting players, producing better results on the field. 

This system has many other benefits as well. Now, that players can receive money, boosters are able to pay these players too. Boosters are usually alumni, fans of the university, or former athletes. Universities can set up tax-deductible funds that the boosters can put money into. Instead of just giving cash directly to the school, it is going to the players. Now this system would need to have contract to ensure that the players are withstanding students and getting the work done to stay eligible or else they will not receive their payment for that week, this could also enforce policy of staying for a certain amount of time, whether it be all 4 years, or maybe 2-3 instead of having players stay for one year and leaving school, especially in basketball, which helps build foundations for the sports programs, which in turn makes more money. Another flaw that those who refute this idea, would say that paying some players more than others would create problems in the locker room, but that is how life has always been in the pro’s, so why would it be any different at the college level. Many professional leagues have player unions, and that is a problem that college athletes thought they would face but it turns out they already have a union. Having this union insures the players that they are going to be represented by someone who is on their side. Their union is called the National College Players Association, headed by Ramogi Huma (Nocero). Ramogi faced the problems of being a student athlete first-hand while at UCLA. He wanted to create an organization that could protect and improve its collegiate athletes. Already having a union in place makes this system look more and more appealing to the players because it shows they are going to be protected from the NCAA and that someone is looking out for them and it has shown over the course of the last 5 seasons, many players are willing to get this done.  This will be very beneficial in the first 5 years of implementing the system, The N.C.P.A. would negotiate with the N.C.A.A. and the Power 5 conferences over the salary cap and minimum salaries, which would probably increase over time. It would also have a spot during the meetings with the conferences and the N.C.A.A. when they negotiate with the networks over television rights. (Economist). It does sound confusing but this exact system is almost the same how music royalties are handled and the Power 5 conferences would have to set up a system to split up the prime-time games. This system has potential to completely change college sports because of the exponential growth in money that both the NCAA and its players would be receiving and hopefully something like this will be implemented within the next 5-10 years so that college sports would no longer be flawed by the strict imposition by the NCAA. 

A typical Division 1 football player must work 15 hours a day daily. They wake up at 6 am and do not stop for breaks until 9 pm that same day. They must put in all their school work in the morning, after lifting, and then have a 4 four long practice of some type, meetings, lift, practice, other day-day activities in the afternoon, until 9 pm when they must be studying again. Theses time constraints that the athletes face was brought to the surface during the 2015 Super Bowl media day with former college athlete and Seattle Seahawks player Richard Sherman going into detail about this problem. (Wire) These players are putting in hours of week each day and are only receiving a scholarship, which is not a bad thing, it is just not the just payment they should be receiving for 15 hour days for 6 days a week. Players in high school should be playing with an incentive that they are going to receive money if they go to university to play a sport and if an athlete is a special talent, they deserve to want to get paid as soon as they go to college and have long weeks of work. In the past, many former athletes have come out against the NCAA for the unfair amount of work they did for them, and not getting anything out of it. Most recently it was the O’Bannon v NCAA case that occurred in 2009. The NCAA has recently faced unprecedented legal challenges that could fundamentally alter the labor market it faces. The most prominent of these is the case brought by Ed O'Bannon. (McCann). Edward O’Bannon was a former UCLA basketball player that won the 1985 championship and he filed for an antitrust violation against the NCAA. Many of the lawyers that were representing O’Bannon were trying to expose the NCAA, “They are seeking an injunction that halts the N.C.A.A.’s rules prohibiting universities from paying players for their publicity rights. “-Free-market forces would then determine whether schools decide unilaterally to compensate college athletes” (Strauss 1). This is saying that schools should have the choice if they want their athletes to sell personal belongings or receive gifts, on top of getting paid. The NCAA would not be directly involved in this aspect. 

 This O’Bannon case was for major football and basketball players in the NCAA and a concluding decision that was made was, “that once a payer graduated, that he/she was entitled to financial compensation for the NCAA commercial uses of his or her image” (Wong 1097). During the 1990’s and early 2000’s the NCAA created video games using the active players on the college sports teams, using their name, number and sometimes pictures of those athletes and all those athletes were not compensated for the commercial use of them. These video games used over 100,000 athletes and they did not get paid a single cent for their usage in the game. Having past athletes come out against the NCAA does not help their case any, with the specific issue. If the NCAA is going to continue to not want to pay its players, they are going to continue to face the reality of the situation. The players are upset and want to receive the money that they earned during their playing careers. This situation is going to continue to worsen in the next five to ten years and a change needs to happen.

There are many benefits to paying our college athletes in a new system. Those benefits include: it attracts the best talent, it encourages the healthy players, and the money would evenly be distributed to fit the schools/sports teams need. Attracted talent is a huge component of college sports, because if you don’t attract any talent, you are going to go nowhere as a team, coach, university. Having an initiative to get paid from top universities is the biggest key in implanting this system. When prospects are given the opportunity to receive real compensation instead of just the scholarship, meaning cash it will motivate them to continue to get better, which will make everyone happier in the end. As a college student, having money to look forward to is the most important part of my week, and if I don’t get my money for the weeks’ worth of work, I won’t be able to provide for myself for the week. This is the situation that college athletes are finding themselves in week after week. They need to be getting some type of payment to get them to give their best effort and if they are unable to receive anything, morale does drop quite quickly. Those players need that motivation each week to not only boost their own morale, but to also allow them to be paid for their weeks’ worth of hard work. 

Distributing the money seems to be the biggest factor that many experts are predicting as the key to passing a new system. With this Pay for Play system we should be able to distribute the money easily. Those who want to make a change but don’t want to pay the players directly through Pay for Play have come up with an idea that is intriguing, “Many people believe that it is more deserving and righteous that earnings from TV networks running the games should go back into the schools as a whole and not to the individual players. Then, the money would be disbursed evenly throughout the school, resulting to lower tuition rates and improved school program” (Green). Going about the system in this way, by paying the school rather than the players is not the most beneficial tactic. Having this, in place, is almost what they have today because schools and conferences already make money from their schools playing in big games, so paying the school is not the right way to set up a successful system. If we were to pay anybody, it should be the team directly, instead of the school. Paying the program gives them to evenly distribute the money to the players, coaches, and to building new facilities and fields. Each program would receive the revenue that they deserve and it would create a NCAA economic boom, that would not only help the NCAA but help the economy overall. Having all this extra cash flowing through the system is what will be the most beneficial scenario. 

Many people disagree with pay for play. These people want to keep college sports the same in a changing industry. This is no longer just a sports market that college sports are targeting. They have so many different ads, campaigns and other issues that are bringing in casual sports fans or even non-sports fans at all, talking all about the games that happen each year in the College Football Playoff and March Madness. They target all types of people for these games to get more and more people watching college athletics. Many people who watch college sports during big tournaments or games are seeing how the players are treated and how much the players work during big events and they are on my side of the argument. Those “old timers” that want to keep sports as is have one argument that is still relevant.  “the camaraderie of game day, the tailgating, the atmosphere of a stadium packed with nearly 100,000 fans and the pride of cheering for a university team -- are at stake” (Panim). This argument is very relevant because many of the older generations have been around since the dawn of college sports and its huge growth over the last 50 years of the 20th century and they don’t want to lose what they watched grow. Another argument is that the college athletes are not legally considered professionals. Having them called professionals would be false because they are, in fact amateurs. These amateurs are putting in almost the same number of hours, travelling, and media coverage that the professionals also receive. When you combine these factors, it becomes clear that these players should be getting paid for the play. This situation needs a through look at by NCAA officials but also legal representatives that can assist these players in getting paid soon.

Collegiate athletics is one of the most intriguing aspects of American life. We watch student athletes as if they are professionals. The NCAA and its member institutions will continue to deny but as proven, “to pay the players would simply require a reallocation of resources, the economists said. Assuming the university declined to increase the football or basketball team’s funding, that program would just have to move the money from some other part of its budget” (Goplerud 5). It can be a very simple system if the Pay for Play is implemented and those funds that schools already have, can be used to pay those players. We need to start paying them as they are professionals. Hopefully the NCAA decides to pay its players because they rightfully deserve to get a payment for their work. 
