More Active Posts
Front Page
Turf serfs?
 |
 15 Comments |
Should college football players get paid? That’s the question Michael Lewis at The New York Times ponders:
This is maybe the oddest aspect of the college football business. Everyone associated with it is getting rich except the people whose labor creates the value. At this moment there are thousands of big-time college football players, many of whom are black and poor. They perform for the intense pleasure of millions of rabid college football fans, many of whom are rich and white. The world’s most enthusiastic racially integrated marketplace is waiting to happen.
What do you think?
 |
Topic: WorldMagBlog |  |
Email a friend |
 |
Keywords: college-football |  |
RSS 2.0 |
 |
Both comments and pings are currently closed. |  |
Share this: |
Less is more
Last time I checked they were getting an education and a chance at future opportunities. What a mess it would make to pay the players.
Who’s getting rich from college football? I can’t figure that one out.
I think they should be paid as employees of the university. Murray Sperber, in BEER AND CIRCUS, has a great proposal for college football: Treat the athletes like members of the college staff. Pay them, offer them the option of attending classes (as most colleges do for their staffs) and make sure they can attend classes and earn a degree if they choose. Pay them reasonably - like minor league baseball-type salaries - and let the boosters augment that salary if they wish.
It would become all about the money, but it already is all about the money. Let division II and/or III (and NAIA) schools remain the same, if they choose.
And give us a playoff.
Potential problems:
(1) The players would become unionized and always be dissatisfied with their current benefits.
(2) Some of them would choose not to attend classes and would then turn around and be angry that the college didn’t give them a degree for playing sports. Given that they all could not continue as pro players, they would join the ranks of the unemployed.
(3) The members of the marching band, the swimming team, and the journalism department would then demand that they get paid for their work. Laughable I know, but it would happen.
HSK, Kyle is right, there would be a where-does-it-end reaction. Scholarships are sort of like getting paid–room, board and education (if you want it). You do four hard years to become a millionaire, hey, just like the engineering students!
If there is some great need to pay college football players they should seperate the players from colleges completely and set up a farm system like baseball.
I agree, the problems are many, but many of the pathologies of higher ed can be traced back to the overemphasis on athletics (and I love athletics).
While paying athletes would create a whole slew of problems, my concern would be to preserve (or rather restore) the integrity of higher education. Converting athletes to staff might help this problem. No space or time to develop this argument, though.
While I don’t disagree with Kyle…
There is big money in college football. It draws more people and money than you can shake a stick at. Where do you think they get the $$$ to pay these high dollar executives they call “coaches” and “atheletic” directors? Not to mention multi-million dollar stadiums with skyboxes…
I understand Kyle’s point, but I also understand that in all other area’s of society, when a person makes a product, it belongs to them. Most times we work for someone else, and in lieu of being paid in that product, the employer pays us money.
In the college football scenario the worker is being paid a disproportionate amount for the $ his work generates. Of course it may be with the cost of a college education these days, that this is not true….
The better players already get a free education, with room and board thrown in (as has been mentioned). Why pay them cash? What then would you do with other athletes, primarily the basketball players who also bring in the money to the school?
If they must get paid, how about the going rate for work-study students, which I believe is 85% of the minimum wage?
I was in a much lower revenue sport - so this didn’t come up in my sport.
But I always tried to make clear to my players who might be able to get an athletic scholarship that it was going to change from a game to a job. And they were going to be - effectively - paid $20k to $40k a year for the job (depending on tuition levels at their school).
They are already paid with free tuition, room and board plus getting the chance to hone their athletic skills under great coaching to get the chance to go pro for big bucks later. They also say that getting a college education gets you an extra $50,000 a year when working at a job afterwards - that sounds like a $2 million bonus even if they never go pro.
This debate never ends but it should. They already get paid very well for 18-223 year olds.
The question really isn’t whether they should be compensated (the better ones already are), but rather how well they should be compensated and why.
I’m against paying them. Yes, schools make lots of money from college sports. Yes, athletes aren’t compensated with much of the profits made. But that money goes to subsidize the cost of education for others at the school, which is a much wiser use of the funds anyway.
There is not a good way to handle this.
The current system has lots of problems, primarily that players ARE being paid. And not just with education–they are being paid with cars, cash, and prizes. It’s not a coincidence that all of the BBall players at my university were driving pimped-out Escalades.
Secondly, not all athletes are suited to be students of higher learning. It seems a bit unfair that in order to a professional football player, you have to either pass 3 years of collegiate academics or spend 3 years working out by yourself, removed from competition (since you cannot directly go Pro).
The problem with paying college athletes is that you are essentially creating another NFL. It would be a headache for schools to spend each year working out contracts with a new class of recruits. Now-a-days, it’s just a matter of getting someone to accept a full scholarship. A change would mean having to piece together an incentive package for each player. If contract negotiations are tough with a single coach, imagine doing the same with 20-25 recruits.
And you are never going to get away from the cheating. Even if you are allowed to pay athletes, you will always have schools paying their athletes more than is allowed.
I really don’t think that college football players should be paid. Like other people have pointed out, they are already getting paid with scholarships, etc. Besides, those scholarships most likely come at least partly from the profits made at the games.
Unless some universal salary was set, we would have players deciding where to go for college based on how much they would be paid, rather than the quality of the education they would get. Then all the bigger schools with lots of money would gain an advantage, and college football would become more and more lopsided. Eventually, there would be a few teams that always got the better players, and always went to the bowl games (another problem; we need a playoff). That would destroy college football.
Do the players really need to be paid? I think they already have enough money.
Llama #9: They also say that getting a college education gets you an extra $50,000 a year when working at a job afterwards …
Hey, I’m getting ripped off! I make less than $50k/year, and I have a Master’s! Does this mean I am paying for the priveledge to work?
llama - I noticed that extra $50k per year item too. That just can’t be right.
Amen to Kyle in post one.
Amen to the idea of a playoff as well.