Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
College athletes - should they be paid to play?
Do college athletes deserve to be paid? ESPN reporter Michael Wilbon used to argue against it, thinking that tuition, room, board and books were compensation enough. And even if it wasn’t enough, the idea of pay-for-play would at best be considered a logistical nightmare. “Where would the money come from? How could you pay college football players but not baseball players or members of the women’s field hockey team? And how in the world would you pay men in a way that wouldn’t violate Title IX?"
So what changed his mind? That $10.8 billion deal between the NCAA and CBS/Turner Sports for March Madness between 2011 and 2024. That’s $11 billion for three weekends of television per year. In a move expected to shore up the financial health of college sports, the contract will allow for the entire men’s basketball tournament to be televised.
It will funnel at least $740 million annually to NCAA member colleges and will very likely include an expansion of the tournament field to 68 teams, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. While the vast majority of those dollars will go to elite programs like those at Texas, many smaller athletics departments rely on their tournament distribution to support the day-to-day activities that keep their programs afloat.
The previous CBS contract, worth $6 billion, or about $500 million per year, was not set to expire until 2013. However, association officials began renegotiating last summer with the hopes of avoiding a severe reduction in rights fees. CBS was reportedly worried about losing money on the last deal.
Michael Wilbon isn’t interested in equally distributing the wealth among all the athletes. He’d like to see the people who produce the revenue share a small percentage of it. “That’s right, football and men’s basketball players get paid; lacrosse, field hockey, softball, baseball, soccer players get nothing. You know what that’s called? Capitalism. Not everything is equal; not everything is fair. The most distinguished professor at the University of Alabama won’t make $5.9 million in his entire tenure in Tuscaloosa. Nick Saban will make that this year. So I don’t want to hear that it’s “unfair” to pay the quarterback of Alabama more than all the sociology students in the undergraduate college.”
Rick Morrissey, writer for the Chicago Sun Times, agrees in theory with Wilbon, but with very different reasoning. Morrissey says, “ESPN’s new Longhorn Network allows the University of Texas to televise its athletic events. More importantly, it will generate at least $11 million a year for the school during the next 20 years. If ESPN recoups all of the $295 million it has invested in the network, Texas will get 70 percent of future profits.
“And the athletes? The ones doing the sweating and the entertaining? Not a dime of any of it.
“If you like your mixed messages slathered on thick, the NCAA recently proposed a rule change that lets schools provide athletes with butter, cream cheese, peanut butter and jelly for use on bagels. According to Sports Illustrated, providing the bagels is acceptable, but supplying the spreads is still considered a minor rules violation.
“There are always going to be unscrupulous agents offering loans to players. And the stipends I’m talking about – $50 a week, $100 a week? – wouldn’t stop some athletes from wanting more. But it might allow them to go on a date or buy an iPod.
“Football and basketball players deserve to be paid something. They’re the one's generating the money that makes the college sports world go ‘round. Look at BYU. The football and men’s basketball programs were the only sports at the school to make money in 2009, according to the Deseret News. Because of those two programs, the school managed to turn a $5.5 million profit.
“Colleges never will give up on the big business of sports, but it’s not asking too much for them to give up a sliver of the proceeds.”
Should college athletes get a piece of the pie? Let us know what you think, Odessa.
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