Should College Athletes Be Paid?

The Free Market is Going to School, And We should All Be Worried

(Auburn Quarterback Cam Newton; students no longer use 
sports as a means to attend school, many now use school 
as a means to play sports.)

There's a black market for athletes in college sports.   Auburn Tigers quarterback Cam Newton is the current star of college football and is in the conversation to win the sport's top individual honor, the Heisman trophy. There's just one problem. He's embroiled in an unfolding scandal of allegations that he or those around him solicited large sums of money, in violation of the NCAA's longstanding policy that prohibits college athletes getting paid or accepting favors. If Newton were alone his problems would be little more than an unfortunate scandal. However in late summer, Super Bowl champion and New Orleans Saints RB Reggie Bush was forced to give back his 2005 Heisman trophy after it was revealed he accepted money and gifts when he was a college athlete at the then National Champion USC Trojans. In fact, during the summer of 2010 the NCAA opened an embarrassing amount of investigations into a score of collegiate football programs citing similar cases of student athletes being paid. Whether they want to admit it or not, college sports has a crisis on its hands. It's because of that crisis that American institutions of higher learning are probably about to become beacons of free market capitalism. Which will be a crisis in and of itself.

Each year EA sports releases its latest version of NCAA themed video games, basketball and football being the most popular, and makes millions in profits. Obviously the games' entire existence is centered around the use of real college athletes' likeness—nobody wants to play a sports video game with players that are truly random and fictional, which EA Sports maintains is the case. While the video games do not list actual player names, the rosters are based and built around real life NCAA rosters, which the NCAA itself licenses to EA Sports every year. While the NCAA profits from the licensing and EA Sports profits from the video games, NCAA rules technically prohibit the commercialization and profiting from a players likeness, a rule they strictly enforce on athletes. This allows everyone in college sports to make millions from video games except the actual athletes themselves. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The ticket sales from games, the sales of player jerseys and other merchandise, all adds up to college sports being a multi-million dollar industry each year, and everyone involved is seeing larger and larger paydays, except the players of course. In 2009 USA Today reported on UC Berkley football coach Jeff Tedford, taking an increased salary of $2.8 million a year despite the national recession, academic cuts, and the rise of tuition cost at Berkley. College football's highest paid coach, Mack Brown, makes over $5 million a year. That's not to say neither deserves the money, but neither would have a team if they didn't have players. And the players are not allowed to make a penny.  To a certain degree this very hypocritical and wrong. To demonstrate the depth of hypocrisy and yet the conflicting nature of the problem here is last years National Champion, University of Alabama, Coach Nick Saban calling sports agents who prey on (pay) college athletes pimps.  Nick Saban has a $32 million 8 year contract with U of A.  His players earn nothing.  Who's really the pimp?
 

However, The NCAA's reasons for restricting college athletes from making money are of course noble and in fact right, but they don't reflect reality and its really beginning to show. College athletes shouldn't be paid because they're presumably in school to obtain a degree, and their extracurricular activities are supposedly secondary to their studies. Furthermore, America's institutions of higher learning should be just that, and not factories for minor league athletes using universities as their stepping stone into the pros. How can there be a collegiate system in which a struggling poor biology student at Duke attends class with the star of the basketball team who earns thousands of dollars (possibly more) each year because of his contributions to the school on the court? It's because of these, and a myriad of other reasons, that the NCAA correctly prevents student players from getting paid. However, there are millions of dollars in college sports, athletes aren't exactly stupid, and many make a grab for their piece of the pie. In the October 18, 2010, issue of Sports Illustrated, former sports agent Josh Luchs described a detailed a list of college players he paid and gifted in exchange for a tacit agreement to represent them once they graduated from school. Concert tickets, cars, monthly payments. According to Luchs and others who have come forward, there's an epidemic on the nation's college campuses. The NCAA may prohibit student players from getting paid, but college sports is a big business and business is booming, thus a black market for player pay has simply evolved. Player pay is coming whether anybody likes it or not because it's already here. As the cases of Cam Newton and Reggie Bush demonstrate, it's just a matter of how long the NCAA wants to investigate and prosecute their top players and schools, threatening the health of the sport all together by going after their own stars and top revenue sources.

The top 5 colleges in football revenue brought in over $300 million in '07/08, with the best teams bringing in the most money. There are universities whose entire budgetary structure is dependent on the revenue stream of their sports teams. That of course is the free market, as successful college teams bring in more money for their schools, and those schools profit nicely. The question is whether higher education should be surrendered entirely to the free market. If college athletes are paid (and I'm convinced that will happen), it will simply reflect the free market with the best players earning the most money, at the best collegiate sport teams. Yet the danger is that a large portion of the university and college system will become a slave to college athletes, their salaries, and the market force of demand for excellent athletes. This is why the NCAA ignored Reggie Bush's problems in 2005 and allowed him the Heisman (only to take it back), and they're looking to allow Cam Newton to earn it this year despite his problems. The NCAA is fully aware it has a massive problem on their hands, but it's ignoring that problem because the NCAA is also fully aware that the coming alternative will have disastrous effects far beyond anyone's control. Education should never be subject to the free market.  But we may soon find out what happens when it is.