By MICHAEL SMITH
Staff Writer
One major topic in sports today that is being debated is whether or not college athletes should be paid.
There are many people arguing for both sides in this debate. There are some people who believe college athletes, especially those in basketball and football, provide the same service as their pro counterparts. But it is not that cut and dry.
There are many things to be taken into consideration. Who is going to pay them? Right now, agents are paying athletes illegally and under the table so they can ensure that they will be their agents when the athletes turn professional. But those agents can’t pay everyone, there are way too many players on in college football to be paid by agents, and there are way too many sports beyond football.
There are two targets here, the universities and the boosters of each program. There may be money to be found to pay the student-athletes in each sport but however, even if that money is there now, it may not be sustainable over a long period of time.
A program could end because it wastes money on paying players instead of covering other essentials. Not every program at every school across the country is capable of paying its players and it’s not fair to pay one athlete and not another.
What is the pay scale? How do you decide the amounts you will pay the starting quarterback and the back up running back. Some teams play a predominant running game, so the starting quarterback sees the field more but the back-up running back has more value.
Plus, what is the pay of a football player, as opposed to that of an athlete that plays another sport. Football accounts for most of the athletic revenue of most schools across the country. Does that make it fair to pay the football players better than the other athletes?
Let’s combine the two problems. If it becomes a mandatory regulation, that all schools that participate in NCAA athletics pay their student-athletes a salary for their performance, then the football team at some schools may be capable of it, but the other teams may not and the NCAA may try and make it fair. But you just can’t make it fair for everyone, paying athletes is going to step on somebody’s toes. Not everybody is going to be able to handle this new expense.
How fair is a new regulation that shuts down a program? Even if it’s just one program, that’s one too many.
We live in a world where the only thing you can do to stop the under-the-table payments to college athletes, is to make it legal to so. However, it’s just not that simple, the NCAA is going to have to make the perfect rule so that no team or athlete feels like they were slighted. You can’t make everybody happy, but with a rule that has the potential to be as sensitive an issue as this one, you just may have to.
