Why We Need to Pay College Athletes
With the 2012-13 NCAA Football season ending just 2 months ago with Alabama trumping Notre Dame in the BCS National Championship, and March Madness just days away, the issue of paying college athletes is as popular as ever. Despite the recent scandals, the popularity of college sports is at its all time high. With millions of people watching these sports, the broadcasting alone brings in over 700 million dollars each year for the NCAA. When the NCAA is making that much a year, doesn’t it make you wonder if the right people are being paid?
The idea of paying college athletes to play dates back to the first intercollegiate competition. In a series of boat races between the Harvard Crimsons and the Yale Bulldogs, the Crimsons used a coxswain who was not even a student enrolled at the Ivy League school. Much like today’s universities whose appetites for appearances in corporate-sponsored “big money” football bowl events, the Crimsons may have used the non-student to feed the hunger for victory of race sponsor, Elkins Railroad. While they appear to be operating in a solely professional atmosphere, the NCAA continues to show an amateurism concept in college athletics. These contradictory values lead some college athletes in major sports programs, in big championship games to question the status quo of the current system through their words and actions. These athletes push their luck and take a leap of faith trying to get what they think they deserve. They try to get their piece of the pie under the table.
Much like our own school, the NCAA has a value that college athletes are students first and athletes second, and are not paid because they are not employees of the university. The most a college can give an athlete is a “Free Ride.” The “Free Ride” scholarship is only so much. A “Free Ride” can only include tuition to the school, fees, a place to live, food to eat, books. While the scholarship is worth anywhere from 20 thousand dollars to 100 thousand
The idea of paying college athletes to play dates back to the first intercollegiate competition. In a series of boat races between the Harvard Crimsons and the Yale Bulldogs, the Crimsons used a coxswain who was not even a student enrolled at the Ivy League school. Much like today’s universities whose appetites for appearances in corporate-sponsored “big money” football bowl events, the Crimsons may have used the non-student to feed the hunger for victory of race sponsor, Elkins Railroad. While they appear to be operating in a solely professional atmosphere, the NCAA continues to show an amateurism concept in college athletics. These contradictory values lead some college athletes in major sports programs, in big championship games to question the status quo of the current system through their words and actions. These athletes push their luck and take a leap of faith trying to get what they think they deserve. They try to get their piece of the pie under the table.
Much like our own school, the NCAA has a value that college athletes are students first and athletes second, and are not paid because they are not employees of the university. The most a college can give an athlete is a “Free Ride.” The “Free Ride” scholarship is only so much. A “Free Ride” can only include tuition to the school, fees, a place to live, food to eat, books. While the scholarship is worth anywhere from 20 thousand dollars to 100 thousand