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Should college athletes be paid?
YES
Bill Lyon:
Universities are fostering a sham
How much money do you suppose Penn State made from riding the broad back and fleet feet of former star running back Curtis Enis? A million? Five million? Ten? What we do know is what Enis’s cut amounted to, which is the figure made by joining the tips of index finger and thumb.
For his 1,363 rushing yards and 19 touchdowns during the 1997 college football season, Enis was invited to an awards ceremony. A man is entitled to want to dress for such an occasion. But a suit of clothes required money that Enis did not have. Were he just a student and not an athlete, he could have accepted the gift of snappy duds from anyone. Were he an accounting major, a banker could have bought him a wardrobe, and no one would have looked twice. But he is a jock, and we hold jocks to a different standard. It is a double standard, and it reeks of hypocrisy. Still, we cling stubbornly to it. We insist on protecting a tradition that no longer exists.
Our universities, those supposed bastions of moral values, insist on fostering the transparent sham that college football is an amateur game played for the benefit of student athletes. In fact, it is big-time, big-money entertainment, with professional trappings, financed by a plantation mentality and slave labor.
While it’s fine to go after the leeches and the predators who ply star athletes with goods and luxuries, the root problem remains where it always has been. Right there on campus. Slowly--much too slowly--and hesitantly, like a turtle, the NCAA crawls toward reform.
Here’s an intriguing question: How is a football player supposed to go to class, play his sport and work at a part-time job? Perhaps the job could replace some minor incidental, say, sleep. The NCAA will permit jobs to be arranged by the athletic department and by boosters, which sounds suspiciously like holding open the hen-house door for the salivating fox. They may want to reconsider booster participation.
But at least we have, however wobbly, a start. At least the NCAA admits, however grudgingly, that athletes should be entitled to something. The first slice from an enormous pie is shamefully small, but maybe the schools eventually can be made to see how unconscionably discriminatory they are. What this will come down to is semantics. Should athletes be paid? Absolutely.
Richard Bill Lyon is a sports columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Reprinted with permission of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
NO
Andrew Zimbalist:
Only the few would benefit
Reform sports, yes; pay athletes, no. According to estimates by economists, star college athletes on top Division I basketball and football teams produce revenues between $500,000 and $1 million a year or higher. What do they get in return?
Ignoring illicit payments and benefits, the star athlete gets a free-ride scholarship including tuition, room and board, book money and emergency-needs funds. This value can run upwards of $35,000 annually. The star athlete often stays in special housing, eats well, travels first class, benefits from tutoring and may receive Pell Grant money of over $3,000 a year.
The star athlete must devote 40 to 60 hours a week, year round, to his sport. He must perform competitively and stay eligible. Graduation rates in Division I hover around 50 percent for football players and 40 percent for basketball players.
Is this star athlete’s benefits commensurate to the value he is producing for his school? No way. He is exploited big time. Is professionalization the solution? Only if one wants to change the face of college sports as we know it.
If we pay the star football player, do we also pay the first violinist in the school orchestra or the lead thespian in a school musical? Will other academic relationships be similarly mercantilized? And if we pay the star athlete, how much do we pay him? If we use market standards, then a few players will be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, a few will be paid between $50,000 and $100,000, a few will earn their full-ride scholarship, and hundreds of student athletes per school will lose their scholarships altogether.
In any given year, no more than one or two dozen colleges of the 970-plus schools in the NCAA turn a true surplus in their athletic programs. Put simply, colleges cannot afford to pay their top athletes without further draining their academic budgets.
There are more sensible reforms that should be attempted first. Allow student athletes to be real students by reducing the number of games and hours of training and practice. Allow the star student athletes to earn money on their athletic skills in the summertime. Allow them to test the waters in professional drafts and to retain their eligibility to play college sports until they receive their first professional paycheck. Allow them to borrow money to buy career-ending injury insurance. These and other changes make sense. They should be given the old college try before we throw in the towel.
Smith College professor Andrew Zimbalist is the author of Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time Sports.
