http://college-football.si.com/2013/09/05/time-cover-story-johnny-manziel/

Time Magazine lays out the reasoning behind paying college players....if the NFL formula for revenue sharing is used the average player might make as much as $200K...or more.


What say you?

I've posted for years that the problem here is that the NCAA over penalizes college players and inflicts arbitrary penalties for amounts that are chump change/spending money. Most of the problems and investigations( which cost millions) involve amounts less that $10K.

If you simply allow a player to make a limited amount of money(say $5-10K/year) thru any source, most of this NCAA crap goes away. You don't need to pay these guys 'pro' money.

They should rename the article:

It's time to pay college football and basketball players and then cut all other sports for a lack of funding.

Then 20 years later we can read about the decline of college sports because direct competition with the NFL and NBA for a professional sports ended up being a death sentence for football and basketball while other non-revenue generating sports without the extra revenue generated from football and basketball have been cut in a lot of schools and there are a lot less opportunities for people to participate in college athletics overall. (Sorry for the excessively long sentence).

Looks like the Ivy League was right all along in refusing to allow athletic scholarships as it would eventually put the sport above the academics.

In a recent Yahoo column, Dan Wetzel made a very interesting point. One of the excuses colleges give for why players shouldn't be paid involves their revenue and how that would cut into it.

Only thing is, in the wake of recent scandals, seems a lot of these schools have put big money into compliance departments (he used Ohio State's as an example -- apparently it's a 15-man department where the head guy makes six figures and gets a free car). So in order to make sure kids aren't getting any extra benefits, schools are spending huge amounts of money on a department that has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with sports or education -- but solely to ensure that all NCAA-sports-related money is only going to the NCAA.

What a total waste.

Here's the link to that column, which also has an interesting bit on the shady history of the concept of amateur athletics.

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/ncaaf--latest-college-scandals-again-reveal-folly-of-ncaa-rules-210822795.html

Pay each player 15-20k a year and be done with it. That way it's not too much money but it's still a decent amount for a college kid

Players shouldnt be paid, and quite frankly, I'm tired of the "debate." It's a complex subject. It shouldnt be changed just because people break the rules.

The NFL requires 3 years removed from high school before they can enter the league. Why, to protect its union members. So here is the problem, athletes who are capable of being in the league must go somewhere to keep competing until they are eligible. So, the NCAA is nothing more than the NFL's minor league. Kids who have no desire to attend college, only do so in hopes of reaching the NFL. Why doesn't the NFL start their own minor league, why would they when they have a freebie in college football? Colleges arent going to change, they have a cash cow as well. The only way to get this to change, stop putting your butt in the seats at both levels!

There's no reason to pay them. People have to break down a decision to be a college athlete into it's simplest level... the good and bad of entering such an agreement with the NCAA and any respective University.

The positives still outweigh the negatives.

If they don't, for any particular individual, they can simply not take the offer.

Paying college athletes would be the worst mistake possible.

1) There is no way to quantify who should make what, or why. So you pay Justin Zwick "X" and Troy Smith "Y" - how did that work out? And how are you going to handle non-revenue sports, i.e. all women's athletics at most colleges.

2) No college athlete is starving and many of them live like kings on campus - and you want to give them more money? Again, NO ONE is starving. I can see additional aid for relatives to travel to games, or other sort of support in that manner. But if you want to be a college student, be a college student. If you don't there are other options.

3) There is no way I'd send my 18 year old daughter to any place where some dude is making $200,000 for simply playing football.

4) These guys aren't starving. I'm going to restate that. I don't know where Time magazine authors went to school, but at my undergrad football players got free housing, free food at the athletic facility and a stipend to boot, and got summer jobs if they wanted them.

5) If we start paying athletes, my wife and I will stop donating to our respective schools.

No.

They should be able to collect on whatever they want, but not be able to draw from it until after college. They should be clean of all NCAA penalties while in college.

And as for being paid... it should not be by the university. Let players make whatever money they want, on the side, but make them account for every penny, and save it.

Pay them but they better not ever try to sell or barter any of their personal belongings.

Manhattan Buckeye;1499730 wrote:Paying college athletes would be the worst mistake possible.

1) There is no way to quantify who should make what, or why. So you pay Justin Zwick "X" and Troy Smith "Y" - how did that work out? And how are you going to handle non-revenue sports, i.e. all women's athletics at most colleges.

2) No college athlete is starving and many of them live like kings on campus - and you want to give them more money? Again, NO ONE is starving. I can see additional aid for relatives to travel to games, or other sort of support in that manner. But if you want to be a college student, be a college student. If you don't there are other options.

3) There is no way I'd send my 18 year old daughter to any place where some dude is making $200,000 for simply playing football.

4) These guys aren't starving. I'm going to restate that. I don't know where Time magazine authors went to school, but at my undergrad football players got free housing, free food at the athletic facility and a stipend to boot, and got summer jobs if they wanted them.

5) If we start paying athletes, my wife and I will stop donating to our respective schools.

XXX...BUZZZZ...WRONG.

I agree with you about a lot of things MB, but not this.
My uncle was a player on the the Buckeyes national championship team back in the 40's, and the only reward he got for his lifetime of orthopedic problems related to football was a teaching degree and a championship ring presented to his family post-humously ... given to and bought by a good, but now disgraced coach...a coach, partly because of his own weakness, but mostly crushed by the weight of a ponderous NCAA rulebook...a book which grows in weight and complexity every year....loaded with rules that are selectively and arbitrarily enforced.

The game has changed since my uncle played.
Now, college athletics have become a multi-billion dollar industry, with everybody making a fistful of $$$...everybody except the guys who put on the entertainment...who take the punishing hits, suffer the blown out knees, and hip replacements 25 years later. The talking heads on ESPN, the coaches, vendors and marketers...and the NCAA and the universities themselves all help themselves to $$$ flowing from the fruits of minimum wage 'scholarship' labor provided by 'student athletes'.

You say these students ''live like kings"...a gross exaggeration. Sure a lot 'live better' than a struggling college student who has to take out loans just to go to school, but that is not the point. Student athletes have expenses that go beyond what their scholly provides, and restrictive NCAA rules with arbitrary punishments makes it tougher for these students to earn extra money. If you look at most of the violations, that cost million$ to investigate, they are penny ante, chump change, spending money sized.
I don't think it is necessary to pay these guys professional wages, it is 'amateur athletics' after all....but don't restrict them from making small amounts of money on the fame of their labor.

All you have to do is to change some NCAA rules to allow these players to earn a small amount of money...say $10,000/year from any sources (except the University) related to their athletic status. If you do this, all the picayune NCAA violations disappear! Players could sign some autographs, sell their own 'memorabilia', go out to dinner with a booster, attend a barbeque in the offseason without worrying who is there.
There will be violators ,of course, and those who do get slapped with a 1 year suspension of their amateur status. Exceed another higher threshold, and your amateur status is stripped FOR LIFE.
Keep the rules simple so that an 18 year old kid can understand them and enforce them evenhandedly and without equivocation.

Paying players won't curb the vultures that are agents, which in my view remains the larger issue. This will always continue as long as the farm system that isn't a farm system remains.

^^^^.....and that is why you don't pay players. You need some semblance of 'amateurism' for this to be a university funded/run activity. If players are actually to be paid, then the NBA and the NFL have to set up their own minor leagues.

HitsRus;1500146 wrote:^^^^.....and that is why you don't pay players. You need some semblance of 'amateurism' for this to be a university funded/run activity. If players are actually to be paid, then the NBA and the NFL have to set up their own minor leagues.

The NBA does with the D-League - and D should be for depression because people don't attend the games. In college athletics we root for the uniform, not the player, another reason why paying players is ridiculous.

And football players can work during the Summer. As long as they show up and not pull a Rhett Bomar they can easily make $10,000. I had many friends on the football team at my undergrad, they had everything handed to them as long as they kept clean. That means $20/hour Summer jobs, free tutoring, free food, free housing, free tuition.

The bigger issue is that only the NFL has a three years removed from high school edict, the NBA has one, MLB nothing...preventing an individual from profiting from their chosen profession for three years borders on, well something un Amurican.

"MLB nothing...preventing an individual from profiting from their chosen profession"

And how many 18 year olds play in MLB? They are usually playing in the minors staying at 1/2 star hotels with a $15/meal allowance. How does that compare to a college football schollie?

I had many friends on the football team at my undergrad, they had everything handed to them as long as they kept clean. That means $20/hour Summer jobs, free tutoring, free food, free housing, free tuition

I'm not sure you can make a generalization from a specific.

And how many 18 year olds play in MLB? They are usually playing in the minors staying at 1/2 star hotels with a $15/meal allowance. How does that compare to a college football schollie?

pretty comparable...except that minor league ball players are not restricted from making money signing autographs, giving lessons...etc. that is my point.

"except that minor league ball players are not restricted from making money signing autographs,"

Because most of them are worthless. The whole point behind Johnny Football's signing autographs had nothing to do with his notoriety, it is about paying players for their signing on to the team (and IMO 5 years from now Johnny Football will be a nobody). Troy Smith is a Heisman winner, and he could walk into a McDonald's in many towns in Ohio today and few would care, or pay $5.00 for an autograph. But if a five-star recruit shows up there may be a booster that will pay him Cam Newton money to sign on.

ytownfootball;1500187 wrote:The bigger issue is that only the NFL has a three years removed from high school edict, the NBA has one, MLB nothing...preventing an individual from profiting from their chosen profession for three years borders on, well something un Amurican.

Precisely. If I'm one of the best HS baseball players in the country, my signing bonus says I'm a millionaire before my 19th birthday. If I'm one of the best HS football players in the country, the rules say I have multiple years risk losing it all via injury before I can collect a dime. There's logic to that, as the extra years of strength/weight training are kind of a necessity for a kid to become a man capable of (hopefully) handling all the brute force trauma, but it's kinda BS to say that those players can't use their athletic status to get money.

Academic fraud is what should be the issue. Not players getting benefits. If a guy is really good and someone wants to pay them for autographs or having a big game or for selling memorabilia they earned (ala Ohio State), really, what is the big deal with that, other than an out-of-control system wanting to micro-manage everything to an obscene level?

The NCAA wants this fairy-tale world where all student-athletes are equal and all money goes to them. Which is insane and bizarre. The four years I went to Ohio U coincided with the three years Gary Trent was there. I went to class and participated in club sports before graduating in four years as one of many, many anonymous faces in the ceremony. Trent was the main man on a basketball program that spent time in the polls, made the NCAA tournament once and put Ohio on the map nationally for a reason other than that big Halloween party they throw. Lol, yeah, it makes total sense that dude shouldn't get special treatment that I wouldn't get.

The concept of amateurism is obsolete. If the NCAA doesn't realize that, as far as big-money sports go, it will become obsolete. Players will continue to take what other people feel they should get and as the "scandals" mount and more big-name schools get affected, eventually the breaking point will be reached and they'll tell the NCAA to take its million-page rulebook and cram it. Rumblings about that have come up and they're just going to keep growing.

The downside to allowing players to collect up to a certain amount on their likeness, autograph, whatever...is that it will cost the universities even more to make sure all of that is on the up-and-up. Doing that might be WORSE than what we have now.

I've always said that I wouldn't care if universities payed players, as long as those players then could not get free tuition, room and board, meals, etc. Now, I don't even want that. Players should not be paid because, as mentioned above, it absolutely kills all the other sports. You know damn well there would be a lawsuit as soon as they started paying football and basketball players from girls tennis players across the country because they aren't getting paid.

Take your free education and your free meals and your free access to some of the best facilities in the country and shut the fuck up. Appreciate the fact that, even if you don't make it into the NFL, you are coming out ahead of just about every other student at your university because they are going to be buried in student loan debt.

sherm03;1500216 wrote:The downside to allowing players to collect up to a certain amount on their likeness, autograph, whatever...is that it will cost the universities even more to make sure all of that is on the up-and-up. Doing that might be WORSE than what we have now.

I've always said that I wouldn't care if universities payed players, as long as those players then could not get free tuition, room and board, meals, etc. Now, I don't even want that. Players should not be paid because, as mentioned above, it absolutely kills all the other sports. You know damn well there would be a lawsuit as soon as they started paying football and basketball players from girls tennis players across the country because they aren't getting paid.

Take your free education and your free meals and your free access to some of the best facilities in the country and shut the fuck up. Appreciate the fact that, even if you don't make it into the NFL, you are coming out ahead of just about every other student at your university because they are going to be buried in student loan debt.

Read up on Oklahoma State. Functionally illiterate players who graduate. They're not too much better off.

ernest_t_bass;1500227 wrote:Read up on Oklahoma State. Functionally illiterate players who graduate. They're not too much better off.

They're fault for not taking advantage of the opportunities that football presented to them. I don't feel bad for them.