Justice

Is It Time to Start Paying College Athletes?

August 28th 2015

In a rare move just days before college football season kicks off, University of Cincinnati football coach Tommy Tuberville announced this week that he plans to consider withholding some cost of attendance money from his players who fail to meet academic requirements or violate team or school rules, ESPN reports. Put another way, Tuberville will effectively fine his student athletes the same way that an NFL team fines its professional players.

"We are holding them accountable," Tuberville told ESPN.

The plan, according to UC officials, would be subject to appeal and is causing a social media stir among critics of the idea.

"We cannot stress enough how completely ridiculous and borderline evil a policy like this is," Deadspin's Tom Ley wrote. "The new inclusion of small stipends...in athletic scholarships marks the first time that college football players have received anything close to resembling compensation for their labor, and the College Football Hardman Complex’s first instinct is to hover around those little fistfuls of money like vultures."

According to Cincinnati.com, UC provides its athletes with amounts ranging from $5,504 to $7,018, which can depend on academic program factors and whether they live on or off campus. USA Today Sport's recent report on athletics departments found that this figure was the highest in its obtained information on 100 of the 128 Football Bowl Subdivision schools. This number included additional spending of cost-of-attendance-based scholarships, the unlimited meals, and snack options for student athletes.

Is it time to start treating college football players like pros?

Illinois footballAsolsma1988 / Wikimedia Commons - wikipedia.org

Lots of people are getting rich off college sports. ESPN paid $7.3 billion—yes, billion—to broadcast the College Football Playoff for 12 years, according to CNN. (This is the second year of that deal.) Alabama coach Nick Saban is the highest paid coach—he rakes in $7,160,187 annually.

And how much are student athletes paid each year for their athletic efforts? Technically, nothing at all.

Over the past few years, the debate of over whether student athletes should receive a paycheck or not has become somewhat heated, and those who are in favor are publicizing their opinions.

In a clip from his show "Last Week Tonight," host John Oliver argues that paying student athletes with an education cannot be seen as proper compensation.

“Paying top college athletes with an education is sort of like telling a full-time nurse, ‘There’s no salary for this job, we’re just going to be giving you free trumpet lessons, which you’ll be too busy to do. But if you don’t learn to play the trumpet, you’ll be fired. Does that sound fair?’”

Even President Barack Obama weighed in on this issue. He told the Huffington Post that “students need to be taken better care of because they are generating a lot of revenue here.” He then suggested that schools could immediately begin keeping their promises when it comes to guaranteed scholarships. That would mean that even if a student gets hurt or is not playing to the best of their ability, they should be guaranteed the scholarship they were originally promised.

One of the most common arguments for student athletes receiving compensation is the idea that they are technically employees. According to an article from Forbes, the standard Division I football player spends 43.3 hours working at his sport. Of course, this is even more hours than a typical 40-hour work week.

Additionally, if student athletes truly are students first and athletes second, then why are they asked to miss class time and exams to perform? Billy Pettiford, a former basketball player for Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, told CNN that “you really had to apply yourself on those trips to keep your head above water.” He added that athletes had to become their own teachers and teach themselves—especially, while away from campus between Wednesdays and Sundays.

Some changes have been made to give more to student athletes, but they are not exactly ground-breaking. In April of 2014, the NCAA council approved a new model which provides Division 1 athletes with unlimited meals and snacks as a part of their sports participation. But does an extra bag of Doritos or a plate of spaghetti compensate student athletes for the hours of work they put into a sport that benefits their school so greatly? Many would argue no.

With the slight improvement in April 2014 came a step backward quite recently. At the end of July, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals placed a stay on an order that would have forced the NCAA to allow colleges to pay student athletes $5,000 per year. The district order was set to begin on Aug. 1. Consequently, according to NPR, on that day universities were able to start sending offer letters to prospective student athletes.

And just last month, Northwestern University's football team was blocked from its effort to form a labor union. The National Labor Relations Board said that it did not have jurisdiction over the NCAA due to the fact that the vast majority of the member schools in Division 1 football are public schools. (Only 17 of 128 are private.) The NLRB did not rule, however, on a key question: Are these players more like employees than they are students? For now, we'll have to wait for the final answer to that argument.

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