Where Is the Athletes Cut?

Where is the Athletes Cut?

College athletics are a billion dollar industry and has been for a long time. Due to the increasing ratings of college athletics, this figure will continue to rise. It's simple: bigger, faster, stronger athletes will generate more money. College Universities generate so much revenue during the year that it is only fair to the players that they get a cut. College athletes should get paid based on the university's revenue, apparel sales, and lack of spending money.

I believe that college sports should be considered a profession. Athletes deserve to be paid for their work. College athletics are a critical part of America's culture and economy. At the present time, student-athletes are considered amateurs. College is a stepping-stone to the professional leagues. The NCAA is exploiting the student- athlete. Big-time schools are running a national entertainment business that controls the compensation rate of the players like a monopoly (Byers 1).

According to the NCAA regulations an athlete will lose his/her eligibility if they are paid to play; sign a contract with an agent; receive a salary, incentive payment, award, gratuity educational expenses or allowances; or play on a professional team. The word amateur in sports has stood for positive values compared to professional, which has had just the opposite. The professional sport has meant bad and degrading; while the amateur sport has meant good and elevating. William Geoghegan, Flyer News sports editor writes, "Would paying athletes tarnish the ideal of amateurism? Maybe, but being fair is far more important than upholding an ideal" (Geoghehan 1).

Some people say that college athletes get paid by having a scholarship, but if you look at it a different way, scholarships might change your mind. Coaches try to get players who they think have the talent to make them win and to persuade them to come to their school by offering them scholarships. The whole idea behind a scholarship is to lure the athlete into coming to your school. Scholarships are nothing more than a recruitment tactic. They will give you a scholarship as long as you produce for them. It's all about what you can do for them. Indeed these scholarships pay for tuition, room and board, and books, but these athletes don't have money for other necessities. The NCAA doesn't want friends or boosters to offer athletes jobs because they fear it will interfere with their sport. This makes athletes able to hold a job to earn money for phone bills, gas money, entertainment, toiletries, etc....... I believe that an education should come first when attending college. But, going to school for free compared to how much money athletes generate, is not even in the same category. According to Thomas E. Way II, a staff reporter from the Xavier Herald, "The University of Michigan grosses over $20 million from football alone" (Way II 3). This includes merchandise sold, ticket sales, and concessions. Now do you think any of these Michigan athletes receive any cut for all this considerable amount of money made? Nope.

Instead of putting the money in the athlete's hand, the majority of it goes to the coaches. In the past, Florida Gators coach, Steve Spurrier, signed a six-year contract for over $2.5 million a year, not including benefits. Also, the Iowa State basketball coach earned $1.1 million a year (Espn.com). A scholarship-athlete can't receive $200 a month but his coach can get $2.5 million a year. Who is the one playing the game, the coach or the athlete? Without the players, coaches would not get paid as much as they do. Nobody goes to the college game to see the coach in action, they go to see the players. The players determine how good the coach is anyway. How well they play reflects the ability of the coach. In the NCAA the coach has complete control over the athlete due to the one-year grant-in-aid contract. "Placing the financial aid awards in the hands of the regular university financial aid committee and curtailing the coaches' ability to effectively dictate off-season conditioning and practice regimens would contribute greatly to providing players with freedoms that they do not have now", explains Byers (Byers 1). This basically says that a college athlete cannot be sponsored, but his university and coach can accept his sponsors and reap all the benefits. An example of this is "When an athlete signs his grant-in-aid contract he does not donate his feet to his coach. If the college wants to permit the athletics department or the coach to sell their athletes' feet to Nike or Reebok, so be it. But the players should have the freedom to endorse a shoe different than their coach, who may get paid some $300,000 as a result of the shoe contract" (Byers 2). Another example is Dean Smith, former coach of UNC, who made thousands of dollars for letting his players wear Nike shoes. But the players saw none of it and they are the ones making the shoe popular. The grant-in-aid system has been around since 1956. The idea was that if your education is free as an athlete you would not need to seek alternate means of income. The NCAA is using college players as a means to make money-bottom line.

When someone buys a college jersey, that money goes straight to the college and the coaches. The money never touches the athlete's hand. At the Division I level it is more or less a business. It's like working at a big company and finally getting your product out and being sold, but then you don't get any money that comes from the sales. Here