Peer review
Nolan Lenz
Professor Kreuger
ENG 201
March 11, 2019
Why College Athletes Should Be Paid
According to Moneynation.com College athletics as a whole pulls in about $12 billion annually, while the NCAA makes north of $1 billion each year. You might wonder how they do this, but the answer is easy: the players. The players make the NCAA all of their money, but how much do the players get from that money? Not a dime. You may say, “well they get scholarships to help pay for tuition for room and board,” but so do students in high academic standing, but how much do they make their colleges? College athletes train harder than any of their peers to play the sport they love and while they are making the NCAA billions, they aren’t getting any of the profits. College athletes deserve to see a share of the profit that they work so hard to create.
Although student athletes are often exposed to very generous scholarships for tuition and room and board, this doesn’t begin to pay for the time they put into their sport. In his article, “Here's The Insane Amount Of Time Student-Athletes Spend On Practice,” Peter Jacobs says that student athletes may spend more than forty hours a week practicing their sport. As a college student, if I had a forty hour week commitment, I don’t think I could stay on top of my studies and graduate. So to do all of that work day in and day out and not see any of the profit, I don’t see how that is fair to them. They train and prepare to be the best, to make their school more profitable, because the better they are, the more money the school makes. It just isn’t fair to not give any compensation for their hard work and sacrifice.
You might think, why pay them now when they will make more money than they could imagine in the pros. Well the sad reality is that many of the Division 1 athletes won’t even go onto the professional level, giving all of their time to their game to get nothing they can leave college with in return. According to NCAA.com, more than 480,000 students compete in sports at their respective schools. However, the chances of going pro are slim. In Football, student athletes have a 1.6% chance of making it into a professional league. Basketball presents an even harder number, with only 1.2% making it to the next level. Women’s basketball stars represent the hardest chance as they are at a less than 1%, with a .9%, to be exact. The only sport that represents any real chance is baseball, with a 9.5% chance, but the MLB draft is fifty rounds, many players not even signing contracts. So to put this number in perspective, according to Chris Morris, in his article, “Ticket Prices to See Georgia Play Alabama for the National Championship are Soaring,” ticket prices for the 2018 NCAA Football championship ranged from $2,000- $114,000. That championship game was played in Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, GA, which according to AJC.com, the stadium is able to hold up to 71,200 people. If you take the lowest ticket price of that game, which was $2000 and times that by how many seats, while keeping in mind that $2,000 was the cheapest seat in the house, that game would have made more than 142 million. Not including the seats that went for over $100,000. How many of those players do you think made it to the NFL with the 1.6% college football players making it? Don’t you think those players deserve some of the cut of the more than likely half a billion dollars made in one night?
So if the players don’t get any of the money made from their work, shouldn’t the coaches make a small salary? This does not appear to be the case, according to BoydsBets.com, the salaries for division one coaches range from $376,044 to the highest being $11,132,000. While more than half received over a million dollars for their time coaching this season. Yes, the coaches are at the top of everything that the team and are responsible for the teams success, so they ultimately deserve that money, but why don’t the players deserve any of that money? They practice and work for their the teams success and get no part of the abundance of profit, while the coaches and higher ups are making more than they even need. The NCAA is a business that benefits everyone except the people who do the most work.
Now, when I say that athletes should be making part of the profit, that doesn’t mean I think they deserve salaries and contracts. My scenario is that players should be subject to around 15% of the profit that there respective team brings in for the year and that is split up amongst every player on the team. Bringing in salaries and contracts into college sports would have a negative impact on the game, but these players work harder than most college students and aren’t compensated fairly. Giving them a piece of the profit could go a long way for them, because many of their families aren’t exactly in the best of conditions and could absolutely use the extra cash. Giving student athletes scholarships doesn’t even begin to equal what athletes have done for the NCAA and their own programs.
Gerencer, Tom. “How Much Does The NCAA Make?” Money Nation. https://moneynation.com/how-much-money-does-the-ncaa-make/ . Accessed 11. March. 2019
Jacobs, Peter. “Here's The Insane Amount Of Time Student-Athletes Spend On Practice.” Business Insider. https://moneynation.com/how-much-money-does-the-ncaa-make/ . Accessed 11. March. 2019
NCAA.org. “Estimated Probability of Competing in Professional Sports.” NCAA. http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/estimated-probability-competing-professional-athletics . Accessed 11. March. 2019
Morris, Chris. “Ticket Prices to See Georgia Play Alabama for the National Championship are Soaring.” Fortune. http://fortune.com/2018/01/02/2018-national-championship-ticket-prices/ . Accessed 11. March. 2019