If college athletics is a business, shouldn’t athletes receive some sort of compensation?
NCAA President Mark Emmert believes so. The NCAA passed several measures last week including one that would allow athletes to be paid $2,000 more than the current limits on scholarships.
Conferences will be allowed to decide if they want to implement the increase. The NCAA refers to the extra money as covering the “full cost of attendance,” including travel, phone, toiletries, etc.
Scholarships previously covered only room, board, books and tuition. It will be available for all athletes in all sports.
“This is most certainly not pay for play,” Emmert said. “It’s for covering more of the legitimate expenses of attending college for our student-athletes.”
Those who agree and disagree on the matter have one question in common: how much is an athlete worth? Some say don’t pay an athlete any money while others argue $2,000 isn’t enough considering how much colleges, universities and conferences receive.
Another argument is to only pay athletes who play sports that make money. In actuality there are only two – football and men’s basketball.
Last year CBS and TBS paid more than $10 million to televise the NCAA basketball tournament and the BCS gave more than $50 million to schools who played in the football postseason.
Dr. Boyce Watkins at Syracuse University wrote he’s witnessed how college competition can affect an athlete’s life and believes they should be compensated.
“I’ve seen kids taken out of my class to play on ESPN games in the middle of the week. I’ve seen student-athletes wonder how they can help their mothers after they were evicted from their apartment in the projects,” he said. “The billions generated by March Madness rival the money earned from the post season of nearly every professional sports league in the world. At $613 million, the NCAA is earning over 40 percent more ad revenue than the entire NBA playoffs and over 60 percent more ad revenue than the entire post season for Major League Baseball. Given that professional basketball and baseball players bring home millions to their families every year, one has to wonder: What is the NCAA doing with all that money?”
Kristi Dosh, a contributor to Forbes believes paying athletes to play sports means that student-athletes in smaller sports and smaller schools will suffer.
“The bottom line is that more money will have to be devoted to women’s sports and it’s highly likely it’s men’s sports outside of football and basketball that will suffer. And, again, where is all this money going to come from?” she asked. “How much do you pay players? Is it one set amount for every athlete no matter the sport or the school in order to keep things fair? At least within a sport I think it has to be the same, otherwise schools with more money will have the advantage.
Last week, more than 300 athletes signed a petition asking that the NCAA set some of its TV revenue aside for them. The players from Arizona, Georgia Tech, Kentucky, Purdue and UCLA signed a petition asking the NCAA to “realize its mission to educate and protect us with integrity.”
In a written statement, NCAA spokesman Bob Williams said the NCAA “redirects nearly all of its revenue to support student-athletes.”
“Of its approximately $775 million in annual revenues, the NCAA invests 96 percent, or 96 cents of every dollar, in student-athletes through direct distributions to individual campuses and conferences; the funding and administration of national championships; and other direct support, such as the Student Assistance and Academic Enhancement funds in Division I,” he said.
Additional reforms passed by the Division I Board of Directors
• Raising initial eligibility standards from a 2.0 grade point average in college preparatory courses to 2.3 for high school recruits, and increasing a sliding scale that uses the grade-point average and standardized test scores.
• Increased requirements for transfers from junior colleges, who must have a 2.5 GPA.
• In four years, a score of 930 on the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate (APR) will be the minimum for eligibility for postseason championships. (There will be gradual implementation over four years before 930 becomes the standard.)
The APR measures the term-by-term academic eligibility and retention of athletes by schools and teams.
