Compensation for College Athletes Speech- Zachary Whitehouse

            12$ Billion. 12$ Billion raked in my universities annually from college sports. This is more than McDonald’s and Chevron pull in annually and yet college athletes see none of this money. Ask yourself, who do you think is more important for their respective businesses, because that’s what they are, cash flow? The star athletes like Johnny Manziel or Jamies Winston or Andrew Luck who draw in 100,000+ fans? Or the overweight McDonalds employee with a butterfly tattoo, and a mullet? Easy question. Arian Foster, a star running back at the University of Tennessee and now in the NFL, remembered walking out on the field and seeing 107,000 fans there to see him play football. He had one of his best games and could remember going home and finding an empty fridge. He thought it was a little strange that he had to ask his coach to buy him tacos because he didn’t see any of the multithousands of dollars he had brought in for his school in a little over 4 hours. His coach buying him tacos, I repeat, Taco Bell tacos is a NCAA violation. Along with the lack of money to provide himself with food to survive, he remembers walking to practice the next day and seeing his coach pull up in a new Lexus. The coach is making it nicely for himself alright. A proposed idea from some of you would be to go out and get a job. To that I say, “Are he and other college athletes not already working one?” Athletes spend the whole day from 5 am to 9 pm in class or at workouts for their respective sport. According to Marc Edelman, a writer for Forbes on legal issues in sports, athletes devote 43.3 hours to their sport. That is more than the average man or woman works a week. That’s 43.3 hours a week for a grand total of net pay of zero dollars. That must be great. If you think devoting 43 hours a week to your sport isn’t a job, I ask when they have time to get a different job.

            Yes, athletes are giving an academic scholarship that pays for most of the expenses for an education at that school. I say most because according to Schooled: The Price of College Sports, the academic scholarship doesn’t take into account the cost of living at that school, leaving the athlete with an average of 3,500$ short of the actual cost to attend the school. In addition to receiving the academic scholarship, athletes must abide by the code of amateurism meaning they pay for the fun of the game not for money. The athletes are not allowed to accept any payment or benefit beyond their scholarship, not money for autographs or appearing in video games or in magazines, not even a box of tacos from the coach. Jay Bilas, a Charlotte lawyer who played and coached basketball at Duke is leading the charge for “pay for play”. He argues college athletes are exploited. He says, “Anytime you make money off another, while at the same time restricting that person from making money in that same enterprise, you are by definition exploiting them.” Oh, but the billion dollar business that is the NCAA says the athletes are amateurs and “student” athletes but I ask where is the student in this? The average art student or musician is allowed to make money off their art. There aren’t amateur rules for them. The universities don’t say, “Oh yeah, that painting you can sell for a couple hundred dollars, yeah we get that money. You are an amateur student-artist, you can’t accept that money as if you were a professional. We will take it instead.” But when billions of dollars are involved, the universities and NCAA make sure they don’t let the “student” athlete see a penny of that. How is it fair that an average art student can make money for their work, but athletes who rake in 71$ million (in the case of UCLA basketball and football) can’t see a couple thousand?

            In the original NCAA rules, neither coaches nor athletes were allowed to make money. Now Nick Saban, Alabama’s football coach, is making 5+ million a year and Coach Cal is making close to this sum. Coaches are making it pretty well now I’d say, on the other hand, athletes are resorting to selling drugs and the awards the earned, just so they can pay for food. Like indentured servants, the athlete has their housing provided, their speech regulated, their schedule controlled by coaches, and food controlled by trainers, yet they can’t receive a penny for their work that brings in a tremendous 12$ billion without having their scholarship ripped from them and their integrity challenged. The fact of the matter is, they don’t play sports of leisure, they are trapped into being all-star marketers for the greedy school and NCAA marketing teams. The money is trickling down into everything but the athletes’ pockets, that’s a little odd isn’t it?

Works Cited

Forbes. 21 Reasons Why Student-Athletes Are Employees And Should Be Allowed To Unionize. Edelman, Marc. 2014.

Charlotte Observer. Paying College Athletes: An idea that’s gaining traction. Fowler, Scott. 2014

Schooled: The Price of College Sports. Dir. Ross Finkel. Documentary, 2013.