Paying College Athletes

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PAYING COLLEGE ATHLETES Waylon Ledet American Military University SPHE379 Professor Rogowski January 13, 2013 Universities receive much of their income from college sports, and that income comes from merchandise being sold, ticket sales, and from radio and television contracts. A major concern, today, is that athletes do not get a share of any money the university makes off of them providing the entertainment/labor. All the athlete receives is a scholarship. Even though the college athlete does receive a free education with a scholarship many can understand why they would feel betrayed due to the university using them for their services and not being…show more content…
The colleges and universities are using their athletes almost like slaves because the amount of money that the universities pull in does not compare to giving an athlete a scholarship. The athlete gives all he/she has in their sport in order to try to make it into the professional levels that at anytime they could be injured for the rest of their lives. This fact alone is only one of many as they why college athletes should be compensated for their work. The argument from the universities and colleges is that they aren’t making the money that everyone thinks they are making and they are trying to downplay this in order to not look like the bad guy. Former athletic director of Notre Dame, Kevin White, has mentioned that somewhere between 5 to 15 out of over 100 Division I schools do make a profit. You can just look at the fact that college football head coaches get paid in the millions to do their job. If a college can afford to pay one of the coaches millions and pay all the assistants hundreds of thousands of dollars then why can’t a college athlete get a share also? Now I know not every school does make big money. Only schools like Louisiana…show more content…
But, if a college football player was that music major and did that he would be stripped of his scholarship, banned, and the college would face fines and possible bans of bowl games. How fair does that seem? College sports do serve as a kind of amateur league, especially for football. In professional baseball the teams do have minor, amateur, leagues where the athletes get paid for their services. Professional football does not have that, but instead they have college football to use in the same manner, except that these athletes do not get paid for their services. So in essence the professional football league is using and abusing the college ranks. Recently the NFL has started to help out this problem with putting a cap on the amount of money a rookie can make, especially the top pick in the draft. In years past a rookie could come right into the league and make millions of dollars. Today they can still make that amount, but there has been a cap placed on exactly how much they can make so that not everyone will try to jump through the hoops to make it to the pros. It isn’t
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