College athletes the shame of college

Or buy your coach.

Archipelagolf: The Shame of College Sports

Tuition, room, board and books were compensation enough. And even if, increasingly, it wasn't enough and virtually every kid who accepted a scholarship was in the red before Christmas of his freshman year, the notion of pay-for-play was at best a logistical nightmare.

Where exactly would the money come from? How could you pay college football players but not baseball players or members of the women's field hockey team?

And how in the world would you pay men in a way that wouldn't violate Title IX? Would the quality of the broadcasts or the coverage or the staging of the events be somehow diminished?

Let me declare up front I wouldn't be the slightest bit interested in distributing the funds equitably or even paying every college athlete.

I'm interested in seeing the people who produce the revenue share a teeny, tiny slice of it. That's right, football and men's basketball players get paid; lacrosse, field hockey, softball, baseball, soccer players get nothing. You know what that's called?

Not everything is equal, not everything is fair. So I don't want to hear that it's "unfair" to pay the quarterback of Alabama more than all the sociology students in the undergraduate college. Using the inability to distribute the funds equally as an impediment is an excuse, a rather intellectually lazy one at that.

Nothing about the way hundreds of millions of dollars is distributed is equitable or even fair. In question right now is whether the BCS even conducts its business dealings in a manner consistent with principles expressed in federal anti-trust laws.

So, the equitable-application excuse for not paying athletes doesn't hold water; at the very least there's a level of hypocrisy here that ought to make the opponents of paying athletes uncomfortable. Don't get me wrong, paying players out of individual athletic department budgets is beyond impractical; it's probably not feasible.

Because so many athletic departments run at a deficit, it's difficult to make the case that schools should pay regular salaries to athletes, even football players who produce more income than anybody. It's commendable that the NCAA has paid millions into a fund for in-need athletes to cover clothing purchases, emergency travel and medical expenses.

There's also a special assistance fund and a student-athlete opportunity fund. Why can't hundreds of millions of dollars be directed into those, and in turn make money much more accessible to athletes for the kinds of regular day-to-day expenses regular college students pay by working jobs that are off-limits to intercollegiate athletes?

Players like Andrew Luck, who are the face of their university, deserve to be compensated. Their revelations, short of Heisman Trophy winners having to return their statues, wind up penalizing only the kids and coaches who remain on the team and in the vast majority of cases have done nothing to merit a penalty themselves.

If somebody is willing to give A. It's called supply and demand, and if both men are fortunate enough to reach the NFL it'll be a lesson worth learning because that dynamic will exist their entire careers.

Taylor Branch Spells Out “The Shame of College Sports.” | The Big Lead

If a soccer player can't get a dime for his jersey, well, there's a realization in that, too. If a car dealer wants to strike that deal then good for the player in question. If a music student goes out in the summer and earns 50 grand, who objects? The student-musician is no less a college student because he struck a lucrative deal.

Ramogi Huma

Neither is the student-journalist who spends his nights writing freelance stories and picking up as much money along the way as he can.

The best college athletes in the two revenue-producing sports have always been worth much more than tuition, room, board and books. The best football and basketball players in the Big Ten have produced to the degree that a television network has become the model for every conference in America, a network worth at least tens of millions of dollars to the member institutions.

Yet, no player can benefit from that work. The players have become employees of the universities and conferences as much as students -- employees with no compensation, which not only violates common decency but perhaps even the law.Jan 09,  · For college athletes, such an organization already exists: It is called the National College Players Association, headed by Ramogi Huma, the longtime activist who was the driving force behind the.

The question, “Should college athletes be paid?” is re-hashed regularly. There are many advocates in favor of and many against the idea of paying athletes who play sports for their college or university. We’ve got a breakdown of the pros and cons.

The pros list the arguments for why college athletes should be paid and the cons list the. Shame is one of many emotions that can result from an athletic performance.

The public nature of sport and the salience of competitive outcomes can cause strong emotional reactions for athletes. The College of the Ozarks, a private Christian school in Point Lookout, Missouri, has announced plans to strip all student-athletes of Nike branding in response to the sportswear company’s.

Sep 28,  · In his Atlantic piece “The Shame of College Sports,” Taylor Branch compares college athletes to slaves.

Downloading prezi...

He writes, “To survey the corporations and universities enriching themselves on the. College athletics is a major enterprise in the United States, with more than , student athletes competing annually. The largest programs participate in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), while other programs compete in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) and the National Junior College Athletic .