Colleges ought to compensate football players for their performance
Whether we should pay student athletes or not is a major debate going on in college athletics, and there are many people with strong opinions on both sides of the issue. However, now is the time to move the discussion forward.
Many would argue that too many athletic departments are underfunded and that paying student athletes would further strain these already limited budgets. However, we should examine this claim more closely. Let’s take, for example, the conference that South Carolina currently competes in, the Southeastern Conference. The SEC distributed over $20 million to each of its 12 members in the 2011-2012 academic year. While official statistics have not been released for this year, they are estimated to be even higher. The Big Ten Conference, despite not winning a national championship in over a decade, distributed even more money than the SEC in the same year.
While these numbers certainly sound impressive or even gargantuan, consider that the NCAA recently approved a four-team playoff system that is projected to increase college football revenues dramatically. This new four-team playoff system is set to replace the Bowl Championship Series after the 2014-2015 season. The SEC and Big Ten, along with the other major college football conferences stand to gain the most from this new playoff system. SEC revenues are projected to increase over 50 percent, to nearly $34 million per school, largely due to the playoffs, but also because of the conferences recent expansion to include Texas A&M and Missouri.
It is important to remember all of this when hearing complaints from those who say we simply cannot afford to pay athletes. If $34 million in revenue is not enough for schools to be able to pay athletes modestly, then we must ask the question of whether our athletic departments are spending their money wisely. It is important to consider that the payouts made to us by the SEC are not our only source of revenue, as we also rely on funding from ticket sales, merchandise sales and licensing, concessions and alumni donations.
With all of this considered, it only seems reasonable that we should start by at least paying our football players because they are the athletes that bring our school the most positive attention, through events like when ESPN College Gameday visited to broadcast the game against Georgia last fall. We could start by paying athletes a modest $100 for every game they dress for, meaning they could earn at most $1,400, assuming we make it to the SEC Championship Game and a bowl game, hardly a fraction of what NFL players make.
If we were to do this for all players on scholarship on our roster, it would cost the school a little more than $100,000 per season, less than what we currently pay Everette Sands, our running backs coach, who made $185,000 last year. Paying our football players is a logical and cost-effective maneuver that we should consider, at least.
— Chad Brown, first-year risk management and insurance student