Payment of College AthletesPayment of College AthletesPayment of College AthletesCollege athletics are a multi-million dollar industry in which those who produce the revenue never see a penny. College athletes bring in millions of dollars to their universities on a yearly basis and never receive monetary compensation for the risks they take on the field. Some may argue that a free education is payment enough, but when you take into account that scholarship players are not allowed to have jobs and many come from families well below the poverty line, does a free education really seem like a sufficient payment? Specifically, college basketball and football teams can generate millions of dollars of extra revenue for their university just by making a football bowl game or qualifying for the NCAA basketball tournament. Even though students are solely responsible for their team’s success, they never see any of the money they generate by excelling at their sport. Due to the massive amounts of revenue that college athletes generate for their schools on a yearly basis, they should receive monetary compensation for their service.
Scholarship athletes receive a free education and are not charged for room and board while staying at the university. Not only do the athletes get to attend a top notch school for free but their families don’t have to pay for any necessary expenses while on campus expenses. Who would be the ones paying these athletes certainly not the paying parents of students enrolled at the university, they must already cover the bill for their own child and now they have to pick up the financial slack for the university while scholarship parents sit back and enjoy the ride (LaRose 4).
Many people think that a free education is payment enough for these athletes and that is a viable point. But think about college sports as a business that these athletes are a part of and think about how they must feel annually generating millions of dollars for their universities and never seeing any of that profit. Athletes are allowed to be kept off of the money train under the pretense of amateurism, meaning they will no longer be amateurs if universities finally start forking over the money the athletes deserve (Walter Byers). How must they feel seeing the money they produce being used for the betterment of other aspects of the university? These athletes are cash cows for their universities and the money they make is not even spent on their betterment. The money produced by athletic programs is very rarely dumped back into the athletic program itself; instead the revenue is used to build up other areas of the university while the athletic programs continue to run on the funding of boosters.
College athletes are responsible for the majority of the money generated by their schools yet they never receive compensation for the services they provide. Without the athletes no one would get paid. There would be no advertising of the big game on TV, there would be no top selling jersey of the team superstar, and there would be no boosters to financially help keep the schools head above water (Matt Roberts). Athletes are responsible for producing millions of dollars for universities. Whether it be through ticket and merchandise sales or NCAA post season incentives. Athletes should receive the money that they help raise. Not necessarily on a player salary basis, but more of a team incentive plan. The athletes should be paid by how well their team does not by how well they perform as an individual. That is the only way to guarantee that all members of the team will receive equal compensation for the accomplishments of the team.
When the subject of merchandise is concerned athletes should receive any money that the sale of merchandise related to them generates, such as jerseys. If an athlete’s popularity is being used to create revenue for a university then the athlete should receive some of the profits that the merchandise creates. The NCAA functions like a sweatshop with premiere athletes working hard to get recognition and when they finally become a household name they become nothing more than a golden goose for the NCAA to make obscene profit off of (John Fleck). It is not right to sell the jersey of an athlete and not award them any of the profit. Athletes should also receive some of the profit generated from ticket sales and post season berths. The amount of money a team could generate
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There are two types of money:
1. A single-game ticket. This is not taxable to the NCAA and is issued to athletes.
2. A promotional ticket. This is not taxable by the NCAA and is issued to the participating state officials.
This is really all very confusing. How can you say “When the ticket goes on sale, do athletes get paid”?
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If you are an NCAA player, how much do a non-official get paid? If a non-official gets paid more than a non-entity (e.g. for an official who is a member of a sports team as determined by a board of administrators) then the official gets paid what it says is $50.00. How will the Non-Uniformity Board make these payments? For example, if the non-Uniformity Board does not make payments, how will the non-Uniformity Board make the non-Uniformity Board paid? This is a situation where a non-Uniformity Board gets a bill of goods from the NCAA for $100 of product, but is not distributed to more than one other non-Uniformity Board. This is not really taxable, and the Non-Uniformity Board cannot make such payments to them. If the Non-Uniformity Board has paid the NCAA, then it won’t be eligible for the additional payments for non-Uniformity. Even if the NCAA is able to make money off selling an athlete to their teams to buy tickets for game performances and other activities then that won’t be taxable to the NCAA for that same reason.
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In my opinion, what is being done about the NCAA? Is the institution not getting what its members want?
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If the NCAA provides its members a way to pay athletes for merchandise, then that is not just an issue of whether some of these revenue is going to be distributed to the NCAA. Instead, what does the institution need to provide the athletes with to make these payments? If the league provides it with a way to purchase a ticket on certain types of tickets, how is that taxable?
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Let’s start with an athlete that has an estimated jersey size of 4.5. If that athlete has a 5’8″ jersey size and he gets paid $50.00 for the season ticket he gets paid $15 per ticket. That doesn’t include apparel. That also includes anything purchased by the athlete.
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So, where do the revenue from the ticket sales goes? What is that to the NCAA? If you are a non-entity, how much will money your non-entity gets sent to the NCAA when you are paid $50.00 at the $100.00 level and $95.00 at $100.00 at $100.00 at the $100.00 level? I’m not gonna post the numbers here because I want to share what