Grade 7 Unit 2 EA 2: Writing An Argumentative Essay
Be Fair to College Athletes
A 19 year-old star running back and future top draft pick slashes left, then cuts back right through a forest of 300 pound offensive and defensive linemen. As he begins to accelerate forward, one of these mountainous young men comes crashing down on his right leg, breaking his knee and tearing ligaments away from the bone. As he is carted off the field, many questions emerge about his future as a student-athlete for the NCAA, but also about what could have been. How far could he have taken his team this season? What was he worth to the university he played for? How much would the university have made off his jerseys if he starred in a big-time Bowl game? How much income would he have made as a professional athlete? Does he deserve to be paid by the university for all of his lost income should he be unable to return to the gridiron? While I believe and respect the idea that being a traditional student-athlete is honorable, all college scholarship athletes should be compensated for the time, effort and sacrifices they make to bring glory to their school.
From a very young age, boys and girls across America dream of being professional athletes. In seeking to achieve this dream, these athletes spend countless hours at practice on the field, in the weight-room and by themselves preparing for making big plays in big games. Ultimately, most see themselves as the type of athlete who gets a scholarship from a major university. These scholarships ensure that some, if not all, of their tuition and expenses are covered by university athletic departments. A recent article from Mark Koba of CNBC reports that the NCAA awards, “$2.4 billion in athletic scholarships every year to more than 150,000 student-athletes.” These 150,000 young adults then become “student-athletes” who are expected to attend classes, study for and pass exams, as well as train under their coaches’ conditions, hot or cold, night or day, basically whenever the coach says so. $2.4 billion seems like a huge amount of money to spend on athletes, but consider this: according to the NCAA, they earned over $10 Billion in 2012. Where does the rest of the money go? On top of that, even once an athlete is out of college, the NCAA can still make money off of them through video games. According to Forbes, NCAA football teams make $75,000 a year from EA Sports. In this business, the players have no choice and make no money from video games that use their face, skin tone, body type, playing characteristics and even their name. Every kid plays those games and gets to know college players, past and present, by name. Despite this, the players themselves get nothing for it while the colleges get so much.
Not paying athletes in college boils down to exploitation of the desperate. In Joe Nocera’s opinion article in the New York Times, he quotes a lawyer, DeMaurice Smith, as saying: “’All of these practices, whether it is compensation, due process, privacy, and the significant racial aspect, given that so many of these athletes come from disadvantaged backgrounds — they all come under the heading of fairness.’” Isn’t that what this is really about? These kids, most of which are minorities and come from poverty, have trained their whole life for their big break and are desperate to please and earn glory. Yet the NCAA says it would be unfair to pay them. Why? Even though I can see how difficult it would be to determine which athletes make how much and what to do when an athlete has a season or career ending injury, there must be a formula that would fairly determine how much a player deserves. Start by asking: Do they stop getting paid? Does health care for their injury continue until their death? That doesn’t even bring up all of the issues bubbling up about concussions and long-term brain injury as a result of that. But despite these difficult decisions, simply deciding that no athletes get paid is a terrible mistake and is unfair. According to a study cited by USA Today’s Koba, 86% of scholarship athletes live off-campus below the poverty line. That means they suffer from poor nutrition and inadequate housing. There is no way that helps a student’s ability to be a serious student. How can colleges not see how wrong this is? Especially when you consider that the universities are making so much and able to pay coaches so much. Did you know that according to USAToday, the average NCAA coach makes $1.6 million a year? Mike Krzyzewski makes almost $10 million a year for coaching Duke! Nick Saban makes $5.4 million at Alabama! Yet, the players are living below the poverty line, stuck sleeping in overcrowded apartments, eating out of cup-o-soups, studying from used books in dim-lighting, and desperately waiting for draft day and a future payday that most likely will never come.
There isn’t a clear solution to solving the compensation problem in college athletics. It may be that paying athletes will take away some of the purity in college athletics, but where is there purity whenever so much money is involved? If a student, coach or administrator in the NCAA really wants purity, they can always participate in a Division III school where students pay for their own education and salaries are considerably lower. It is also obvious that a pay structure set up to pay athletes in college could easily be discriminatory against female athletes and male players those who don’t play the revenue sports of basketball or football. If money rules the day, it is hard to argue against paying basketball and football “play-makers” more, but lawyers and economists can work out those details - they do it all the time. Ideally, all players who earn scholarships, regardless of the sport or success of a program, should make the same amount of money. This is true because all athletes sacrifice similar amounts of time, as well as put themselves in the same position to be injured. An anonymous female Lacrosse player at Tufts can suffer an injury at practice or in a game as easily as Johnny Manziel, a player whose signed #2 Texas A&M jerseys sell for up to $400 online.
It is the right time to pay college athletes their fair share. If we do, maybe athletes will stay for more than a year and actually earn a degree. Maybe they’ll develop a sense of loyalty, brotherhood and team – values we cherish as a nation. So let’s be fair and give those who are doing the playing a fair amount of money to live on. Otherwise, it is just exploitation of the desperate.