For years I’ve been doing my little bit to advance the cause for college athletes to be paid. Below are excerpts from just two of my commentaries in this regard.
- From “Reggie Bush Forfeits Heisman Trophy,” September 16, 2010:
There’s nothing amateur about College Football. It’s a billion-dollar business for Christ’s sake! More to the point, the people generating its revenue are not the university presidents, athletics directors, or coaches who, incidentally, make millions in salary and endorsement deals. Instead, they are the poor athletes whose raw talents colleges exploit…
I’ve always felt that it’s tantamount to modern-day slavery for universities to recruit poor and, all too often, uneducated Black athletes just to play football and not compensate them for their services…
Universities should be required to compensate student-athletes in direct proportion to the way owners of professional Football teams compensate their players.
- And from “Death Penalty for University of Miami Hurricanes,” August 23, 2011:
I urge the star players on all NCAA Division 1 Football teams to organize a wildcat strike this fall and demand fair compensation for the services they provide. Then let the NCAA and university presidents make the unconscionable and utterly unsustainable argument that these kids should be forced to continue generating billions in revenues for them in exchange for nothing more than a college degree that, in most cases, is not worth the paper it’s written on.
Well, now comes this – thanks to the pioneering crusade of Kain Coulter, a former Quarterback at Northwestern University:
In a stunning ruling that could revolutionize a college sports industry worth billions of dollars and have dramatic repercussions at schools coast to coast, a federal agency said Wednesday that football players at Northwestern University can create the nation’s first union of college athletes…
The ruling addresses a unique situation in American college sports, where the tradition of college competition has created a system that generates billions but relies on players who are not paid…
The ruling described how the life of a Northwestern football player is far more regimented than that of a typical student, down to requirements about what they can eat and whether they can live off campus or purchase a car. At times, players put 50 or 60 hours a week into football
(Yahoo! Sports, March 27, 2014)
Not quite the wildcat strike I called for; but a union of college athletes will surely force universities to begin, at last, redressing the shameful inequities inherent in big-time college sports.
NCAA executives clearly want to continue exploiting oxymoronically designated “student-athletes.” But you know they’re fighting a losing battle when their strongest argument against paying them is that:
‘We frequently hear from student-athletes, across all sports, that they participate to enhance their overall college experience and for the love of their sport, not to be paid.’
(Associated Press, March 27, 2014)
Enough said?
Related commentaries:
Student-athletes gradate poor … and dumb