Research Paper on Why NCAA Players should be paid

Introduction

The history of paying National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) players has been an ongoing debate from as early as the 1900s. The growing revenue from football bowl games and basketball has created a demand for compensation of players other than offering a scholarship (Johnson and Acquaviva).

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From the start, the focus was always education first then athletics second. The NCAA also boasts of a history of a great collegiate experience where students attend school, plays for the school team and in the end graduate with a degree. However, the NCAA that was in the past might have not seen the great multimillion-dollar market that it currently has. The current athletes are able to generate billions for the association as their education is paid for. Due to its monopoly, NCAA continues to the advantage by overworking the players and compensating them with academic scholarships that are only given if one meets all the requirements that are needed to earn a degree in that college. This system is so unfair and should be changed in order to ensure that college athletes can be compensated for the work they do (Thacker 186).

In 2015, the NCAA made nine hundred and eighty-nine million dollars. This is a huge amount compared to what forty athletic departments made in ten years. Unfortunately, most of the athletes who bring in this money are leaving in extreme poverty. About eighty-six percent of these college athletes are leaving below the poverty line. Many of these youth are hopeful that someday NCAA will offer them compensation and help them to move into professional sports and become rich and famous (187).

NCAA players deserve monetary compensation because the scholarships are not the only way out for these young players. They are poor and always have a burden to support their families (190). The players should also be paid because they are often exploited. The association gets a huge number of hardworking young athletes that are worth so much. NCAA gets paid and everybody else gets paid except the people making the product. This in other countries is termed as slavery (191). Additionally, players are managed, dominated and controlled and yet do not receive any compensation. Sometimes they are physically and mentally abused and denied their freedoms as citizens (Zema).

Athletes are only given twenty hours a week to go into sporting activities. This can, therefore, be paid as twenty hours of work-study or as a stipend to enable them to have the much-needed income for travel, laundry clothes, and other expenses. NCAA currently forbids athletes for getting any compensations from any sources which are not from that particular institution. The athletes are not allowed to work with advertising agencies and merchandisers, media for autographs and endorsing products. If they go against any of these rules they are subject to fines, suspensions and denied a chance to play games. Zema recommends that these policies be scrapped off to allow the students to pursue other economic related activities. Santesteban and Leffler also add that what the NCAA needs is to offer alternatives to the current pay restrictions. They recommend that colleges and universities use the models set up by professional sports to compensate athletes.

The players should be paid because they generate revenue for NCAA. In every business in American society, all employees must be paid at least a minimum wage from the money generated by the firm. These athletes are not an exception. Nonetheless, colleges and universities rename these field workers to students athlete in order to argue that they are amateurs and not entitled to pay while their revenues keep going up every year (Berri 481).

One other reason for paying the players is to increase the rate of graduation. In colleges and universities, many of these athletes according to Manesh drop out before their senior year due to eligibility for NBA. Thus, compensating these players may cause them to prolong their college days. Since most athletes are not assured of getting better athletic teams to go overseas, this kind of athletes needs a degree to secure a job. Paying them will, therefore, encourage them to keep staying in school.

Players should also be paid because they actually deserve it. It is estimated that an average basketball player earns about one hundred and seventy thousand dollars a year but averagely what they bring in is estimated to about four million dollars a year. Therefore, it is only fair to allocate some money to players. NCAA only spends about 5% of what they earn in profits for scholarships. It is also important to note that there are certain colleges that do not offer scholarships. In such cases, it is even more unfair for athletes not to be paid. For those institutions that offer scholarships, the compensations are not enough since the players really dedicate a lot of time and their efforts. This should not go in vain because these players are the major reason why the money is coming in and it is very unfair not compensating them (Manesh).

The NCAA's exploitation of players and the many financial constraints that the athletes go through require immediate change (Thacker 215). There should be no excuse for restriction of other players in earning their hard earned money. These compensations will solve so many issues by fighting poverty within NCAA and enabling student players who struggle financially get a reward for their dedication and hard work (216).

Works Cited

Berri, David J. "Paying NCAA Athletes." Marquette Sports Law Review (2016): 480-491. 14 February 2019. <https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1681&context=sportslaw>.

Johnson, Dennis A, and John Acquaviva. "Point/Counterpoint: Paying College Athletes." The Sports Journal (2012). 14 February 2019. <http://thesportjournal.org/article/pointcounterpoint-paying-college-athletes/>.

Manesh, Ryan. Should NCAA Athletes be paid? 20 April 2018. 14 February 2019. <https://gunnoracle.com/16369/sports/should-ncaa-athletes-be-paid/>.

Santesteban, Cristian J and Keith B Leffler. "Assessing the Efficiency Justifications for the NCAA Player compensation Restrictions." SAGE journals (2017). 14 February 2019. <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0003603X16688838>.

Thacker, Dalton. "Amateurism Vs. Capitalism: A Practical Approach to Paying College Athletes." Seattle Journal for Social Justice 16.1 (2017): 183-216. 14 February 2019. <https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1892&context=sjsj>.

Zema, Philip. "Should Student-Athlete be Paid?" Sports, Ethics and Philosophy (2018). 14 February 2019. <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17511321.2018.1465112>.