Pay College Athletes?

Student Athletes.

The word “amateur” stems from the Latin root word of “ama” which means love. To be an amateur means that you are participating in a sport because you love it. The USGA’s home site states that: “An ‘amateur golfer’ is one who plays the game as a non-remunerative and non-profit-making sport and who does not receive…”
(http://www.usga.org/Rule-Books/Rules-of-Amateur-Status/Amateur-Status/).
If the purpose of an amateur athlete is someone who cannot receive money, then the argument of whether or not athletes should be paid should be answered there. The majority of the debate on whether or not athletes should be paid stems from recent argument about how much revenue college athletics are grossing from TV rights, cable channels, video games, and ticket sales. There are two main ideas that always come to mind when thinking about this amateur status, both of which relate to the Olympics. First is with Jeremy Bloom. He was a football player at the University of Colorado and also a part of the US Ski team. He was receiving endorsements through the Olympics and this put him in violation from the NCAA rules of receiving gifts, even though these had nothing to do with him playing football.
(http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=1867015).
The other is with the 1980 US Men’s Olympic hockey team at Lake Placid against the Soviet Union. This was such a huge event because it was a team of collegiate hockey players versus professional Soviet hockey players. It was a few years after this that the Olympic went from a purely amateur status event to allow “the best in the world” and opened the door to profession athletes as well. At the time, it really irritated me that Bloom was never allowed to receive his endorsements from USA, however, my viewpoint has switched and I believe that students should not receive more than their allowance they receive and the monies that are allocated to them in different ways through their four years in college.
At first, I thought that athletes should be paid something outside of their scholarship due to the amount of revenue that teams are pulling into the schools. However, after searching more into how much colleges are actually making off these amateur athletes, there are only a handful of schools that actually work in the black with their revenue sharing. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/09/college-athletes-should-not-get-paid/245390/.
This article mentions how out of the 332 major Division I schools programs, only 14 actually operate while making a financial gain. The reason why money is being lost, Davis states, is due to the large operating costs of an athletic program; private jets, huge athletic facilities, academic support, and of course, over-inflated coaches salaries.
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20110330/1apayplayers30_cv.art.htm.
USA Today discussed how Derrick Williams, a basketball player for the University of Arizona, hit a $1.4 million free throw for his college. By him making his free throw allowed the University of Arizona to move on to the Sweet 16 bracket, bringing in $1.4 million from just the TV rights. NCAA is reported to make $771 million dollars from ESPN and Turner Cable for the 3 week time period of the March Madness tournament. Five years ago, I brought my high school golf team to the University of Arizona for a golf trip and to spend the day with the golf coach there and have him explain what it really takes to be a D-1 athlete. He took us through the gym, through their tutor facility, their training room, underwater treadmill room, their huge weight room, nutrionist, etc. The point of this is that the athletes actually never have to go to campus. They attend their tutor sessions within the gym and can get much of their work accomplished within these classes, especially with how much school they miss because of golf tournaments. It is no wonder that almost 90% of these D-1 programs are operating at a loss. This is a major market to get these kids to become professional athletes. The coach for the golf team specifically told these players that he can make UofA the best place on Earth, but the bottom line is that his job is to win. If these golfers can’t shoot below par on their own home course, they don’t deserve a scholarship. It is a very competitive market.
With all this, I don’t see that the kids should be marketed and sold as a young adult. IF they make it professionally, they can market themselves and make all the money they want. But as the records show, universities are actually losing money. Maybe one day when D-1 schools are all operating on a balanced budget where they are not losing money, then the discussions of whether or not athletes should be paid, but until then, do what colleges are supposed to be doing to ALL their clientele, and that is preparing them for life AFTER college.