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Is It Time to Pay College Student Athletes?

By Miguel Gonzalez

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All this talk about DirecTV and Pac-12 working towards an agreement before the 2015 season now poses the real question, should we pay the college athletes? 

Arizona Wildcats
Arizona Wildcats /

Arizona Wildcats

In the past few years whether to pay or not pay college athletes has been a heated debate as there is a ton of money being made in college sports, mostly in football and men’s basketball. I stand with the player’s and maybe that’s because at one time I was a college athlete. For the sake of this argument I will be using college sport of football as an example. Everyone’s argument on the other side of the athlete is that the kids will get a great college education and experience, they get a scholarship worth a lot of money depending on the school.

Now I agree with that argument to a degree, but have these folks who argue this (the NCAA) tried to see it from the player’s side? First off, have you seen the schedule and calendar of a Student Athlete? I mean you work about a 40-hour work week, right? So now lets put it in student terms, you must take a min of 12 credits or 12 hours of class time per week. Ok your right, not crazy, it breaks down to about 3 hours a day of class time, monday through friday.

Let’s not forget these football players must also attend practice anywhere from about two to three hours per day. Then they will have to attend team meetings and other team activities on any given day. So there are those time constraints added to their week. On top of that, there’s the probability that a certain course they are taking is only offered on certain days and certain hours. It’s not like they say ‘I want to go to class from this time to that time on this day’ (although they are probably given some leeway by professors.) College courses and study sessions are all over the map from 7am to about 8pm.

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So your average student is probably on campus from around 7-8am till about 4-5pm, then as a student athlete you get to go to practice probably from 4 or 5 to about 7 or 8pm. Ok yes, that’s a 12-hour day, but now they have to try to study and finish class assignments. So you can imagine how quickly time gets away from them.

For football, as in any sport, there are travel weeks and weekends for away games. Now they have missed classes and weekend down time for school work since they have games and pre game schedule. So it’s tricky to do your school work while preparing for a big intense stressful game.  I can agree that free education, room and board, a little spending money and the college experience may be great compensation, but let’s look at this situation as a whole. Below is a sample schedule on travel game day, this does not include the travel time from the day before and right after the game has ended.

Four-year student athletes (out-of-state) are paid on average about $92,000 in total without regard to the cost of a college living according to this article by USAtoday.com article (I used the out-of-state 4-year budget in this example.) How about we talk about the millions of dollars being made off this young man we are using as an example.

Did we forget to mention that he probably is between the age of 18-23? And, the fans expect perfection from him week in and week out while he attempts to excel in school. I know it’s not impossible to meet all these expectations, but it’s still a lot of responsibility to take on. Let’s now turn to the $$$ being made by the folks profiting from this athletes efforts.

Here are some numbers from last season taken from this ESPN.com article; the NCAA distributed $505.9 million dollars to its FBS Bowl game participants, the teams paid all together about $100.2 million to take part in those bowl games and roughly made $400 million profit all in one month for the schools and the NCAA.

By the way, if you didn’t think you read those numbers correctly, you’re right, these figures were just for the BOWL season (or postseason.) On top of this money, ESPN and other TV outlets have also taken their profit and piece of the pie. ESPN doesn’t pay $475 million a year for the college football playoffs NOT to make any money, right?

Additionally, each school has roughly six home games in which they profit from ticket sales with ticket prices in Tucson ranging from $12-$185 per seat. A season average of 50,000 people, combined with easy math comes out to $600 K per game ($12 x 50,000.) That is $3.6 million for the season and that’s only based on the minimum $12 ticket.  The U of A does have to pay all the salaries of staff in the program, food, tuition, travel costs, uniforms and equipment, stadium staff and related upkeep and expenses, and the list goes on. Basically, there is a lot of money exchanging hands around this college sport.

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I’m not saying these kids should make millions or that they don’t abuse their popularity and power to their advantage. But this whole idea of paying an athlete for two years and then they turn around and attempt to jump to the NFL before they graduate is also a waste of money. We treat them like superstars on Saturdays, so maybe we could teach them responsibility and make a contract with them where they must commit to complete their degree or pay back some of the money they were given to go to college and play college sports. Just one idea.

We can argue about this till we’re blue in the face and I could write on and on about my opinion but let me ask you the real question: is it fair that maybe the people shorted the most in these deals surrounding college football could be the fans? As I stated earlier, there is a lot of money going around but anyone that has DIRECTV still can’t watch their Wildcats every week. 

Maybe we shouldn’t be so focused on whether or not the players should be paid, but instead we should focus more of the discussion on who the Companies and Organizations who are making a ton of money could be sharing the profits with, maybe there’s a way they can share more with the players. They seem so greedy with all the millions they are making off these kids who are just trying very hard to better their lives. It doesn’t seem right.

Whatever the state of affairs,  it’s that time again folks, we are now in the final days of all this pre-season football talk and kickoff is days away. Let’s BEARDOWN ‘with’ our Wildcats on Thursday when they officially kickoff the season and the fans can show them just how much we appreciate all their efforts! It’s not money but it’s something special.

Next: Where was I on November 28th 2014? Not Home Watching DIRECTV

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