"Amateur" Athletes
It’s kind of a slow news day (Newsweek slimes the GOP, inducing a yawn; Clinton to win huge in Reagan Dem-heavy states tomorrow, inducing a second), but I have to admit to being somewhat entranced by this OJ Mayo story. For the uninitiated, it’s a familiar one: big time collegiate athlete accepts money against the rules the NCAA has laid down, athlete leaves school to make millions in the pros, school (probably) gets hit with big sanctions for violating the rules/turning a blind eye.
My antipathy towards college athletics knows no bounds–I find the hypocrisy astounding (“student” athletes? Really?), and the level of talent to be far below the pro game–so I must admit to having a hard time getting worked up over this situation: ESPN found out that a popular recruit who turned into a mediocre freshman was taking some cash. Wow. They could probably do the same exact story about half of the premier recruits in the league…they just happened to have a source willing to go on the record for this one.
But it does raise a question that has been hovering around Division I athletics for some time now: Should college athletes be compensated? (And don’t give me any of that “They are compensated by getting a free education nonsense”–that means nothing to the premier high school recruits who use colleges as glorified farm teams for the pros. If big-time athletes cared about the diploma they had a chance to receive they’d all end up at Duke.)
What I mean is, shouldn’t athletes get a cut of the tens of millions of dollars that their schools bring in on their labor? I’m not talking about a ton of money, but 20, 30 grand a year, enough to mollify the sense of entitlement these young men bring to the court/field, and enough to (hopefully) ward off the hangers-on who wish to leech off of them. It’s not like we’re talking about a corruption of the college game–the corruption is endemic already. At least we might end up with a little regulation creating a level playing field between the programs willing to engage in shenanigans and the programs who try to maintain a façade of respectability.