As seen in the earlier installments of this debate, there are good points on each side. Personally, I am against paying athletes both on principle and for practical reasons.
Why? It would be impossible to find a practical and fair system to distribute revenue to athletes.
Do we pay the revenue sports, football and men’s basketball? Or do we pay based on performance? If based on team performance, field hockey and soccer would be paid, and football not so much.
Individual performance? Paying just the stars will create stratification among the ranks, but paying everyone equally could lead to resentment by the stars. Do high-performing women’s sports get the same rate as men’s? Do injuries subtract from their salary? What’s the base rate?
Do we have a cap? Look at what baseball’s inability to regulate team expenditures has done for the New York Yankees. College could become another example of money buying the championship, with the richest schools enticing all the best athletes to play for the program that can best compensate them. Do we really want to create (more of) a Duke dynasty?
Where is this money going to come from? While the Athletics Department supports itself on donations and ticket sales, the overemphasis on athletics is already obvious. Taking this step could lead to a direct conflict between academics and athletics.
Plus, contrary to popular belief, working full time doesn’t accrue nearly the money that playing full-time does. I could work 80 hours a week during the school year and still come up short of even an in-state scholarship. No athlete works that much. Jobs also don’t net the additional privileges that athletics do.
I don’t begrudge athletes their scholarships. From working with the football players, whose hideous schedule during the season can mean waking up at 5 p.m. for stadium runs or treatment and dragging themselves back to their rooms at 10 p.m. after study hall, I know that they deserve every cent.
I am offended on principle, however, at the idea of athletes getting paid extra. Do students get a bonus when they ace a test or boost the average the university’s average GPA? After all, that makes the school look better, increasing state funding and attracting better students, but I don’t hear anybody cheering my name after a final. Sports records may help to create a more visible achievement of excellence than test scores, but that is only one facet of this school.
Most importantly, by injecting extra green into college athletics, we run the risk of corrupting the game into just another business where your motivation comes from your wallet instead of your heart.
The reason that college sports are so special is because the people who play them are just like us. We cheer and scream and clap on game day and then sit next to them in class. They’re like us, but they’re out there doing something special for us, for the team, for the school, and we love them for it. There’s a connection there unlike any other to be found in the world of sports. If, by paying them a salary, athletes are separated from the rest of us, that connection will be severed. The dynamics of college sports will never be the same, and their fans will never recover.
Bethany Offutt is a sophomore criminology and criminal justice and psychology major. She can be reached at offutt at umdbk dot com.
