They can play in another country. They can form an XFL or whatever and get paid whatever the market will give them. Other options don't have to be as good as the best option to be viable. They get upwards of $250,000 to play football while also getting the opportunity to get a college degree. Sure some players are "worth" millions. But others are worth $0. There's no fair way to pay players.
And say goodbye to non-football or basketball sports. Who cares about those kids....
There's no fair way to pay players? Why not just give them all a small "laundry stipend", as they say?
I get that the scholarship benefits athletes get are HUGE, but I just don't understand how it justifies needlessly keeping them in poverty during their college years. I worked two jobs when I was in school for spending money. Football players can't do that. Their lives are football and school. So when their favorite uncle dies and they have a funeral to go to, they have to scramble to buy a suit and make travel arrangements with money they don't have.
So what, many will say. That's true of many students all over the country, for various reasons other than their commitment to D-I football. Maybe so. D-I players can take out loans like other students, I suppose, sure.
But I cannot get over the fundamental illogic of giving kids a scholarship to perform an activity that is TREMENDOUSLY lucrative to the schools, and then telling the students that they can receive NONE of that value in liquid form, so they had better take out loans if they want any spending money, even though the reality is that more than a third of them will not graduate and will have no more earning power after leaving the program than they did coming in and no way to pay those loans back, and the schools often do very little to ensure that they do graduate with useful, marketable skills.
No one's forcing them to do it, it will be argued. If they think they are better off just taking out loans and going to school as a regular student, or looking for work right out of high school, they are more than welcome to.
But is that what schools want? For kids to realize how unattractive playing D-I football is? No, they want the best players to come to their school so they can field a competitive team and make a lot of money. They recruit the best athletes they can find and gloss over the fact that, in order to succeed, they will have to bust their asses all day, pushing themselves to the limits of physical exhaustion to become faster, bigger, stronger, more skilled, then find a way to study all night, then go to bed, then get up and do it again.
There's just no reason we need to make it so hard for them. It doesn't make sense, when schools could easily carve out a small fraction of the money they get from their conference TV deal and ticket sales and everywhere else for a "laundry stipend" so that the kids have a few bucks to buy a suit and a plane ticket for a funeral.
