Pay To Play – It is time to pay College Athletes

Pay to Play in College sports.  This has been a hot button topic for a long time.  There are the people that say getting the free education is enough pay.  They get room and board and a small stipend.   I used to be one of those people.  While I agree the scholarship is very nice and in some cases it is taken seriously.  In others it is not.  Lets face it there are some players that are just there as a stepping stone.  There is nothing wrong with that.  College sports have not been about an education for a long time.

The problem is that Colleges want you to believe that it is all about the education.  In reality we know that this is not true.  It is about the money.   Every year it is more and more about the money.  Yes this will be difficult to figure out.  It will take some time to figure out a pay scale.  Do you pay all the players the same will there be a sliding scale based on position and other factors?  I don’t know the answer to these questions.

Things Change

I used to be in the camp that said the education was enough.  We are setting those that want it up to succeed in life after sports.  That is great for those players that want that.  Not every player is like that.   In baseball or hockey those players have strong minor league path that they can follow.  In Basketball and Football the college teams are the minor league.  They have no other path so they have to go to college.

With the current NFL rules that you have to be three years removed from High School to enter the draft.  Players have no choice but to go to college.  This was fine before when they money was not as big.  Maybe it was not fine but the free education was easier to defend as the way that the players were getting compensated.

Coach pay is getting crazy

The thing that really changed my mind was how much the coaches are starting to get paid.   Getting paid $7 million to coach a team is a crazy amount of money.   Ohio State paying Ryan Day $500,000 to coach three games while Urban Meyer was suspended it just absolutely crazy.  Not crazy that he does not deserve or has not earned that money.  Crazy that the Colleges say they don’t have the funds to pay the players.   That just makes me LOL  especially with the amount of money they are tossing at the coaches.    They just paid a guy more money than most people will make in the next 10 years combined.  Think about that for a minute.  Ryan Day made in three weeks what the average family in the United States will make over the next 10 years.

The problem is not that he made that amount of money.  It is that the Colleges will maintain that they can still not pay the players. With that $500,000 they could have paid the starting 22 players for the Buckeyes almost $23,000 for the year.  The money is there.  Yes they use some of it to support the other sports in the University.  Jobs are created.   At what cost though.

It is clear however that it is time to initiate a pay to play in some form for College Athletes.

What do you think?

Let us know in the comments.  Should Colleges bring in pay to play or is the free education enough?