I have had a few discussions lately about whether or not college athletes should be paid. To my surprise, I have found more people that think college athletes should get more money.
Why NOT to pay college athletes:
What ever happened to school pride? Play to win for your school, team, and fans(or even yourself). Why do they need money to do that?
And how about playing for the love of the sport? There's a reason they are good at playing this sport. They practiced for hours when they were growing up. They love and hopefully still love to play it. That's what has made them good at it. Go out and play for the love of the sport.
Also, the ones that are good enough to earn a full scholarship(and they're the ones probably making the most money for the University), isn't that good enough? Not only do they have a free education, but they also get free meals, bags, clothes, books, travel to games, etc. They don't need to pay for anything for 4 years, if they wanted to.
Why we should pay college athletes:
The main argument to pay the athletes is because the College or University makes X amount of dollars off certain athletes. For example, how many #2 Texas A&M jerseys have been sold in the last year? Does Johnny Manziel deserve a piece of that pot every time one is sold? That would make sense, wouldn't it? We don't need to pay athletes for TD's or Wins or something on the field(that's covered by the scholarship), but we can pay them a little bit for each merchandise they can directly be correlated with.
The real problem:
What would paying the athletes solve? Even if they get paid, will it be enough? We can try to put rules and restrictions on how much and what they could get paid for, but it still won't be enough. The ones that want to, will keep finding ways to get more by breaking the new rules to get paid even more. What if we open it up completely? Well then athletes can make as much as they want from boosters/donors and/or 3rd party advertisements, but then we totally lose the value of student-athlete all together. More importantly, we lose the value of college athletics.
My thoughts:
College athletes get paid enough now. If they are good; they get scholarships, partial or full doesn't matter, they get what they can and what is deserved. Go play for school pride and love of the sport. If you want to get paid for something then go get a job out of high school, don't go to college. However, if you want to get an education and play a sport you love for free while you do it(maybe even get paid via scholarships) then I encourage you to do that.
