At the end of the 2015 fiscal year, the South Eastern Conference (SEC) finished with a total revenue of $527.4 million dollars. Out of that revenue, around $455.8 million went to the colleges within the conference, which equates to around $31 million per college.
The SEC also accounted for over half of the $906 million the National College Athletics Association (NCAA) made as a whole in 2014 and 2015.
Now, I want to bring it a bit closer to home: Dan Mullen makes around $4.5 million a year, and both John Cohen and Scott Stricklin make close to $500,000 a year. Again, this is a lot of money flying around, and college sports only continue to grow in terms of their revenue-producing power.
College sports are obviously entertaining, so people pay big bucks to watch them and be involved in them, which is fine.What is not fine is the fact that even with all this money circulating in college athletics, the main contributors to the success of these programs—college athletes themselves— are still not getting paid.
According to the NCAA itself, there are over 460,000 student athletes in the NCAA, and almost 70 percent of these athletes do not receive scholarships of any kind, much less full-ride scholarships.
Of the 30 percent of athletes who do receive some sort of scholarship assistance, a sizeable portion do not receive full rides, so their expenses are still not fully covered. Many people will combat my argument by saying things like, “being a student athlete is a privilege, no compensation should be needed.” No offense to these people, but being able to say you are on a college football team is not going to pay a college student’s bills.
Division 1 athletes are working a full-time job for their university. According to USA Today, the average college football player spends up to 43 hours per week participating in football related activities. This is followed by 40 hours a week for baseball players and right around 38 for players on men’s and women’s basketball teams.
This is 40 hours a week for which many of them are not receiving any compensation at all, and dedicating this large amount of time to the team removes all possibility of working a part time job during school.
Not only that, it also affects the type of education they choose to pursue. Most of these athletes do not enroll in STEM programs, and how could they? Where is the time to study and prepare for coursework such advanced programs require? Not only do college athletes sacrifice monumental amounts of time that could be used for education and leisure, they are also the sole reason college athletic programs make money.
If you remove the athletes, where is the revenue? 62,000 people are not going to buy tickets to watch Mullen stand on the sideline and coach an empty field, so why is he making almost $5 million a year when the players that give his job purpose make nothing?
Many people argue there are a lot of athletes on these teams who do not play, and therefore do need scholarships. This is a fallacious statement to say the least. If all of the athletes who do not receive scholarships suddenly vanished from these teams, then there would not be a team at all—the majority of players on a team do not receive them.
Another argument used by those opposed to paying college athletes is the idea that the game will somehow change if these athletes are paid. Well, that is simply not true either.
Let’s be honest, we all know many, if not all, universities, are paying some of the big name athletes that play for them under the table. At the NFL draft Laremy Tunsil stated some colleges are even paying for living expenses for the families of these athletes. These players are paid, just in a way that is generally unnoticeable; if the sanctity of college athletics has not been spoiled yet, then I do not think it will.
What I am suggesting is that college athletes be paid a livable wage based on the services they are providing the university. No 20-year-old student who devotes 15 hours a week to school work and 40 hours a week to athletics should be eating ramen noodles for dinner.
