QUICK TAKE: PAYING COLLEGE ATHLETES

Every time I hear the various talking heads on various sports shows discuss how they think college football and basketball players should be payed by the institutions they attend I can’t help but wonder how uninformed those talking heads are. Have any of them ever heard of Title IX? Institutions won’t be able to just pay players in the revenue sports like football and basketball. Anything the football and basketball players get paid the same amount will need to be paid to the student-athletes on the (insert your own team of least interest here). 

With that many athletes to be paid the dollar amount the schools would be able to pay each of them would be so small it would not at all discourage the players in the big-time sports from accepting under-the-table money and other favors. And even if you could in some fantasy-land pay ONLY the football and basketball players thousands of dollars per semester the belief that this money would stop them from wanting more than what their teammates are earning betrays unbelievable ignorance of human nature. 

Now that takes care of the concept of the institutions paying the student-athletes. A more difficult idea to grapple with is the proposal that it should be legal for agents to pay the athletes “on spec”, investing in the potential return they’ll get if the kid becomes a big-money pro. I think this would be chaotic, but I also think it would be a HUGE (or, since this is the internet, maybe I should say a “HUGH”) kick to see many agents throwing their money away on athletes who don’t pan out and wind up never actually getting to the pro ranks. That would be absolutely hilarious! Comically enough, if enough agents wasted hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars on prospects who washed out it might actually get to the point where even the agents would be leary of paying such large amounts of money to prospective stars and would stop doing it. It might work as a natural corrective and bring the  amounts paid to up-and-coming athletes down to a level that would  be barely above a token stipend, with agents saying “Show me something first, kid” to the people with their hands out.