Analysis: Why College Athletes Should Be Paid

College athletes should receive a salary because College athletics bring in extreme amounts of revenue to universities. Through the athletes performance, labor, and image they bring in large sums of profit to these colleges therefore many believe they should be paid as seeing they are not being paid as of right now. This concept is argued about and causes some strong controversy between both sides those that support and those that oppose the concept. This controversy lies upon three main categories endorsements, salary, and the approach. This topic has become one of the main discussions in modern college athletics.

Universities are using an athletes image and making a profit off of it, meanwhile they aren’t paying the athletes for it.

Athletes began noticing this and there soon were some investigations. Many people began looking into how much these programs are making and how much these players are missing out on, since they aren’t being paid for their performance which runs this industry. For example, “Alabama's Crimson Tide football program reported $103.9 million in revenue for 2016 and posted a $47 million profit”. Due to the NCAA rules players did not receive a dime of these millions. The millions come from the games, the jerseys, team apparel, and most importantly the athletes image. This possible and well deserved income could change the lifestyle of these athletes. They are expected to perform their best day in and day out but they aren’t receiving the right treatment to reach this capability. This statement from Shabazz Napier exemplifies the struggle these athletes go through and how an income would support them. “We do have hungry nights that we don’t have enough money

Many are divided when speaking on the salaries of college athletes because many don't have an understanding on how athletes would be paid. Some concepts consist of salary caps, endorsement deals, and signing bonuses. The concept of salary caps is constructed similar to those of professional leagues such as the NBA and NFL. Teams would be given an overall salary cap, an example of this would be “In basketball, the cap would be $650,000. In football, it would be $3 million.” Now this isn’t an extraordinary amount, its not even that large of a sum if you compare it to what the michigan coach makes which is a grand 7 million. Therefore 3.65 million is a very tangible number to these multi-million dollar programs. With these possible caps some projected salaries would start off at 25,000 minimum per player. Players in the near future could also make endorsement deals with companies. This was a non negotiable with the NCAA for years but with some recent opposition there has been a break and some players received checks from EA sports for the use of their image and name in their games. This is a small step towards the payment of collegiate athletes but it is an undeniably significant one. Lastly the concept of signing bonuses came up in the pondering of how the payment of athletes could occur. The NCAA has been troubled with conflicts involving the use of the