Summary Of Taylor Branch's Article On Student Athletes Get Paid

Alexis Griggsby

October 17, 2017

Should I Get Paid?

Taylor Branch wrote an article on Student Athletes the article is called “The Shame of College Sports”. Branch talks about is that college sports make so much money and thrive off of the back of Student Athletes but the student athletes do not get paid in the time that they are in college. Also throughout the article is how the National Collegiate Athletic Association also known as the NCAA and how it is extremely corrupted. Which control the student athlete from doing anything? The NCAA flourished through Walter Byers and the idea of “student athlete” which specifically have “student first”. While reading this article it hard for me to take a stance on weather I Alexis Griggsby should be

Everything that we do revolves around our practice schedules, game times, and travel times. The classes we choose revolve around everything related to our sport. With that being said some of the top paid job are football and men’s basketball coaches. Those coaches would not be where they are without the athletes. To state that our education is a big priority but yet if a football game lies on a Thursday “we shut down the university at 3 o’clock to accommodate the crowds” (Taylor Branch 3). In the film, they talked about how the coaches own their feet the universities own their body, the athlete only owns their brain. Arian Foster describe a student athlete as an indentured servant which I have to agree describes student athletes. But Taylor Branch knows it’s not slavery but it is “colonialism” (4) because it a form of trying to justify what the NCAA is doing is the right thing for student athletes. The old saying of its for their own good they just don’t know it

Walter Byers was the best man for the job for calling them “student first” to get the universities and the NCAA out of dealing with workers compensation court cases. The rules that they create are really to save their own asses. In all honesty, they really have gone power crazy with needing to have all the money. They hated the television deal with NBC and football teams getting private contract deals which remove the middle man the NCAA which was the case NCAA vs Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma the first case they lost. By these men being who they are knowing that it would not hurt them at all because of the March Madness deal. They never thought about having the athlete speak on their behalf. For how it is o sometimes not having enough money to get food, gas, money to go home, or have family come up to a game. They think that student athletes would not know what to do with the money but we haven’t been able to prove them otherwise. Taylor Branch is a big believer in letting our voices be heard and not just pushed to the side as if we are