The Division I college basketball tournament March Madness is beginning, but the annual debate over whether to pay student-athletes is well underway. Recently, more pundits in sports media openly favor paying the athletes.
What pro-compensation arguments do not account for is the number of American college athletes, a group that is larger than many countries with 460,000 student-athletes in the NCAA.
Paying athletes, though idealistic, is economically unrealistic.
All the free spirit, Kumbaya ideas are great, but when it comes to putting the money on the table and following through with the plan, it just cannot happen.
Paying student athletes will not happen because of three insurmountable obstacles: Payment would bankrupt the NCAA, the players would not go to class, and it would be hard pay rates would be difficult to determine.
The NCAA website reported a revenue of $1.1 billion in 2017 to USA Today which is a fairly large amount of money.
But if the NCAA were to pay all of those athletes minimum wage —or around $20,000 dollars a year—it would cost them about $9.5 billion annually.
The organization would run out of money quickly. The NCAA would be in the hole at least about $8.4 billion every year, which would lead to its financial ruin.
Most college students do not want to be in class anyway. Athletes, unconstrained by financial pressure, may fail courses and squander universities’ investment in their education.
College sports fans may think fondly of paying amateur athletics stars, but they are young and still in training while attempting to keep up with classes.
If student-athletes were already getting paid for their work, they would have no incentive to do anything other than practice their sports.
The vast majority of student-athletes will not become professionals in their respective sport, so paying them would be setting athletes up to fail in life.
If athletes were paid, the NCAA would have the impossible task of coming up with an equitable pay scale for the athletes. Colleges cannot be expected to pay a hockey player from a mid-major school, a Division III football player and Zion Williamson the same rate.
Uneven pay would lead to discord in the locker room, ultimately setting athletes up to fail because they will be more focused on the money or sports than their education.
Paying athletes could compromise college sports forever. It would take the amateur out of amateur sports, leaving college sports in a limbo of mediocrity until it runs itself into the ground.
