Paying College Athletes

athletes are not uncompensated. they get scholarships. but agree also that schools make huge sums of $ off them.

Technically the athletes are being compensated. Not monetarily but with an education. This may not appeal to the superstar with pro ambitions, but for a majority of athletes an education(with a full scholarship) that might not have been available if they didn't play sports is appealing. Most Div I schools go out of their way to hire tutors for their athletes, something they would never do for the average student.

The football programs are mostly non-profits, same with the NCAA. So no, profit, at least for the major programs, is not a concern. The programs receive millions from multiple sources that are spent on staff, coaches and other sports that need to be spent (Universities are not supposed to be profit making institutions). While the athletes that are generating the revenue through their performance every Saturday are paid with scholarships and money for room and board (can't be more than $60k

Football/basketball makes money for the school. If anything it's a little absurd that the players make so much money for the university with little to no compensation for themselves.

Your comment is about football but your links discuss subsidies on entire athletic programs. It is well known that more popular sports offset expenses for less popular ones (especially those satisfying title IX) and many times the schools have to subsidize even further. I think you are confusing the expense/revenue ratio of college football with college athletic programs as a whole.

They profit off the labor of unpaid student athletes.

What are the downsides to paying student athletes?

Because it's really odd to associate a university with a professional sports team and not paying the athletes was the last straw after stadiums in the hundreds of millions, coaches salaries in the millions, television deals, etc. etc. already all made it seem like a joke.There's nothing wrong with being a sports fan or being a player, or competing while at university, but the levels that football and basketball have gotten to are plainly ridiculous. Those games and how much money i

They're profitable because they pay their workers (the athletes) next-to-nothing. And even so, colleges would be better off spinning off their teams into professional entities that pay royalties to use the school's name. At the very least, it's one less distraction for the college administration and they can focus on their actual jobs: education and research.

Those sports teams wouldn't be making any money without the talents of the students that play on those teams. The TV contracts the larger teams are negotiating are worth billions of dollars. The subsidies to all players are two digit millions at best. The manner in which these universities are profiting off of these largely minority athletes is obscene. To deny those kids the right to profit from their own labor because of some trivial tax implication while those same universities continue