Should college athletes get paid?

When you live in a town that is home to a major college football team, you really get an up-close and personal look at just how much money is generated during the season. I happen to live in Athens, Georgia as of this writing, and the numbers of people who are on the streets and parked everywhere in RVs on a football Saturday is mind numbing–it is kind of like like New Year’s Eve in Times Square. The football stadium that the University of Georgia plays in, Sanford Stadium, holds 92,746 people, and it get packed each fall. The coach at the University of Georgia, Mark Richt, earned a salary of $3.096 million in 2009. The Governor of the State of Georgia, Sonny Perdue, makes $135,281.

Hmmm…well, we like to take a Libertarian stance on things, and Richt simply shopped his talents on the open market and was able to negotiate his salary based on supply and demand, and that is the American way. Apparently, the University of Georgia football program makes a profit big enough to justify that salary (it is a state school, not a private business, but I don’t want to muddy the waters too much here). But wait a minute, of course it makes a big profit. It fills a stadium that seats over 90,000 paying customers without having to pay the entertainers one red cent.

NFL teams offer large salaries, and they still remain profitable. Football is a very dangerous sport, and the athletes who participate often suffer the physical effects of their college careers for the rest of their lives. About 0.2 % of college football players make it to the NFL. So imagine all of the revenue that is generated by all of the football factories around the country who make their coaches very wealthy men, and consider the fact that virtually none of the players ever make a dime for their years of playing football.

The old argument is that they get scholarships, and most of them do. It costs about $18,000 for a Georgia resident to go to the University of Georgia, including fees, room and board.. Out-of-state students pay about double that. If I am a player who all of these people are coming to see, I say pay me what I am worth in the open market as a source of revenue, and I’ll pay my own tuition and be a millionaire after doing so, just like my coach.

This is not to single out the University of Georgia; I am just using their program as an example, and they didn’t make the rules. If you believe in a free market system, there is no way that you can support this absurd racket that allows people to provide an entertainment product (that entails a huge personal health risk) that generates enormous revenue without being paid.