College athletes deserve to be paid
18.07.11
How could you pay college football players but not baseball players or members of the women's field
hockey team. 3 billion off the top, invested it, sheltered it and made it available to provide a stipend to college athletes, how could anybody stand on principal and argue against paying the people who make the events possible in the first place. That $11 billion deal -- OK, it's $10. We're talking $11 billion for three weekends of television per year. So, if those two deals were worth, say, a combined $10 billion instead of $11. On top of that, there's a new four-year deal with ESPN that pays the BCS $500 million. I used to argue vehemently against paying college athletes. 3 billion, would the games not be televised. And even if, increasingly, it wasn't enough and virtually every kid who accepted a scholarship was in the red before Christmas of his freshman year, the notion of pay-for-play was at best a logistical nightmare.
Source: ESPN