*FAN SUBMISSION by Aleena Fazili.*
Courtesy: Bleacher Report
Football and basketball players at Big 10 schools should be paid. Ivy league athletes should not.
It’s an unfortunate truth that at National Championship winning schools, the hours of sweat that go into practice often result in neither a professional contract nor an education rigorous enough to boost the players in the ‘real world’. For many of them, the four years at college are essentially their glory days, and with such little compensation for the immense risk they’re taking, it seems like D1 colleges are reeling in the best players in the nation and then leaving them dangling once they’ve been drained of their four years of eligibility.
How much would you be willing to risk without any definitive reward?
20 practice hours per week. Video sessions. Lift. Repeat.
We build up these Big 10 athletes throughout their collegiate careers. They are used to pull in crowds at games and are frequently used to advertise the school – some of them are raking in the dollars for their respective programs and yet under NCAA guidelines are treated as amateurs. Unlike in the Ivy League these athletes were reeled in purely because they were extraordinary at their sport, they were granted athletic scholarships (a concept that doesn’t exist at Ivy League Schools) and the majority of them consciously trade off between the low chances of going pro and a GPA needed to be competitive in the workplace.
Do they deserve more?
In this fiscal year alone the University of Florida’s football team managed to obtain a whooping $63.95 million while NCAA Championship winning team, the UConn Huskies bought in $13.9 million in revenue this year – a stark contrast to the Ivy League Men’s Basketball and Football Champions Harvard, which bought in around $4 million from their programs combined
Many of us understand the need to separate playing a sport at a professional level and at the collegiate level, but there comes a point where compensation for the hours, the revenue and the results only seems fair. Lets not kid ourselves, these players are here for the sport first and the education second, their role on campus is blatant, they are there to win games and make money for their respective universities.
So why don’t we treat them like this?
Although trap seems a strong word for an athletic scholarship to a Division I school, it’s not far off what athletes have to go through for their four years in the system. Football players need to be 21 to enter the NFL draft and basketball players are required to attend college for at least a year before entering the NBA. They’re stuck. There’s an invisible magnetic field around schools by which athletes are drawn in for no reason other than they have no choice.
Ivy league athletes are never trapped in their respective sport; their applications are merely ‘supported’ by the coaches. Without any definitive athletic scholarships, it makes no sense to compensate them for the world-renowned education they’re getting.
It even seems fair to argue that schools like Stanford and Duke should pay their players even though the education standard is on par with the Ivy League schools, because at the end of the day their programs are bringing in the money and national recognition that allow them to pay their athletes.
I never feel like I deserve anything for playing a sport. I spend most of my days walking around campus in my grey standard issue athletics sweats and although I put in hours of training to represent my school at the end of the day I know the school is giving me more than what I’m giving them. But for the players who don’t feel this way it might be time to speak up.
For the players who are giving their schools something to talk about, this is the time to stand up and say something.
