Summary: College Football Players Should Be Paid

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Imagine you’re working a nine to five job during the week and working roughly 40 hours during that week, maybe even more. However, imagine that for this job you have no healthcare, no job security, there is a constant threat of injury due to the working conditions, and you don’t get paid. What I just described to you is the life of a college football player. They have to attend all of their practices, team meetings, film sessions, and games to stay on the team and be allowed to participate. Also, if they get cut from the team, there is the looming threat of losing their scholarships and not being able to afford to attend college. Having to invest this much time into their football careers leaves them with no time to hold down a job or make …show more content…
One concern is whether or not it is even viable to pay players. In a Huffington Post article, five sports economists agreed that it would be viable to pay them. They said that “The NCAA alone brought in nearly a billion dollars in revenue in [2014]” and this revenue is spread among the different schools in the NCAA (Strachan). These schools are non-profit, so they want to spend all the money that they receive, and I find it difficult to find where on a campus or in a sports program you could spend tens of millions of dollars without dedicating some of it to the players. Also, it is hard to look at the allocation of money without looking at the contracts that the coaches receive. Specifically, in states such as Texas, Ohio, and Oregon, you’ll find that the highest paid public employee is a football coach (Strachan). It can be argued that the money to pay these football players could simply come out of these ludicrous coaching contracts that can be upwards of millions per year. So, I don’t believe that there would be an issue finding the money to pay these football