More than 10 years ago, CBS signed a six-year $11 billion deal with the NCAA for the rights to the March Madness Tournament. The math comes out to be more than an average $500 million a year. The most astonishing number is zero, which is the amount each collegiate basketball player gets paid. Although far from slavery, the treatment of student-athletes in revenue-generating sports may be the closest legal and accepted act of slavery that exists today.
The default rebuttal to this claim is that student-athletes are getting paid in the form of scholarships, thus their efforts are compensated. Although scholarships provide great opportunities for many athletes, a college education means little if there is no diploma to back it up. The graduation rates for student-athletes in basketball are increasing but are still embarrassingly low. According to a 2010 study on graduation success rates, only 44 of the 65 teams (69 percent) that made it to the NCAA tournament graduated more than 50 percent of their players.
The commonly accepted answer to this discrepancy is that athletes are simply not as intelligent. This misconception, however, ignores too many variables to have any validity. Many students feel that they are burdened by their extracurricular activities, yet our workload pales in comparison to that of basketball and football players. The weekly time commitment of athletic practice is enormous. They are expected to push their bodies to the limit during every practice and then are expected to memorize playbooks in their free time. It is a wonder that any student-athlete even bothers to go to class when he is constantly exhausted mentally and physically.
The reality is that for many fans, coaches and athletic directors, athletics come first and academics are often an afterthought. The importance of on-court performance and the lack of emphasis on academics make scholarships worthless. These athletes are merely here for the short term in order to raise money for the academic department and to raise the stature of their schools. Whether or not they get a degree is not the concern of the administration, as demonstrated by the graduation rates.
So should universities and colleges take a more aggressive approach in order to graduate their athletes? Maybe it would be easier to compensate them while they are in college, instead. The problem arises about how to decide who and how much to pay them. The simple answer is to pay to those who earn, even at the expense of other programs.
There are only two sports at pretty much any college that make more money than what it costs to run the program — basketball and football. Much of the profit goes back to these sports, but much of it also goes towards funding for non-revenue sports such as fencing or tennis. The rationale behind this is that it provides other student-athletes the chance to have the college experience while building their character by participating in these sports. Although this is true, it does not make it fair to the basketball and football players who devote more time to practices and have more pressure on them to perform well while getting more scrutiny for on and off the field mistakes.
There are many problems with this solution, one being the differences in payment between different institutions. Should a football player from Ohio State get paid more than a football player from William & Mary because he earns his program more money? Should the star point guard get paid more than the three-point specialist on the end of the bench? These are legitimate questions, but are just minor wrinkles to this solution. What is important is that these profitable athletes get some form of compensation.
It is time for college institutions to take a stance, whether it is on a school-by-school basis or as a united front. They should either compensate athletes monetarily for their efforts and for the revenue they bring or they should be more aggressive in making sure the graduation rates increase dramatically. Right now, basketball and football players are money-making machines but they are not getting a fair return for their worth. Although compensation may be a quick fix that has its flaws, it is still better than nothing.
Hung Vu’s column appears on Tuesdays. He can be reached at h.vu@cavalierdaily.com.
Here’s an idea: let’s take the extra money from the increased out-of-state students’ fees and use that to pay our athletes! Brilliant!
Hung, you’re a condescending and clueless moron. Please stop writing. Seriously.
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I’m really stunned that the Cavalier Daily sunk to such low depths as to publish an article this stupid with such little thought. The vast majority of these varsity athletes get scholarships, especially the “star point guard” who probably has a full ride. Why should a school such as UVA, which has a high academic standing to maintain, consider paying it’s athletes when they have a chance to get such a respectable degree for free?
They are putting in a lot of hard work, and I think it’s a totally respectable thing to be doing, but a salary is out of the question. In addition to the $20,000 per year scholarships (for in-state athletes), the “revenue earning sports” in college are where the professional draft from. These students are preparing themselves for a career where the starting salary is in the millions. Unfortunately, I don’t think that even our valedictorian will be able to match what a third round draft pick from University of Florida will make.
Furthermore, your comparisons to some of the other teams aren’t even relevant. Currently our men’s tennis team is #1. Let’s see our football and basketball teams match that kind of performance. And do your fact checking beforehand, because there isn’t even a varsity program for fencing, in either gender, at UVA. The Virginia Fencing Club is a student-led, student-coached program that receives little in terms of funding from the school, and certainly doesn’t receive any from the Virginia Sports budget. Please, do yourself the favor of thorough analysis and research and avoid embarrassing both yourself and the University as such.
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CAV DAILY SUCKS!
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I do not agree with some of Mr. Vu’s observations and conclusions, but his column is a well-stated analysis of issues that have been frequently debated in academia and the media and does not deserve responses such as “stupid with such little thought” and “condescending and clueless moron.”
I believe college athletes are adequately compensated through their scholarships and other perks and also have sufficient academic support that any failure to earn a degree lies largely with the so-called student-athlete. However, there is a well-established legal principle that people have the right to control their own name and image for commercial purposes and must be compensated for their use. A legitimate issue is raised when colleges sell replica jerseys and other paraphernalia with a player’s name and number without any return to that individual. This has been discussed at the highest levels of the NCAA for years and is the subject of several unresolved legal challenges.
The internet is a wonderful tool for the expression of divergent opinions, but I wish many correspondents would state their views in a manner that is more befitting a great institution of higher learning.
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whoever comes up with this idea of paying athletes is a joke. as if covering $40,000 a year in tuition isn’t enough (more than plenty of full time workers in our country make) the reason that student-athletes don’t graduate is because they generally arn’t smart enough to get into the school they play for if it weren’t for their athletic ability. I had a 3.6 gpa and got rejected from a school that my friend with a 3.0 got into for athletics and hes doing awful!
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This article is so unfounded and inarticulate. It’s fair to rehash an argument that has been brought up many times, but it’d be nice if you brought a variant perception to this whole deal. You don’t, like expected.
Collegiate sports are not professional sports in the denotative sense. While we may argue that the two revenue-grossing sports may embody a quassi-professional feel to it, college sports are still amateur sports at the most fundamental level. Things work differently in the college game compared to how things work in the pros for a reason.
You also fail to realize that there are football teams outside of USC, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Michigan, etc. Virginia is one of these peripheral teams at the moment. Allowing pay in collegiate sports would widen the gap between good teams and bad teams– college sports should be about opportunity and some level of parity.
Most college athletes are not even good enough to be paid. Basketball players that are one-and-done quality can pursue professional options in the D-League or Europe if they choose so, and baseball players may accept terms from teams coming out of high school. Football players are compelled to go to college because they need college to physically and mentally develop for the pros.
Understand the dynamic of sports before you spew stupid material like this. You obviously are a very shallow sports fan, but I’m not surprised because: 1) this is your column of all things; and 2) you are like every other Virginia sports fan.
You attempt to bring a good point when you address the graduation rate problem, but paying players isn’t going to fix anything. And your reference to Ohio State football when you know there are better programs is ridiculous. You really need to discover yourself as a writer before you spew any more crap like this, although it does give me a good laugh.
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Every couple of weeks or so I get an idle moment and read the CD online. Sometimes I run into a column written by Mr. Vu and wonder, “Doesn’t UVA teach English writing anymore?”
“Although far from slavery, the treatment of student-athletes in revenue-generating sports may be the closest legal and accepted act of slavery that exists today.” – I hope this attempt at a sentence was a typo. (I won’t address the disgusting comparison of getting a free education for playing a game to mind numbing manual labor under threat of physical violence.)
“The commonly accepted answer to this discrepancy is that athletes are simply not as intelligent.” -As intelligent as what? The average student at those schools? Well, that can’t be it, since Mr. Vu doesn’t note the graduation rates of students who are not athletes . . . as intelligent as the average columnist writing for the CD . . . as intelligent as the average college professor? Your guess is as good as mine.
The chasms in logic are just as bad, but the posters before me have done a good job pointing those out.
There is, unfortunately, a lot more, but I should get back to work. I can only repeat the advice of our first poster, Shaun: Seriously, stop writing.
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