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Making The Call: Pay The Players
By
Peter Trinkle
Published Apr 5, 2009
Modified Apr 5, 2009
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By
Peter Trinkle
Published Apr 5, 2009
Modified Apr 5, 2009
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John Calipari just left Memphis for Kentucky and will receive over $4 million a year to coach basketball there. Jim Calhoun is the highest-paid employee of the state of Connecticut, something you better not ask him about. Roy Williams, the coach at North Carolina, makes around $1.5 million a year. The NCAA itself earns over $500 million a year from its TV contract with CBS. Everyone is making a killing from March Madness except for the people who make it all possible, the players. Why don’t they get a cut of all the profits they generate?
Purists will argue that the players already get paid in a way; they obtain a free education from the college they attend. Sadly, this is a benefit that way too few of the athletes ever take advantage of. 21 of the 65 tournament teams had APR scores (the method the NCAA uses to measure academic progress) lower than 925, which means the NCAA can penalize them. There are certainly some schools where academic achievement is taken seriously, Villanova and North Carolina graduate over 85% of their men’s basketball players, but clearly the first priority for most schools and players is to simply hoop it up.
So, the “student-athletes” spend their hours playing basketball and some spend it attending class, but apart from the 50 or so lucky ones who get drafted by the NBA each year, how many of them are leaving college prepared to face the future? Yet, billions of dollars change hands each year because of the efforts of these players on the court. Without them, none of this is possible.
Not only do the players not get paid, they have to follow some ridiculous rules. John Calipari just left Memphis, but his players can’t do the same unless they want to sit out a year. Why should the coach be free to leave whenever he wants to and the players unable to do so? Abolish the transfer rules and allow the players to receive some sort of salary as a result of their efforts. Tie it into academic performance as well, if you don’t graduate, you don’t get paid. What would emerge is a more just system that better reflected the economic realities of college athletics.
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basketball
college basketball
Making The Call
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Peter Trinkle
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