Universities make hundreds of millions off ticket sales and jerseys while the athletes on the field get a scholarship and a curfew. Is paying them overdue justice, or the end of amateur sports as we know it?
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Add your commentMy daughter is a gymnast at a mid-major program. Full ride. She also waitresses on weekends because she can't afford textbooks and the occasional dinner out. The scholarship covers tuition and housing. It does not cover being a college student. Nobody talks about that gap.
My nephew played D1 basketball for four years. Four years. His face was on posters all over campus, on the university's fundraising brochures, on everything. He graduated with a degree in communications and about $40k in debt because his scholarship didn't cover everything. Meanwhile the athletic director made $800k a year. Tell me again how that's fair.
Okay but here's what nobody wants to model out: say you pay all 85 scholarship football players at a Power Five program a $50k salary. That's $4.25 million per year just for football. Then you factor in the entire athletic department — hundreds of athletes across dozens of sports. Where exactly does that money come from? Do you cut non-revenue sports? Do you raise tuition? Do you fire the third assistant strength coach? I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying 'just pay them' is not a policy, it's a bumper sticker.
The fact that a coach can make $9 million a year at a state university — a PUBLIC institution — while arguing with a straight face that paying players would compromise the spirit of amateur athletics should disqualify that argument forever.
My son blew out his ACL in his sophomore year, lost his scholarship the following year because he couldn't perform at the same level, and graduated with debt and permanent knee damage. The university moved on to the next recruit. Where was their loyalty to him? These kids deserve real protections, and a salary is part of that.
transactional?? it's already transactional. coaches get paid. athletic directors get paid. the guy who mows the field gets paid. everyone in the building gets paid except the 22 year old whose jersey they're selling in the gift shop.
The 'they get a scholarship' argument would be more convincing if the universities weren't pulling in literally billions in TV deals. Alabama football generated $103 million in revenue one year. One year. One sport. And the players got room and board. Come on.
someone's gonna bring up the free food and housing again and I'm going to lose my mind. yes. free housing. in a dorm. with mandatory meal plans. and curfews. and coaches who can walk into your room for compliance checks. you are describing supervised poverty and calling it a perk
I grew up in a household where my dad worked two jobs and we still qualified for free lunch. A full scholarship — tuition, housing, meals, books — would have been genuinely life-changing for us. So I have complicated feelings when athletes call that insufficient. And I also understand why it IS insufficient when the school is banking nine figures off your performance. Both things can be true at the same time.
counterpoint to the person who said the degree is the compensation — what good is a degree in a field you had no time to actually study for because you were practicing 40 hours a week? a lot of these athletes are steered into joke majors specifically so they stay eligible. so the 'they got an education' argument requires that education to actually be real.
i honestly feel like people arguing against this have never had to watch their kid practice six hours a day, maintain a GPA, do media obligations, and then stress about whether their scholarship renews. my son did that for three years. three years of that grind for a scholarship they could yank. tell me again how that's a fair deal
The $300,000 scholarship figure sounds impressive until you realize the athlete had no choice in when or how that value was determined, can lose it for performance or injury, cannot sell it, trade it, or take it elsewhere without sitting out a year, and was until recently forbidden from earning a single additional dollar from their own name and likeness. That's not compensation, that's a controlled benefit with strings.
YES. PAY THEM. FULL STOP. We're not talking about intramurals. We're talking about a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry that decided unpaid labor was fine because the workers are mostly 19 years old.
The real reason schools and the NCAA resisted paying players for so long isn't tradition or amateurism. It's that the moment athletes are employees, schools face liability, benefits costs, workers compensation claims, and potential antitrust exposure. It was always about legal and financial self-protection dressed up as principle.
hot take: the real scandal isn't whether athletes get paid, it's that we've built a system where 18-year-old kids have to make life-defining decisions about going pro vs staying in school with almost zero support, information, or legal representation. whether they get a salary or not, that part is just cruel.
The second you start cutting checks, college sports becomes minor league. And I'm sorry but minor league sports are boring. Nobody's filling 100,000 seats in Ann Arbor to watch a minor league team. The pageantry, the alumni connection, the school pride — that all evaporates the moment it's transactional.
My uncle played offensive tackle at Tennessee in the late 80s. Drove a car with a cracked windshield for two full years because he couldn't afford to fix it. Meanwhile the university sold jerseys with his number on them at the campus bookstore. He wasn't bitter about it — that's just how it was then — but I am bitter about it now, looking back. These kids deserve better.
The injury question is what gets me. Kid blows a knee, maybe ends his career, and the university moves on in two weeks. No workers comp in any real sense, no long term healthcare commitment. We'd never accept that in any other industry.
they already get paid lol. free tuition, free housing, free food, free tutors, free travel, free gear. you know what that's worth at a school like Duke? like $80k a year. most jobs don't pay that.
Graduated from UNC Chapel Hill. Work in accounting now. Went to every home basketball game I could afford. I used to feel a kind of ownership over that team, like they were playing for ME and the school. Lately I've been honest with myself: that feeling was kind of exploitative on my part, wasn't it. I was part of the crowd that made those players valuable without ever asking whether they were okay financially. That's changed how I watch sports and it's changed my position on this.
As a sports economist — and yes that's a real job — the evidence from NIL's first few years suggests that the 'death of college sports' predictions were dramatically overstated. Viewership is up. Attendance is roughly stable. Revenue is still climbing. The systemic collapse people warned about has not materialized. Data matters.
Economically speaking, what we have is a cartel. The NCAA functions as a wage-fixing cartel that suppresses compensation for labor it couldn't exist without. If any other industry operated this way there'd be antitrust suits from here to Sunday — oh wait, there were, and the schools largely lost them. The courts have already started dismantling this. Salaries are just the logical endpoint.
Look at what the SEC alone generates annually — we're talking billions. Not millions. Billions. And the coaches, the conferences, the bowl games, the networks all get their cut. The athletes get a piece of paper at the end. At some point calling that amateur athletics is just a polite word for exploitation.
Counterpoint to the March Madness guy: those kids are already playing for a paycheck in many cases. They're playing for the draft. They're playing for exposure. The 'purity' narrative was always a fairy tale the NCAA told to justify keeping the money themselves.
Responding to the union question above — there have actually been attempts. Northwestern football players tried to unionize around 2014-2015, voted on it, but the NLRB declined jurisdiction. The legal question of whether college athletes are 'employees' has been deliberately muddied for decades. The Dartmouth men's basketball team actually did successfully unionize in 2024 though. It's happening slowly.
I don't even care about this debate anymore. The NIL genie is out of the bottle. Some kids are making millions, most are making nothing, and the 'amateur' label is purely cosmetic at this point. We're already in a pay-for-play system, we're just pretending we're not.
The Title IX argument above is actually a common misconception. Title IX requires equal opportunity and treatment, not equal pay for equal revenue generation. Schools already manage wildly different funding levels between sports. Salary structures could absolutely be designed within Title IX compliance. Courts have addressed this.
Nobody is addressing what happens to the guys who don't pan out. A basketball program signs five freshmen on full scholarship. By junior year two of them are barely getting minutes and the coach is actively trying to get them to transfer to open up spots. Those kids gave everything and got a partial education and a diploma in a major they barely attended for. That's the real story.
I played college softball. Division II. We weren't generating millions for anybody. My scholarship covered 60% of my costs and I worked 20 hours a week off campus to cover the rest while practicing twice a day. So when people frame this as a simple yes-or-no, they're ignoring that 'college athlete' covers a huge range of experiences.
lived in Tuscaloosa for eight years. Alabama football is essentially the economy of that town. Local restaurants, hotels, shops, parking lots, bars — all of it runs on football Saturdays. The players generating that are on scholarship and curfew while everybody around them is cashing in. Felt wrong in 2009, feels wrong now.
I keep seeing people say 'just go to the G League' as if that's a realistic option for most players. The G League roster is tiny. The NFL has no real minor league equivalent. For most elite college athletes, college IS their only path to developing as a professional. So the choice isn't 'college or pros,' it's 'college on these terms or nothing.'
I went to Ohio State for two years before transferring. Sat right next to some of the football players in my intro economics class. Those guys were there for maybe six weeks total out of the semester. Not their fault — they were traveling, practicing, doing media days. How is that a real education? The scholarship isn't compensation, it's a prop.
Here's my challenge to anyone defending the status quo: name one other industry in America where a business generates hundreds of millions of dollars from someone's labor and that person's compensation is legally capped. Go ahead. I'll wait.
Amateur athletics is a European concept that was always rooted in keeping working-class athletes out of competition. The 'purity of amateurism' was literally invented by elites to exclude people who needed money to survive. So no, I don't feel bad about dismantling it.
I keep going back and forth on this and landing in the same place: the current NIL system is actually worse than either extreme. Full employment status would be cleaner. True amateurism with real protections would be cleaner. What we have now is a chaotic gray market where rich boosters funnel money through fake endorsements and kids at less connected programs get left out. It's the worst version of both worlds.
I don't have a strong opinion on salaries per se but I do think the current NIL system is kind of a disaster. You've got freshmen signing $2 million deals before they've played a single college game and fifth-year seniors who never cracked the starting lineup getting nothing. That's its own kind of unfair.
The scholarship-as-payment argument completely falls apart when you look at how many of these kids come from low-income families and can't even afford to fly home for Christmas because their scholarship doesn't cover personal expenses. A scholarship doesn't put gas in the car.
I played four years of D1 wrestling. Zero revenue generated. Zero. Our program barely survived every budget cycle. If salaries become mandatory I can name you thirty programs exactly like ours that fold immediately. You want to pay the quarterback fine but do not pretend there aren't casualties downstream.
Constitutional law professor here (community college, not Harvard, before someone dunks on me). The employee classification issue is genuinely thorny. If athletes are employees, you open the door to workers' comp claims, unemployment insurance, collective bargaining, NLRA protections. Universities are not equipped — legally or administratively — for that world. That doesn't mean it's wrong, it just means the transition would be messier than anyone on either side of this debate is admitting.
There's a version of this that works: revenue sharing tied directly to program revenue, guaranteed scholarships unconditional on performance, and mandatory long-term injury insurance. You don't have to pay a swimming scholarship holder the same as a starting quarterback. You just have to stop pretending the quarterback's labor has no market value.
Somewhere between 'free room and board is enough' and 'pay them $500k salaries' there has to be a reasonable answer. A modest stipend, full cost-of-attendance coverage, and guaranteed healthcare for sports-related injuries seems like a start that most reasonable people could agree on.
Am I the only one who thinks this whole debate skips past the obvious fix which is just make the scholarships iron-clad regardless of injury or performance and extend medical coverage for life for sport-related injuries? You solve 80% of the actual harm without blowing up the whole system.
Genuine question nobody asks: if we pay football players, do we pay the lacrosse team? The rowing team? Title IX says you can't just pay men's sports. So either everybody gets a salary or nobody does. Have fun figuring out that math for every athletic department in the country.
my roommate freshman year was on a full D1 soccer scholarship. she was exhausted literally every single day. practice at 5:45am, classes, film sessions, travel every other weekend. she graduated with a 2.8 GPA not because she was dumb but because she had no time. if that's not a job i don't know what is. she deserved a paycheck.
That take above is kind of cruel honestly. Why does an athlete's motivation for wanting fair compensation matter? Workers don't have to prove they deserve wages based on their future career prospects. A cafeteria worker at the stadium gets paid whether or not they move up in the food service industry.
Think about the labor economics here. If a player generates $10 million in value for a program and receives $60,000 in scholarship benefits, the 'employer' is capturing over 99% of the surplus. In any functioning labor market that wouldn't last five minutes. The only reason it has lasted is the NCAA's extraordinary and now-crumbling legal protections.
ngl the real answer is just tax the NCAA as a for-profit entity, take the resulting revenue, and redistribute it. they've been hiding behind nonprofit status for decades while their executives pocket millions. start there before you restructure every athletic department in the country
Pay them fairly and Title IX collapses overnight. People don't want to talk about that. If you pay the football team market rate, you legally have to offer equivalent compensation across all sports, including ones that generate zero revenue. The math simply does not work.
What I never hear in this debate: what do the athletes actually want? I saw a poll where 70-something percent of D1 athletes supported some form of direct pay beyond scholarships. Maybe start by listening to the people the debate is actually about.
I'm a walk-on offensive lineman. No scholarship. I pay full tuition, I practice the same hours as scholarship players, I travel to away games and miss the same classes. I'm not complaining — I love the game. But the idea that all college athletes are being exploited equally is false. The experience varies enormously.
Hard no. Pay them and watch every small school's program die within a decade. It's always the Power Five people screaming about this. What about the wrestler at a mid-major who generates zero revenue? Does he get minimum wage? Does he get cut? This opens a can of worms nobody's ready for.
I coached JV basketball for twelve years. The kids I coached who went D1 on scholarship were not normal students having a normal college experience. They were essentially professionals without professional protections. Every single one of them deserved better than what the system offered.
paying college athletes a salary would literally destroy March Madness and I will die on this hill. the magic of that tournament is that these are KIDS playing for their school not a paycheck. you start paying them and it's just the NBA G League with worse arenas. hard no from me.
I'm not emotional about this either way I just think the honest answer is: yes, but only for revenue-generating sports, only at schools above a certain revenue threshold, and with a salary cap. Is that complicated? Sure. Is it more fair than the current system? Obviously.
Vanderbilt has like 15 scholarship football players on their roster who will ever generate meaningful revenue for the school. Michigan has dozens. The comparison doesn't scale. Top programs exploit their athletes at a completely different level than smaller schools.
I'll say something unpopular: most college athletes aren't talented enough to ever go pro, which means the degree IS their compensation. It's a trade. You give us your athletic talent, we give you an education and a path to a middle-class life. For the rare superstar who deserves more, that's what the NBA G League and minor league baseball exist for.
okay here's my genuinely uninformed hot take and i welcome corrections: can't they just form a union? like if the nba players have a union why don't college players just organize? someone explain why that hasn't happened
everyone acting like this would ruin small schools — small schools football programs mostly LOSE money already. they're subsidized by student fees. paying athletes at those schools $0 isn't saving those programs, it's just maintaining the status quo while the P5 schools rake it in.
Paying college athletes is literally the end of college sports. The entire appeal is that these are students playing for the love of the game and school pride. Once you introduce salaries you've just created a minor league system and nobody's pretending otherwise.
The pro-salary crowd always focuses on football and basketball. What about the swimmer? The cross-country runner? The women's volleyball player? Revenue sharing sounds great until you realize 90% of college athletic programs lose money on most of their sports. You'd essentially be creating a two-tier system where football players at Alabama are employees and the field hockey team is somehow still amateur. That incoherence is a real problem.
okay but who exactly is paying for this? tuition goes up every single year already. if schools start paying athletes where does that money come from? answer: us. the students.
Sir this is a Wendy's — I mean, this is a debate forum, but I feel like half the people arguing against athlete pay have never been closer to college athletics than their couch. These are 18 to 22 year olds with no union, no agent, no legal recourse if they get hurt or cut. That's not amateur, that's just unprotected labor.
I'm a high school coach in Texas and I see this play out already at the recruiting level. Kids and their families making decisions based on NIL potential, not academics, not fit, not even coaching staff. We're already in the weird zone. Might as well just make it official and transparent.
Ehhhh. I'm torn. I've watched college football my whole life and part of what makes it special is the rawness of it — kids playing for a school they actually attend, not just wearing a jersey because the contract is right. Pay them and it becomes the NFL lite. I don't need NFL lite. I have the NFL.
College sports built my entire community. I went to a small school in rural Georgia, football was everything. Friday nights, Saturday games, homecoming. If you turn it into a salary structure those small schools lose their programs, those small towns lose something real. I'm not being nostalgic, I'm being practical.
the bumper sticker comment above is fair but also like... start with the revenue sports and work out from there? nobody said you gotta figure out the entire system in one afternoon
Here's the thing no one wants to say out loud: a full scholarship to a Power Five school is worth $300,000 over four years at current tuition rates. In what world is that not significant compensation? I'd have killed for that deal. Most Americans would.
lol at people acting like a scholarship to Vanderbilt or Northwestern is small compensation. that's a quarter million dollars over four years. QUARTER MILLION.
nope nope nope. college is school. you go to learn. if you want to get paid to play basketball, declare for the draft. nobody is forcing anyone to play college sports.
unpopular opinion but i think the athletes pushing hardest for salaries are the ones who know deep down they won't make it to the pros and this is their last shot at getting paid for their sport. which like... is actually a valid reason to pay them? but it's not the noble labor rights argument people pretend it is
my grandfather played college football in the 50s and he'd roll over in his grave hearing this. not everything has to be monetized. some things are just supposed to be about playing the sport.
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