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NCAA Paid Case Study

Decent Essays

Intercollegiate sports have been around since the 1850s to promote athletes to play for the love of the game and not for income. Recently, two different decisions have endangered this tradition: the decision by the National Labor Relations Board to recognize the Northwestern University football team as employees of the university and a federal judge’s decision regarding payment to football and men’s basketball players. Both decisions favor the idea of paying NCAA athletes because their games generate massive income; from ticket sales, merchandising, and TV and marketing contracts, that benefit the university, but not the athletes themselves (Majerol). Nonetheless, NCAA athletes should not be paid because of the problems that would arise from …show more content…

With its adoption of the amateur code in 1956, college athletes are known first as students then as athletes (Majerol). In the past year, however, two cases have come up that threaten the amateur code. The first case was in April of 2014 when the Northwestern football team appealed to the Nation Labor Relations Board for the right to unionize. They argued that they met the standards of being an “employee” of the university because they spend 50 to 60 hours of football-related work per week during August training camp, 40 to 50 hours per week during the regular season, 15 to 20 hours per week during the offseason, 20 to 25 hours per week during spring practice, and they are constantly under strict schedules and monitoring. Due to these reasons, the NLRB has declared the football team as employees of the university (Vint). Four months later, Claudia Wilken, a U.S district judge, ruled that players whose images are used in video games or TV broadcasts should have a part of the revenue from media contracts put into a trust fund that can be collected once the athlete graduates (“Judge Rules Against NCAA”). With these new decisions, the debate on whether or not college athletes should be paid has …show more content…

Every year, approximately 150,000 student-athletes receive some kind of athletic scholarship- a total of $2.7 billion (“The Value of College Sports”). Even though scholarships can be as little as 10% of total costs, it still deducts from the average debt of $35,200 that college graduates face (Ellis). Furthermore, even if a student-athlete does not receive a scholarship, they still receive free academic support. In an interview with Coach Dormann, the Women’s golf coach at San Jose State University, he said that during a student-athlete’s first semester at SJSU they must attend mandatory study hours with tutors to ensure that student-athletes are eligible to compete. Student-athletes also have the ability to train and condition in state-of-the-art facilities with trainers that create workout plans specifically engineered to help one perform at their best (“The Value of College Sports”). Just by playing a college sport, athletes are already being “paid” with the training and guidance needed to play professionally while still receiving an

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