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Should College Athletes Be Paid

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College Athletes Shouldn’t Be Paid While catching up on some game day scores for college football, an article popped up on the side with a title reading, College Athletes Deserve To Be Paid. I noticed it was written by Michael Wilbon, one of the hosts from the ESPN show, Pardon the Interruption. Already disagreeing with the title before even reading it, I was skeptical, but I clicked on the link and started to read. Wilbon brought up a number of decent points throughout the article, but for some odd reason, they didn’t seem to add up to me. This is why I took the opportunity to do a little more research behind the points made in the article and came up with a concept of my own. Wilbon’s reasons why to pay the athletes don’t have a …show more content…

And you’re an athlete, so you don’t need to assemble a resume, if your good enough, your performance should say it all. While I disagree with Wilbon’s reasons why athletes should be paid, I find his reasoning that the NCAA should be paying them absurd. Wilbon argues that the NCAA is so greedy and selfish because they make all this money and essentially don’t pay their employees (the athletes). When looking at it from afar, this can appear to be right, and Wilbon persuades the reader by emphasizing the $774 million made from the college basketball tournament, March Madness last year and the $175 million made from 5 of the college football bowl games. However, these are the only two substantial money contributors to the NCAA funds. When all this money is collected, the NCAA distributes their revenues as follows, 60% to Division 1 schools, 19% to services and programs dedicated to the athletes, 13% to the championship events, and 4% for other services like the Eligibility Center. If you do the math, that leaves 4% for the NCAA to run their headquarters and pay their own employees. To me that’s not selfish at all and they help the schools out more than enough with the money they give them and the services they provide them (“Distribution Money”). To go into a deeper meaning of these numbers, it is necessary to understand what the NCAA truly does for the colleges and their players. The 60% that is given to the

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