Persuasive Essay: Should NFL Players Get Paid

Paying College athletes has been a trending topic around the National Collegiate Athletic Association over the years. Many have strong opinions about this topic, and the opinions vary. The discussion of paying college athletes began in 1991 when the famed Fab Five became a household name in the United States. The Fab Five is arguably the greatest recruiting class of all time; all attending the same school (Baxter). The Fab Five first created controversy when they started to question why the university and university officials were making millions and millions of dollars off their names, and they were just deprived hungry college kids not making a dime. Nike even made billions by copyrighting their famed black athletic socks, black

Due to National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rules and regulations no college athlete is able to receive any compensation or endorsement while participating in college athletics. These rules have long been challenged, however no changes have been made by the NCAA. With universities grossing close to $200 million a year college athletics has turned into one of the top industries in the world. The NCAA is a governing body of college athletics, but without people questioning the NCAA and demanding changes to the monopoly that the NCAA is nothing will happen to the unfairness to college athletes like it is currently.

(Attention Getter) What if I told you that for decades, students have worked over 40 hours a week and received absolutely no pay. College athletes are expected to balance the immense workload of school work and represent their school well in athletics.

The NCAA is one of the most profitable organizations in the world due to their monopoly on major college sports. Across the country there are over one thousand colleges and universities in the NCAA separated into 3 divisions, with a total of 89 different sporting events, and a staggering four hundred thousand student athletes in the organization. The NCAA makes money in primarily one way and that’s ad revenue for the commercials played during an event. In the Men’s NCAA Basketball tournament a 30 second add cost over seven hundred thousand dollars to run. The NCAA is a big business with millions of fans, so it is surprising that so few want to hold them accountable for the damages that they cause in their “amateur athletes”. The only difference

Are college athletes getting ripped off? Are they put into an unfair situation? Currently, college athletes do not get paid and they do not receive wages because the National Collegiate Coaches Association (NCAA) president feels that college athletes are not professionals, they are just college students who also play a sport. College athletes should be paid because the NCAA and colleges collect an extremely large amount of money from the athletes bringing in revenue, and it would make the sport more competitive.

Have you ever wondered how much a NFL player gets paid? Well, he at least gets paid more than a firefighter, a cop, and a soldier! They don’t even save lives. Every time a cop saves a live the barely get paid.

College athletes being paid has become an interesting debate in recent years. People are starting to get different feelings of the old way of not paying amateurs. Profits are so easily made in today’s age through social media, advertisements, apparel, and ticket sales, that programs are bringing in millions of dollars each year off the likeness of their athletes. Athletes dedicate their lives to the sports they play and it consumes their time. Data shows that some colleges do bring in millions of dollars a year in profit, but many colleges around the US are struggling to break even. Should college athletes be rewarded for their hard work and dedication? Opponents of paying college athletes point out that they are rewarded through scholarships,

There are about 325.7 million people in the United States of America, 400,000 of those people are college athletes, that’s 12.3%. Along with that, 1 out of every 25 of those college athletes will become a professional, that’s 16,000 athletes (.5% of America’s population). Due to the slim possibilities of even becoming a college athlete, college athletes should be compensated because of the support their families need financially, the revenue they bring in for their school, and the sacrifices they must make for their team.

Why is there a debate regarding this topic? It should be a simple decision. There are 460,000 collegiate athletes and only 2% of them go on to be pros and make millions of dollars. Come on man, universities have to start paying their athletes so that they can start saving up for their long life ahead of them. Collegiate athletes should earn a salary because they work 40 hours or more just on their sport. Athletics generate most of the revenue for universities. The NCAA is approaching 1 billion dollars in revenue. The NCAA has plenty of money to pay their athletes. Granted, the opposing view says that college athletes don’t need that extra money. College athletes already live a luxury life because they have extra money from their scholarship and are going out to restaurants, while regular students eat ramen noodles every night in their dorm.

The NCAA is an organization of 1,200 member schools/ universities that have banded together to form the rules of college sports. The NCAA head office enforces these stringent and mostly unnecessary rules for the sake of maintaining the extremely high salaries of coaches and athletic directors. Because many athletes can't afford necessities like food, the colleges and/ or the NCAA must reform their “code of amateurism” so that players may receive compensation for their play. Many proponents of the NCAA and opposes of “pay for play” (paying student athletes for their play) often make the argument that if athletes don't want to go to college, they don't have to.

In the history of collegiate level sports, college athletics has gained its popularity across the U.S. From swimming, soccer, and football ever since their introduction, college sports have brought in a staggering amount of revenue to their Universities while simultaneously making the school become more popular. For instance, one study estimated that the athletic program at UT had the “highest revenue of any other University at $120,288,370”. Even with this vast amount of money being accumulated, no college athletes are legally paid for their work. According to the NCAA rules, “You are not eligible for participation in a sport if you have ever: Taken pay, or the promise of pay, for competing in that sport” . With this restriction, college athletes very often have difficulty in paying off their college tuition. These collegiate level athletes have no motivation to stay in school and finish their degrees, and oftentimes cannot

Almost one billion dollars are flooded into college sports each year. This is a report coming from the NCAA. Even so, still college athletes shouldn’t be paid. Colleges don’t have the money and other resources to be able to afford to pay all athletes. Other reasons apply to ensure my opinion on this subject.

There will be college athletes to get paid. The NCAA has voted on the choice to let sixty- five teams from big power conferences, the ACC, Pac 12, Big 10, and SEC, including Notre Dame, would be able to make their own decisions on paying their athletes. “If you’re an athlete, going for zero to three-thousand five hundred dollars is in a lot better,” said Andy Schwarz, an economist who has done work for the plaintiffs in the Ed O’Bannon case. “But, it still misses the point entirely” (Schwarz). Athletes will start to be guaranteed the benefits that they deserve while being paid by these “Top five” divisions and will be able to pay for things like families of the athletes, more money in athletic health care coverage, and to pay for post season

Only 30% of Division 1 basketball players who accepted scholarships will graduate college, and only 40% of football players with scholarships will get a degree. Just how well spent would the money be that college athletes were to receive if over half of these student-athletes do not care enough to graduate college even with scholarships? Schools would spend millions of dollars a year paying these athletes and it is very probable that much of it would be spent irresponsibly. We have seen many examples of college athletes spending money given to them in careless ways in the history of college athletics. Scholarship athletes competing at the collegiate level should not get compensated because they are amateur athletes, many of them are already receiving compensation in the form of scholarships, and paying every college athlete would ultimately be a costly burden to taxpayers and fans.

Should college football players be paid? Or is scholarships payment enough for the work these athletes get paid. Craig Keolanui argues that if the player was paid then he would less likely break the rules and that they should get paid for the sacrifices they pay every day for the team. However, getting paid money does not affect whether or not one will break the rules and the sacrifices the players make are what they signed up for and deserve since most receive a scholarship, which allows them to get paid more money in the future with the college degree.