Sports and Money

With college basketball and football originating in the 1800’s, the game has had much time to adapt. Over the years, the sports have become more and more popular, gaining a bigger fan base, which has resulted in substantial profits from the sale of merchandise representing the teams and players. There is one thing that has not changed; all of the athletes are still not being paid. The National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, is an organization that regulates most aspects of

This business transaction involves the universities’ greed for money. Universities will almost never turn down a money offer. Having a top notch athletic department is great for them especially, for the television revenue. After all, they only care to better

The past 20 years have witnessed a massive transformation of professional sports stadiums in North America and the rest of the world. In the United States and Canada alone, by 2012, 125 of the 140 teams in the five largest professional sports leagues, the National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Soccer (MLS), and National Hockey League (NHL), will play in stadiums constructed or significantly renovated since 1990. This new construction has come at a significant cost, the majority of which has been covered by taxpayers. Construction costs alone for major league professional sports facilities have totaled in excess of $30 billion over the past two

Should college student-athletes be paid has become a much debated topic. The incentive for a student-athlete to play a college sport should not be for money, but for the love of the game. It has been argued that colleges are making money and therefore the student-athlete should be compensated. When contemplating college income from sporting events and memorabilia from popular sports, such as football and basketball, it must not be forgotten that colleges do incur tremendous expense for all their sports programs. If income from sports is the driving factor to pay student-athletes, several major problems arise from such a decision. One problem is who gets a salary and the second problem is how much should they be paid. Also, if the income

Universities can sell sponsorships to various companies for advertising (at a minimum of about $300,000 per year) and have recently begun naming their stadiums after large corporations in exchange for large donations. Most large athletic departments have lucrative deals, worth about $1 million yearly, with shoe companies. Many colleges receive a substantial amount in royalties for college merchandise, which is sold under official license; some schools receive up to $6 million annually from this source. Coaches also stand to make a significant salary (including base salary from school as well as television, radio, and shoe company stipends) with the highest paid football and basketball coaches currently earning $1-$2 million a year (Eitzen 2000). Even among schools who don’t produce these extreme amounts of revenue,

With the universities pulling in more than twelve billion dollars, the rate of growth for college athletics surpasses companies like McDonalds and Chevron (Finkel, 2013). The athletes claim they are making all the money, but do not see a dime of this revenue. The age-old notion that the collegiate athletes are amateurs and students, binds them into not being paid by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). This pay for play discussion has been talked about since the early 1900s but recently large steps are being made to actually make a change. There are many perspectives on the payment of collegiate student athletes coming from the NCAA, the athletes themselves, and the university officials.

Collegiate athletics is a multibillion dollar business. Competition across basketball, football, and other popular sports generate just as much money as they do excitement and entertainment to sports fans and the casual viewer. The driving force behind this behemoth are the athletes that don the uniform of the competing universities. These athletes, the most of which are black, dedicated time synonymous to working a full time job on top of being student in order to serve this money machine. What is so damning about this system then? The truth is that the student-athletes do not see a penny of the millions they earn for their schools. On top of that, they are stretched beyond reasonable means in order to serve their athletic program. In return, they are compensated with scholarships to attend the college. However, what might seem like a coveted opportunity is not what it seems.

Colleges bring an incredible amount of money by their sport teams alones. According to John Brill, a sports journalist writer, “College football and basketball generate more than the National Basketball Association, a total of more than $6 billion yearly.” The money made from these sporting events are not being used correctly which is frustrating many college athletes. The money that is being

Athletics are a big attraction to many students when looking at colleges. When college sports programs have success, research done by Pope and Pope show that there is a boost in applications that the colleges receive from students. “Applications [after] a Championship add 7-8 percent, with a big effect in the immediate year and little effect after one year.” It was found that when colleges have winning athletic teams get more applications sent in from all levels of student and not just athletes. This is found true for basketball and football. Not only increase in applications is found but also found after success in football there is a growth in enrollment, this is not found true for basketball (Getz and Siegfried “What Does Intercollegiate Athletics Do…”). “David Schmidly the president of the University of New Mexico said “One of the most effective ways to market your university nationally is to have a really quality athletic program. It helps recruit faculty, students, and donors. It helps with the image of the whole university.” (qtd. in Getz and Siegfried “College Sports: The Mystery of the Zero-Sum Game.”)

College athletics assume a large role in the entertainment industry of America. Each week, millions of people tune in to watch their favorite team, buy tickets to go to the games, or spend money on university athletic merchandise to show their pride. The NCAA and universities benefit enormously from college sports. The top 10 total revenues generated by universities were all well over the $100,000,000 mark in 2012 (“College Finances 2012”). The University of Texas tops the list with $163,295,115 total revenue from athletics (“College Finances 2012”). Last football season, Texas A&M University quarterback Johnny Manziel won the Heisman Trophy. As the first freshman to ever win the trophy, he propagated over 1.8 million media impressions which translated to $37 million of media exposure (Cook). The University’s licensing revenue jumped 23% this past year due to the success of one player (Cook). The NCAA itself generated $871,600,000 in revenue from the championship games (“College Finances 2012”). All of this revenue is impossible without the student-athletes. The NCAA is strict on making sure that athletes should be treated no different from any other student (Blias). However, the athletes are involved in a heavily commercialized multi-billion dollar industry. As amateurs, athletes remain restricted solely to scholarships as the only form

In 2012, the NCAA generated 10.6 billion dollars in revenue; 5.6 billion due to ticket sells and 433 million dollars off of rights agreements but only have (“NCAA College Athletics Statistics,” 2012). Surely the NCAA has enough money to provide a stipend all of the 420,000 student-athletes. These players walk around schools and malls noticing stores selling their jerseys, shirts, and shoes, making millions off of the merchandise. It is only right that the athletes wonder why they bring in millions to their university but still do not have a car

With how many sporting events that there are in this country, it is common to see fans that love multiple games. Professional sports are typically favored by most followers, but there is a clear deficiency that hurts the leagues. Professional sports are exhilarating if one is a fan of a playoff team or especially a team that wins championships on a regular basis. While this is great for traditional powerhouses and teams with endless amounts of money, the majority of teams in these leagues serve as punching bags for years or even multiple decades. There is a fine line between these teams and other organizations that struggle just to make financial ends meet. Teams in financial

The “contradiction at the heart of big-time college football,” as Michael Oriard describes it, is the competing demands of marketing and education. The 1890s proved to university administrators that there was an enormous market for collegiate football, which postulated opportunities for university building. Since this ubiquitous realization, there has coincided this blatant, yet unchanging contradiction that academic institutions are permitted to profit off of the services provided by its student-athletes while the athletes must idly accept that they are amateurs, donating their efforts to their respective schools. The schools then direct this revenue toward strengthening their athletic departments, and thus continues this seemingly endless growth of big-time college sports, all while athletes remain uncompensated and academics continue to take a backseat.

In today’s world of big time professional sports there are the two major players and they are football represented by the National Football League (NFL) and baseball represented by Major League Baseball (MLB). Now there are other sports that the American public enjoys watching, however the argument generally boils down to which sport is the true favorite of the American people: baseball or football. In this paper I will attempt to examine both sports from several different angles to include attendance, television revenue, ticket costs, venues, salaries, entertainment value, and athlete perception. The goal of this exercise will be to determine, once and for all, which sport is the American

The following Case Study is about the National Collegiate Athletic Association unethical act in the sport college league. How this league creates big amounts of money which is invest in all short of projects rather than take care of the student-athletes. The study case highlight the two main principles issue that the National Collegiate Athletic Association faces; the money how the student are not getting paid and the academic versus sport.