Some time during our lifetime, NCAA athletes will be paid.
I can’t tell you when this seismic shift in the collegiate order will occur, but it feels like it will be sooner than later.
There has been an undercurrent of support for paying players from day one of college athletics, but it seems as if the murmur has turned into an uproar.
The issue has hit its tipping point, and I believe historian Taylor Branch’s piece “The Shame of College Sports” in the October 2011 Atlantic was the perpetrator.
You would expect current and former athletes to fight for pay with tooth and nail. They are the ones that give up their bodies day-in-and-day-out and have little to show for it. They are the ones with the most to gain — not some white-haired literary geek, with all due respect. His thoroughly researched and well written piece dropped like a 2-ton atom bomb on the NCAA. Paying players went from a quiet issue most were appalled to consider into something that seemed inherently unfair.
Now you have to duck to avoid being hit by editorials and columns being written on the topic — which, ironically, includes this one.
As a response to the groundswell of popular support, the NCAA made a historic decision on Oct. 27 of this year to allow schools to pay players an annual stipend of $2,000 to cover the “incidental costs” of college.
Of course the NCAA president, Mark Emmert, asserted this in fact did not constitute a payment for playing but instead was an addition to existing athletic scholarships.
Baloney. I’m sure he’s the type that reads Playboy for the articles as well. Don’t let anyone fool you. This is a landmark moment in collegiate athletics.
As Marquette alumnus and Esquire writer Charles Pierce eloquently laid out in his story on Grantland.com, this is a stopgap measure that is sure to fail.
“And that’s the ballgame right there,” he wrote. “As soon as you pay someone $2,000, you cannot make the argument that it is unethical to pay that person $5,000, or $10,000, or a million bucks a year, for all that. Amateurism is one of those rigid things that cannot bend, only shatter.”
The ball that has teetered dangerously on the ledge for the past 30 years is rolling down the hill at full speed.
I’m in the midst of a monster 10-page paper on this subject for my media law class, but as well researched as I may be, I’m in no position to argue for or against paying players. I undertook this column with a different purpose in mind.
As a current student, I see Darius Johnson-Odom as my peer. Sure, he may one day make more in a year than I will in a lifetime, but today he and I are equals.
When he walks down Wisconsin Avenue he may get more stares his way, but it doesn’t change the fact that he is a student at Marquette. He takes the same classes. Does the same homework. Crams for the same tests.
What happens in 20 years when that generations’ Johnson-Odom gets a $5,000 bonus for signing his National Letter of Intent to be a Golden Eagle and is compensated with a sweet $200,000 per year?
He wouldn’t be a student, but rather an employee. What incentive would he have to study for his philosophy ethics class? Try to fail him. See what happens. Don’t you know DePaul offered him $225,000 out of high school?
Don’t even get me started on that stats class. His contract explicitly states no math courses would be required.
So while I completely agree that certain athletes are worth much more than the scholarship they receive, paying athletes would tilt the playing field at a university level.
You’d have to change the name. You couldn’t call it collegiate athletics because there would be nothing “college” about it.
Adios NCAA. It’s been real. It’s been fun. But it hasn’t been real fun.