Wasn’t Slavery Abolished in 1865
The average division one football program generates $31,924,154 in revenue for their school (Gaines 2).” College, once a place to go to enlighten your mind, has since turned into a lucrative business. When you walk into a college bookstore, half the items are football related. The items the football players make popular many players cannot afford. These athletes, who train 30 hours a week on average, receive no compensation. The belief is that college athletes 4 years later walk away with a college degree from a prestigious school at no charge. The truth of the matter is that only 55.1% of players actually graduate (Martinez 3).” Do the athletes even care about the education they are receiving? Cardale Jones
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On average, a scholarship is worth $25,000 a year, and over the course of four years, it totals $100,000 (Marshall 1).” On paper, this sounds like a lot of money, but what people do not take into account is the athletics part that consists of injuries, which can lead to your scholarship revocation. In all honesty, the statistics show that many athletes only last 2 years at their original college, either for not making the cut, politics, or injuries. For the players, the field is a dog-eat-dog world; if you do not put in all your time into the athlete part of student-athlete, someone else will gladly take your place. Many of the critics think being an athlete is not a full time job. Yet, if you take a step into a collegiate football player’s life, you see the facts are that you wake up before classes to attend a mandatory gym session, after mandatory conditioning session, and an hour later you have class till about 4p.m., then the long anticipated practice, after that you have mandatory study hall. Where is the time to work a part time job? There is none! College athletes put 40 hours on average into athletics per week (Smith 21).” The point here is a scholarship does not equate to money in the bank. It leaves them dead broke. Now, on the road the team can give a whopping $7 for meal money to a player, anything more than that is an NCAA violation. So how much money is exploited off these gifted athletes? Well for one, the highest paid public employees in 39 different states are the coaches themselves (Gaines 2).” College coaches earn an average of $1.64 million per year, the highest paid being Nick Saban, with an annual salary of $10.9 million (Tracy, Marc, and Rohan).” What happened to the critics saying athletes need to be doing it for the love of the game? These athletes are dead broke, putting their blood, sweat, and tears into their sport, some not being able to enjoy a movie, food, and going
If there’s one thing we dread in the summer more than the heat, it’s the afflicting sentiment that surrounds oneself when one is inhibited from experiencing the thrills of football for six long and gruesome months. National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) football is a part of many Americans’ Saturdays, but to fewer does it mean their lives. Recently coming under debate, many sporting fans and college athletes believe that players should be paid more than just tuition, room, board, and books. Two articles on this issue that bring up valid points worth discussing are Paul Marx’ “Athlete’s New Day” and Warren Hartenstine’s “College Athletes Should Not Be Paid.” From these articles I have found on the basis of logical,
Paul Dietzel, former head coach of LSU, once said, “You can learn more character on the two-yard line than anywhere else in life.” Ever since the beginning, not only children but also college athletes have been playing sports for the love of the game and have used it as a way to grow character, teamwork, and leadership. Although when playing for a University an athletes job is to bring in profit for the school, this is not why these young men and women have continued with these sports they love. It is usually these students passion, a way for them to express themselves like others have art and music. The question has been up whether these college athletes should be paid for their loyalty and income for the University but by paying these students more than their given scholarship, it would defeat the purpose and environment of a college sport versus a professional sport, cause recruiting disputes, and affect the colleges benefits from these school athletics.
Tiffany Patterson argues “College football players are already receiving scholarships to pay for their tuition and it is unfair to other students who are juggling between jobs and school.”(Patterson) Although college football players work hard at playing football, it is unfair to other students who are not receiving scholarships and having football players paid will be even more unfair. According to Lauren Horne, the lead author of Bleacherreport, says “College football players cost universities and colleges lots of money and paying them will put the universities in even more financial debt. Universities and colleges spend about $42 million on football players who, except for an elite hundred, will never play in the NFL.”(Horne) Colleges are already have finance issues and if they pay all the players, their trouble will get worse. Rick Burton, the professor of sports management at Syracuse University explains “Student athletes who go to college are already receiving a fair amount of pay by receiving an education”(Burton) The athletes are being compensated for their time on the football field by the professors giving them an
Since the early 1900’s when college football first became a NCAA sport, it has had a history of paying its athletes as well as improper benefits. In around 1910, Walter camp was put under fire for having a fund for players of over $100,000. Camp was one of the early pioneers in football that brought the game where it is today. In the 1950’s, scandals hit the college of William and Mary for hiding its players poor grades to allow them to be eligible all season. (Branch 83) This is important because the University of William and Mary was contending with powerhouse football programs that season for a national title. This here all shows that even 50-100 years ago collegiate athletics had already been dealing with improper benefits for players.
College sports are a major revenue producing industry. Athletic programs and their student-athletes can achieve national recognition and generate millions of dollars in revenue for their university. Colleges use this revenue to invest in players, pay for their education, and provide state of the art training facilities, which are used to improve their athletic performance. As revenue driven colleges begin to prioritize athletics, the emphasis on the quality and standards of an undergraduate education are diminishing. Compromising their academic acceptance requirements, universities have now found that the educational ability of their newly accepted student athletes are inadequate, to say the least (Gurney). The same universities must then spend millions of dollars to provide these athletes with “learning specialists”, who in turn helps them to meet academic requirements and maintain their eligibility (...
Ever since college students started playing sports, back in 1879 when Harvard played Yale in the first collegiate sports game, the question of whether college athletes should be paid was addressed. From that point on athletes, coaches, and college administrators have brought forward points agreeing or disagreeing with the notion of paying college students. The students argue that they deserve to be paid due to the revenue that they bring for the college and because of the games they play and the championships they win. At first the idea of paying college athletes was out of the question, but now the argument has gone from a simple yes or no to a heated debate. Since college athletes are given a free education, they should not also be paid.
Today there are over 450,000 college athletes and the National College Athletics Association (NCAA) faces a difficult decision on whether or not college athletes should be paid. Many people believe that they should and many believe they should not. There are several benefits that college’s athletes receive for being a student athlete. Why should they receive even more benefits than their scholarship and numerous perks?
One of the strongest arguments against student athletes getting paid is that many people feel they already are getting paid, through their financial aid package. Sports Illustrated author, Seth Davis, states in his article “Hoop Thoughts”, that “student athletes are already being payed by earning a free tuition. Which over the course of four years can exceed $200,000, depending on the school they attend. They are also provided with housing, textbooks, food and academic tutoring. When they travel to road games, they are given per diems for meals. They also get coaching, training, game experience and media exposure in their respective crafts” (Davis, 2011). This is a considerable amount of income. While the majority of regular students are walking out of school with a sizeable amount of debt, most student athletes are debt free. Plus they get to enjoy other benefits that are not made available to the average student. They get to travel with their teams, t...
Emil Zatopek once said “An athlete cannot run with money in his pockets. He must run with hope in his heart and dreams in his head.” This quote applies to every college athlete. The quote means that an athlete may not be getting paid in college, but if they put in the hard work and dedication they can make it to the big leagues. College football is the second most watched sport in America. And the athletes playing the game do not even get paid a penny to play the game. In the sports world. this has been talked about for an extremely long time. College athletes put their body on the line for injury. They put their grades in on the line because of the hours they put on the court, or field (Keolanui). They also sell their apparel at the game and at stores and they get no money at all (Keolanui).
The payment of NCAA student-athletes will deteriorate the value of an education to the athletes. The value of an education for a young man or woman cannot be measured. It is our gate way to success as...
Financial aspects and profitability of college athletic programs is one of the most important arguments involved in this controversy. A group of people expresses that college athletic programs are over emphasized. The point they show on the first hand, is that athletic programs are too expensive for community colleges and small universities. Besides, statistics prove that financial aspects of college athletic programs are extremely questionable. It is true that maintenance, and facility costs for athletic programs are significantly high in comparison to academic programs. Therefore, Denhart, Villwock, and Vedder argue that athletic programs drag money away from important academics programs and degrade their quality. According to them, median expenditures per athlete in Football Bowl Subdivision were $65,800 in 2006. And it has shown a 15.6 percent median expenditure increase fro...
Some people say that college athletes get paid by having a scholarship, but if you look at it a different way, scholarships might change your mind. Coaches try to get players who they think have the talent to make them win and to persuade them to come to their school by offering them scholarships. The whole idea behind a scholarship is to lure the athlete into coming to your school. Scholarships are nothing more than a recruitment tactic. They will give you a scholarship as long as you produce for them. It’s all about what you can do for them. Indeed these scholarships pay for tuition, room and board, and books, but these athletes don’t have money for other necessities. The NCAA doesn’t want friends or boosters to offer athletes jobs because they ...
As highlighted by John Oliver in Last Week Tonight, the University of North Carolina was found giving their football players filler courses in order to boost their GPA to the point of athletic eligibility. One of the popular courses is Swahili, a language that nobody will ever need to use unless you plan on going to the Swaziland. Along with your devotion to the highest quality education provided to you for free, college athletes may have to endure verbal abuse from their coaches. The same coaches that USA Today found have an “average annual salary for head coaches at major colleges (not including four schools that moved up to the Football Bowl Subdivision this season) is $1.64 million…” Not only do they receive a salary from their respective school but also money from camps they hold, products they endorse and the apparel company they may represent. While college athletes are giving everything to their university’s athletic program, they receive no compensation. They struggle to keep food on the table some months, their parents back home are impoverished and they are not allowed to make any money off of the name they made for themselves? These are young adults living a professional athletics lifestyle on top of a full time student lifestyle being exploited by the NCAA, an organization meant to protect and support the well-being of their athletes. The practices implemented by the NCAA are
For most American’s especially African Americans, the abolition of slavery in 1865 was a significant point in history, but for African Americans, although slavery was abolished it gave root for a new form of slavery that showed to be equally as terrorizing for blacks. In the novel Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon he examines the reconstruction era, which provided a form of coerced labor in a convict leasing system, where many African Americans were convicted on triumphed up charges for decades.
For decades there has been a debate on student athletes and their drive to succeed in the classroom. From the very beginning of organized college level athletics, the goal to want to succeed in athletics has forced students to put academics to the back burner. In spite of the goal to want to succeed over a hundred years of attempts to check limits of intercollegiate athletic programs on colleges' academic standards still seems to struggle to this day. This brings to surface one of the most asked questions in sports, “What effect does college sports have on academics and economics?” Herbert D. Simons, Derek Van Rheenen, and Martin V. Covington, authors of “Academic Motivation and the Student Athlete” researched the topic on whether athletics and academics benefit each other. Bryan Flynn, the author of “College Sports vs. Academics” poses the question “Should institutions of higher learning continue to involve themselves in athletic programs that often turn out to be virtual arms races for recruiting talented players who bring big money and prestige, but put academics to the back burner?” Although both authors agree that sports have an impact on an athlete’s academics, the focus of their argument differs.