I'll take a stab at that, and may end up being wrong, but. . . for basketball at least, a team has maybe ten players (5 starters and a couple alternates)? A coach at a top D1 school will generally get well over a million dollars in salary, seems like players could easily earn 60-80k a year and still leave the coach with a salary higher than that of the school's chancellor with no change in net expense.

I'm sure there are other aspects, but just peeking around on google, it seems that salaries for big name college coaches in the $3million per year range compared to $6million per year for top pro coaches. Given that this is a minor league, that's pretty substantial, and I feel a lot of it has to be because they don't need to pay the athletes.

What about players get a cut of the shoe money? Or what about they get a cut of the NCAA television money? What about a limit on the loony number of assistant coaches each team has (particularly in football) We are talking about very modest sums here relative to the mega salaries, mega tv contracts, and mega budget deficits.

I understand the moral dilemma here, but I have a hard time garnering any sympathy.

Paying athlete's 60-80K when grad students work 80 hours a week and live below the poverty line? When undergrad students are amassing crippling dept? I can't back that.

Sports are supposed to be an extra-curricular activity, as the NCAA likes to advertise themselves "Most go pro in something other than sports". If AD budgets are too big, cut them. Don't redistribute them to the athletes. If coaches are paid too much, don't give their salaries to the players, hire more Professors so classes have less then 6000 people in them.

I realize I'm fighting over one hundred years of history, but the NCAA shouldn't be the minor leagues. We shouldn't be discussing the economics of it because economics shouldn't play any part of college sports.

One of the first intercollegiate games of football ever played was between Rutgers and McGill in 1874. I think it's a real lesson to see how college sports evolved in the two different countries. Here in Canada, University's are not allowed to give scholarships based on athletic achievement. As a result sports play a very subdued role on campus. University's reputation are not built on how well a guy can throw a ball (or in Canada, how well a guy can shoot a puck). A student doesn't need to play football because his scholarship is the only way he could attend University, but because he enjoys knocking heads around in between exams. Additionally high school students can't use sports as their "ticket out" and must also focus on their academics.

We also, have a very large junior hockey system to deal with the development of young players. Sydney Crosby didn't attend university, he played of Rimousky in the Quebec Junior Hockey league. The players either get paid, or receive a full scholarship to attend an independent University of their choice. This is a far fairer system that's isn't backed by the tuition of students. Costs are controlled, because if they aren't, the team will go bankrupt.

It just seems to me that the whole idea of college sports in the US is ridiculous. I don't see how paying players fixes anything. The system is beyond repair.

Good points!

Priorities are a bit skewed here. It seems the NCAA (and you could include the various JUCOs) is the unofficial semi-pro league for football and basketball. Yeah, the purpose of student athletes was to balance academics with extracurricular events. Seems that got lost when the greenbacks came through. These days, you're sometimes looked down upon for even getting an education and placed on a pedestal (assuming you don't slip off) when you entertain. Weird...

O'Bannon and his teammates are being exploited by the NCAA when they sell their likenesses to for profit video game companies. Expect to hear lots of pious sounding lectures from the NCAA about the sanctity of its mission as a sanctioning body for "amateur" college athletics, while the mine commercial gold off of its enterprise. Give me a break.

The NCAA is good at waiving its finger at players and telling them what they can and can't do. Well, if their enterprise is truly one featuring amateur athletes, then they shouldn't be allowed to extract for profit royalties from the likenesses of its athletes.

All of this underlies the simple fact that major men's college basketball and major college football are about as "amateur" as the Olympics is now.

Yes, there is no doubt that the NBA and NFL get an indirect subsidy from major colleges when they turn their athletic departments into defacto farm teams for the NBA and NFL. But what is more outrageous is the gold the broadcasting industry has extracted from major men's basketball and football. If these are truly "amateur" sports, then why are they being broadcast on for profit commercial television? They should be broadcast on either the local PBS station or the non profit station the college itself runs.

I kind of cringe every time I hear someone talking about college sports. All those billions of dollars made everywhere for everyone except the guys putting their ACLs on the line. I've heard that in many cases, these "amateurs" are kept too busy earning their scholarships with sports and have little time to do the academic side right, even if they were so inclined. And since most of them don't actually make the pros, they wind up with bad knees and an education on paper only. It's got to stop. Paying the students is a step in the right direction. Go O'Bannon.

Kevin,
The amount of money being made on college athletes is there, and whether or not you think it should be a priority is not important. What's important is that these kids who are giving the most important years of their life to the program are rightfully compensated.

It isn't like the money can only come from the schools either. The money college basketball players are creating is going all over the place. When I wanted to watch a game online yesterday I had my choice of watching a Capital One, Coke or Direct TV commercial- enough said.

The graduation rate is low for athletes. Its difficult to get a degree when the basketball program takes up so much time and effort. Especially a real, useful one.

The points raised by the Kevin posts (assuming both are by the same person) are all valid, though it would take several volumes to address them all. There are 119 Div. 1 football programs and 347 men's Div. 1 basketball teams. With very few exceptions, these are the only sports that actually make more money than the cost of operation.

There is a big pool of money there, but it changes many hands before going to the universities, and still more before it reaches the non-athletic departments therein. A university athletic department can raise plenty of revenue, though not all do so equally well. There are direct payments from shoe and equipment vendors, tv contracts, licensing, and revenue sharing, depending on what, if any, your conference divides among member institutions based on bowl and tournament appearances. There are big disparities in revenue performance among D1 programs.

Even within the athletic wing of a university, much of the money drawn via a sports team is invested back into the team that generated it, but there is more that subsidizes the myriad non-revenue sports.

I don't contend that anything about intercollegiate athletics is "fair," whatever that is, but there are some very valid questions to consider in light of O'Bannon's suit. The likely casualty if his rationale wins are the non-revenue men's sports, either scholarships or the entire programs themselves. An AD would have to abide by Title IX and whichever sport is the cash cow. If the AD cuts spending on the revenue-generating program, he or she will be fired as soon as said program stops winning. Hence, cutting assistant coach positions from the football team won't happen in this reality.

Tne NCAA has conditioned too many students to be athletes first and maybe students 2nd,3rd, or 4th. I agree with Kevin that paying athletes 60-80k's or whatever and not paying grad students a commensurate salary is ridiculous. As DZ has pointed out D1 athletic programs for the most part lose money. The reason for this as Aaron has stated is the non-revenue sports.

I don't feel sorry the athletes who take the money. Since they are taught about percentages in their repective sports, they should know the odds of them making pro are stacked against them. The American public is also to blame. The NCAA wouldn't be collecting billions of TV money if the public wasn't watching. I just witnessed Kansas being upset by Northern Iowa. Why do American universities have to be the best in sports? To answer my own question because we expect it.

As a former grad student, I certainly agree with Kevin and RM that compensation for these positions unequivocally sucks. That said, our institutions of higher learning do currently serve as defacto minor leagues, and this is supported not only by the heads of the institutions, but by the alumni, the local populace, and the student bodies themselves.

Given that, I think it's a bit rich to go off about it being unacceptable to compensate athletes more than grad students when as things stand, athletic directors make far more than professors or even department heads (I believe a well compensated professor might make 80,000 a year, assuming they are able to line up funding for their summer months, vs 2 million for a coach, and 20,000 in stipend for a grad student).

Forcing universities to compensate their athletes at a level that reflects their skill and the relatively short expectancy for their career would probably do more to shift their focus onto academics than any other measure.

I'm a little bit ambivalent on the issue of players getting paid straight cash - it's not like the players don't get paid at all. A college education is one of the most valuable and prized possessions that you can attain, something for which millions around the world would give an arm and an ear, so i wouldn't say that being given a full scholarship counts as nothing. That being said, there's no doubt that players whose are actually marketed for specific profit-producing goods, such as jerseys and video games, should get some share of those profits - to not do so would absolutely be piracy.

by the way everyone, when you're done here make sure to check out www.arjun-allthingssports.blogspot.com for candid and insightful analysis

.... there is already a huge gap between the top and bottom of the 347 D1 schools. As Dave has written, athletic budgets are way too big. Three schools have athletic budgets of over 100 million dollars. But you also have many D1 schools with budgets under 10 million. The school I graduated from is D1, yet has an athletic budget of only 7 million. Schools woud be crippled if they paid players. Now I understand that the point Dave is making here is that players like O'Bannon should get a share of the revenues that they bring to their schools. This would give financial incentive for players to choose schools that draw in the big revenues, and would make the first round of the tournament an unwatchable pros vs. amateurs competition.

A better solution would be to evenly distribute the total revenues to players, without regard to how much each school is drawing in. This would ensure fairness across all of Division I, which has the widest gap in talent and finacial resources among any level of American sports. Players like O'Bannon who do well will usually get paid later on, either in the NBA or the European leagues which usually pay at least a living wage. It makes sense to compensate players given the amount of money here, but being fair in an already unfair environment is difficult without hurting schools more financially than they have been already.

It always amuses me when I hear people say things like "even distribution of revenue", "pay nobody", "don't pay straight cash" and pay grad students if you pay athletes (what do grad students have to do with athletics?).
How's this for an American idea, pay workers (college athletes) for their labor. Call big time college athletics what it is, business, really big business! Stop lying and pretending that athletes receive an education in return for their services because in most instances they don't (and it's not in the best interests of coaches and colleges that education is their priority). Are we a capitalist country or not?

Simultaneously lament poor graduation rates of major D1 programs, then call for college athletes to be paid.

Which one is it? If you care about education, then you would want revenues to go towards increasing education services. There are millions of creative ideas on this point:

*use revenues to create more scholarships.
*use revenues to add more athletic opportunities (Title IX)
*use revenues to create college readiness programs in underserved communities.
*use revenues to pay student-athletes to tutor in public schools.

And the list goes on. It's right to say that paying the players won't solve any of the problems. And it's right to be outraged by the obscenity of cash that they generate. In the end, I think about the purpose of university, and how that can be reached with this money.

Cause he destroyed College basketball video games.