College Football and Basketball Players Need a Raise

"This week, more than 300 football and basketball players from major conferences signed a petition to school presidents asking for a small cut of the crazy TV money that has turned the college games into such a colossal commercial venture that scandals have become an accepted part of the landscape. Except let’s be honest and not call them “scandals” anymore. The flagrant violations happening all over the country are merely the price of doing business in a multimillion-dollar industry – nothing more, nothing less."

Football and basketball players deserve a cut. That’s undeniable.

"All they want is for school presidents to put aside a portion of the skyrocketing TV money so each athlete could receive an extra $3,200 to go with the usual expenses of covering their education, should they elect to pursue it or not. Considering how much revenue the players bring in at the risk of injury, that’s a trifling amount."

Take Tim Tebow. He played in 14 games during each season of his glorious college football career. That $3,200 a year breaks down to a mere $228 a game. If you want to break it down further, that $3,200 divided by eight months in the school year comes out to a mere $400 a month. How is giving Tim Tebow an extra $100 a week for his college career unfair?

Even extrapolating that $3,200 by 85 scholarship players on a D1 team only ends up totaling $176,000. Hunt uses “trifling” to describe the amount. I’d say it’s minuscule. Especially when you consider the SEC deal with ESPN – the $2 billion one – pays each school “roughly $17 million a year.”

It’s time for college athletes to get a raise [Journal Sentinel]