Time Magazine Cover: It's Time to Pay College Athletes

Time Magazine’s latest cover features Johnny Manziel alongside a powerful BUY ME headline: It’s time to pay college athletes. Time Magazine could have softened the headline – some, football players, revenue-generating – but this one will probably be a best seller.

As someone who has advocated paying college athletes for years on this site, it’s nice to see the mainsteam media finally catching up to the obvious. And Time talked to people much smarter than you or I:

"“Lifting the restriction on athlete commercial opportunities is a great step toward compensating them for the value they create,” says Warren Zola, assistant dean of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and an expert in college sports and business law. “And it doesn’t cost the schools anything.”"

I spoke with ESPN’s Jay Bilas about this recently – why are people so against college athletes making a little more money than their scholarship? The market has spoken – TV networks and fans can’t get enough of college football. Coaching salaries have escalated dramatically. TV network deals are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The sport has changed dramatically in the last 10 years.

The only constant is the players aren’t getting any of it.

It’s coming to football and men’s basketball, whether some fans like it or not.