If I understand you correctly, you have a two part argument against this. The second part that you present (moral grounds is what I will call it) is not relevant to this topic. I think everyone will agree that benefits and compensation afforded to athletes, coaches and Kardashians are way out of line with their tangible merit to society. But it is not illegal and unfortunately we are all to blame in our willingness to consume and pay top $ for the product they produce thereby creating the environment of said benefits and compensation. I think its rather silly to say the college athletes shouldnt be paid because gosh darn it we already put athletes on a pedestal. Perhaps in a simpler time when the levels of $ were not in play this argument is more relevant.
The first part of your argument is relevant. My counter is that the money being generated in college football now is on par with any of the professional sports. On professional teams even the 3rd string backup is well compensated because they contribute to the overall product that is put on the field. I do think it would be incredibly difficult to pay the individual college athletes based upon their individual market value so I would prefer to see some solution that shares equally across all athletes on the team. Yes, they do get the scholarships and other perks but even being generous the scholarships and perks are worth $100,000 per year? So $100,000/41,000,000 = 0.2% of the cut! Even the athlete that never plays and is on the practice squad contributed to the product on the field. Yes, some do get injured and never contribute, but that is more the exception than the rule. I still dont understand how you cannot agree that the college game is way different than it was 10-20 years ago.
I'm not sure what you read into my argument, but no, there's not a moral element at all. Or at least I didn't mean to imply that. The simple response is that these player are largely being given major opportunities to get something based on their athletic ability that they wouldn't have otherwise. As Seabee said, your math isn't even scratching the surface of accuracy. The value of a 4-5 year stay at UF, plus meals, clothing and other benefits is easily 250k(I've seen a quote of 300 in an article). So for every 10 Wells/Linton type players, we've essentially wasted 2.5-3 million. Even in some of our best classes like ‘06 there were 10 or so players that were dead weight and never amounted to anything. Over a four class period, what percentage of our roster is practically a bunch of unknowns who still get all the same benefits.
To me this is a classic case of trying to make things more fair, and it simply won’t. To be clear, if this was in place in 2006-2009, there wouldn’t be a commercial in Gville that didn’t feature Tebow in some fashion. If it were Knoxville in the mid-90s, it would be Manning. So the kids who come from money and grew up in a great community are making money even in college, while the other 85% of the roster who have twitter handles like retiremoms are getting very little. Yeah, I don’t see any issues there. When Gatorland says they want Trask not Toney, which is their right, I’m sure those in favor of this rule will just quietly sit by and accept it because now it’s “fair”.
As I’ve said, I get that players are important and if you want to formulate a way to compensate all of them from the sale of Tebow’s jersey, so be it. But it should be fair in the way it’s paid out. And there’s no denying that a gigantic can of worms has been opened. Those ignoring that are ignoring reality.
