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Should College Athletes Be Paid

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Should College Athletes Be Paid
College Athletes Shouldn’t Be Paid While catching up on some game day scores for college football, an article popped up on the side with a title reading, College Athletes Deserve To Be Paid. I noticed it was written by Michael Wilbon, one of the hosts from the ESPN show, Pardon the Interruption. Already disagreeing with the title before even reading it, I was skeptical, but I clicked on the link and started to read. Wilbon brought up a number of decent points throughout the article, but for some odd reason, they didn’t seem to add up to me. This is why I took the opportunity to do a little more research behind the points made in the article and came up with a concept of my own. Wilbon’s reasons why to pay the athletes don’t have a strong backbone to them and his ideas on how to pay athletes are simply not feasible. A point made by Wilbon is that the poor athletes have no spending money, which accounts for a large percent of college programs. This is a false accusation. Although not every student athlete receives grants, the NCAA will provide the low income athletes and their families a Pell Grant worth $5,500 per year that can be spent on anything. For this year, The NCAA gave out over $31 million in Pell Grants. Since the NCAA has originated, they have been helping out colleges with supporting the financial needs of athletes that are not met through the school. Wilbon also believes that the only collegiate athletes that should be paid are the ones that are on revenue producing teams. In most cases this would be the football teams and men’s basketball teams. While this may not seem fair to the other teams, Wilbon’s reason is simple; Capitalism. The only players that deserve to be paid are the ones that can make the NCAA money. This could cause problems within the United States court systems however. Even if you wanted to pay the revenue-producing athletes, Titles VII and IX could withhold the process. Title VII prohibits employment


Cited: Bennett, Dashiell. "Only 22 Of 120 Division I Athletic Programs Made Money Last Year." Business Insider. N.p., 15 June 2011. Web. 14 Nov. 2012. . "Distribution of the Money." NCAA Champion, n.d. Web. 14 Nov. 2012. . "National Collegiate Athletic Association." Where Does the Money Go? N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Nov. 2012. . Schlabach, Mark. "NCAA: Where Does the Money go?" ESPN. ESPN Internet Ventures, n.d. Web. 14 Nov. 2012. . Wilbon, Michael. "College Athletes Deserve to Be paid." ESPN. ESPN Internet Ventures, 18 July 2011. Web. 14 Nov. 2012. .

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