Paying college football athletes Essay

The Coach of a football team is just as important as any player performing on the field. In fact his power over the team surpasses that of any one single player, the coach can determine whether an entire season is a victory or a loss. Perhaps this is why Colleges justify paying a coach millions of dollar a year, but the players who are out there beside him next to nothing. Although a lot of the players that perform on the field week by week do get scholarships to help their tuition fees, food, and housing, this pales in comparison to the millions of dollars that the schools will bring in every season of football. It is wrong for colleges to use athletes to make money and not pay them or allow them to earn money in anyway involving their sport. Any coach of a successful college football team makes somewhere between 900,000 dollars and 5 million dollars annually. These are the coach’s of the big 10, big 12, SEC, ACC and many other conferences. For our top two college football teams in Michigan alone we have some of the highest paid coach’s. Brad Hoke the coach of our Michigan wolverines made 3. 25 million in 2011 and was the eighth top paid coach in college football. Mark Dantonio, coach of the Michigan state Spartans, made 1. 9 million according to USA Today. This is a small portion of what the whole industry of college football will make for a single college every year. It is wrong to not pay the ones who are even making all of this entertainment possible. It is one thing that colleges do not provide contracts for these players that compete so hard for the slim possibility of glory making it to the National Football League, but these colleges students are not even allowed to sell their signature for a profit. Colleges have prohibited the right of players to sell anything with their signed name on it to make a small some of money to fill their pockets. Now this does not affect every player in the NCAA, but it certainly does to the superstars of the league. An athlete can also be disciplined for selling their tickets to someone on game day, yet how much money do the directors of the NCAA earn as a result of the efforts of the student athletes? The truth is that the college athletes pay for a large portion of the salaries of every person employed by the NCAA. It only further demonstrates how colleges are abusing their control and power over their football players and more importantly what goes into their wallets. Another exploit in college football is the sale of jerseys by colleges. The NCAA wont allow colleges to sell football jerseys with a players name on the back of it, so the colleges resorted to selling it with a players number on the back. The number of a superstar football player is easily recognized locally in a college town. The schools are allowed to sell these jerseys, while the player who has worked hard to earn the right to play the game with it on never seeing a single penny of the profits earned. This does in theory put an idea of how much a single player can earn a school annually, but does go further than that, because a star can pull hundreds of fans in to a stadium that might not have filled up the year before. The money a school will makes from selling tickets to games is minuscule though in comparison with the money they will earn every when football starts in the fall with television contracts. Colleges setup contracts with major television networks so the whole nation can keep up with their fantasy football teams or enjoy the weekend flipping back and forth between games on TV. These contracts that school write up with networks earn millions of dollars every year and between actually airtime and all the advertisement that goes into it. Schools will also earn millions of dollars from sports booster donations. It is true that there does need to be money to cover cost of traveling, hotels, staff and maybe the college would even expect to earn back the 15-25,000 dollar yearly scholarship’s that a lot of athletes receive, but when you compare the amount of revenue that student athletes generate for their colleges, what they receive in return is very small. Most people already think of colleges as being greedy for their outrageous tuition fees and everything else that goes along with needing to live on campus and attend classes. That they will hire students to teach classes so that professors do not have to, while the large majority of students who are attending these classes are paying thousands of dollars to be there. Their greed reaches beyond all that when it comes to college level sports at school that have competitive teams. These astonishing facts about the amount of money a season of college football produce yearly surprise and upset most fans. It’s the same as taking a test for someone only to let them turn it and receive an A on the exam, It is constantly debated about whether or not starting and back up players on college teams should get a yearly salary, considering the time and effort they put in does not always lead to a deal into the NFL. However it has not changed yet and does not seem to be heading that way anytime soon. It is corrupt, it is unjust, but most of all robs the hard working players who go out their every weekend to make everyone else Saturday that much more enjoyable.