College Slavery

Wasn’t Slavery Abolished in 1865

The average division one football program generates $31,924,154 in revenue for their school (Gaines 2).” College, once a place to go to enlighten your mind, has since turned into a lucrative business. When you walk into a college bookstore, half the items are football related. The items the football players make popular many players cannot afford. These athletes, who train 30 hours a week on average, receive no compensation. The belief is that college athletes 4 years later walk away with a college degree from a prestigious school at no charge. The truth of the matter is that only 55.1% of players actually graduate (Martinez 3).” Do the athletes even care about the education they are receiving? Cardale Jones

tweeted out “Why should we have to go to class if we came here for FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS” on October 5, 2012. With so much money created by college football players, the pure enjoyment of the sport is not enough compensation for all their hard work.
The first College football game was played on November 8, 1969. It was New Jersey tigers vs. Rutgers queen’s men (Rutgers 1).” With only 100 spectators accounted for, we can see college football has come a long way. Now we have a lot more than a field to play on, rather $72-$420 million dollar stadiums for every school (Gaines 2).” The teams have gone from a 100 spectators all the way to 42.06 million in spring of 2018 (Rutgers 1).” Youngsters idolize many of these players. From having to sit alone at lunch to being the center of attention, players have the capability of sparking change in the lives of the youth. This scenario played out when FSU wide receiver Travis Rudolph sat next to a young man named Bo (Chan 1).” Bo, a child who is suffering from autism never has to worry about sitting alone because he now has a plethora of friends. These players have such a big social media presence whatever they take part in; there is always a camera filming. The NCCA is making enormous amounts of money each year attracting millions of new visitors year after year, even competing with the NFL for viewers and profits.
The topic of paying college athletes has been around since the birth of the infamous “Fab Five” in 1991. Critics of paying college football stars will argue that there sole purpose is to attain an education, not on how well they perform in the football games. The college would not be able to make as much income off the games. In today’s society, the ability to attend a university is a privilege not everyone has. The term, “student-athlete” starts with student, which is what is supposed to come first (Chan 1).” NCAA’s rulebook perceives the players as amateurs, not professionals. If they were to receive compensation, football would become a job that is the polar to why they are there. “The best argument against paying players is the fact that it diminishes the value of an education” (Lemmons 3).” Too many questions would surface which would instigate controversy that colleges do not have time to deal with.
One could assert that any individual should be able to profit from their NIL (name, image and likeness). The NIL is the first right stripped from these student-athletes who play with a chip on their shoulder and give their 110% every workout, practice and game. The sport they play for the love of the game is now leaving them with a financial burden. Braxton Miller, a young man on the OSU football team, performed a spin move so fast it took the world by storm. The spin happened during the rematch of OSU vs Virginia State scientists claimed him to have, “a peak angular velocity of 676 degrees per second” (Smith 26).” ESPN frequently played it, and multiple clips on YouTube averaged 500,000 views. Big corporate leaders who made money off it all the way down to the small filmmakers took his superhuman-like spin away from him. Ed O’ Bannon and numerous scholarship athletes in a related issue sued the NCAA and its business partner for the production of videogames that had them as the main characters (Marshall 2).” They claimed that the production of these videogames stripped them of their NIL. Once the court was pressured into coming up with a conclusion. The court stated when an athletic recruit exchanges his labor and NIL rights when agreeing for a scholarship. This point alone sounds very corrupt, because it is undeniably breaking the 13th amendment right. The 13 amendment states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States”. This amendment is ironically the same amendment the NCAA backs up their argument with, referring to the case of Vanskike vs Peters. One can deduce that the NCAA is comparing their athletes to prisoners.
Rarely are people aware of how much a college scholarship is worth.

On average, a scholarship is worth $25,000 a year, and over the course of four years, it totals $100,000 (Marshall 1).” On paper, this sounds like a lot of money, but what people do not take into account is the athletics part that consists of injuries, which can lead to your scholarship revocation. In all honesty, the statistics show that many athletes only last 2 years at their original college, either for not making the cut, politics, or injuries. For the players, the field is a dog-eat-dog world; if you do not put in all your time into the athlete part of student-athlete, someone else will gladly take your place. Many of the critics think being an athlete is not a full time job. Yet, if you take a step into a collegiate football player’s life, you see the facts are that you wake up before classes to attend a mandatory gym session, after mandatory conditioning session, and an hour later you have class till about 4p.m., then the long anticipated practice, after that you have mandatory study hall. Where is the time to work a part time job? There is none! College athletes put 40 hours on average into athletics per week (Smith 21).” The point here is a scholarship does not equate to money in the bank. It leaves them dead broke. Now, on the road the team can give a whopping $7 for meal money to a player, anything more than that is an NCAA violation. So how much money is exploited off these gifted athletes? Well for one, the highest paid public employees in 39 different states are the coaches themselves (Gaines 2).” College coaches earn an average of $1.64 million per year, the highest paid being Nick Saban, with an annual salary of $10.9 million (Tracy, Marc, and Rohan).” What happened to the critics saying athletes need to be doing it for the love of the game? These athletes are dead broke, putting their blood, sweat, and tears into their sport, some not being able to enjoy a movie, food, and going

out. Meanwhile, their coaches get to live an extravagant and luxurious life style. The college coaches are not the only exploiters, the main one is the NCAA. A 501 3-C is a business term that stands for a nonprofit organization. “Nonprofit” that has to be a joke! They earned $1.1 billion in the year 2017 overseeing 460,000 athletes and 14,000 teams (Marshall 1).” The big people never like giving to the little people even if the little ones are doing all the hard work.
The main reason I believe college athletes deserve compensation for their hard work is due to multitude of injuries that many receive throughout their time in the NCAA. Concussions are the highest percentage injury for football players which can leave them with brain damage that can affect them long term. The NCAA has no insurance plan for these athletes unless playing in a championship game which then and only then will they dip their hand into their precious billions of dollars to help a little. Also in hindsight, the solution seems simple if the argument is that they pay for play based on a scholarship then just let the players receive compensation because of their NIL. In the past, a multitude of times large conglomerates have exploited athletes. The most notorious is the “Fab Five” who increased Michigan State’s profits from $1.5 million to $10 million in only a year (Mama 2).” Shortly after the birth of the “Fab Five”, Nike produced a shoe named after them, which made tons of money, none of which went to the players. They had to walk through the halls of their school, seeing students wear jerseys, shoes, and t-shirts with their own names on it. Can you blame athletes for accepting booster money when they do not see any part of the millions they generate? The proposed plan above would stop all the lawsuits, put the media at ease, and stop so many heated discussions.
In conclusion, with so much money created by college football players, the pure enjoyment of the sport is not enough compensation for all their hard work. I have written the critics counter-arguments, and there is no basis in reality on which they stand. Their arguments are stools with two legs instead of three, weak and unstable, rarely having any supportive facts to support the claim. In turn, that is why I highly support the idea that college football players deserve compensation on their NIL. It is a given right that no one should be able to take from another person.