Questioning Paying FBS Football Players

Reading the Associated Press article about Reggie Bush returning his Heisman Trophy and how that's not an admission of guilt (Um, sure), I was struck by the closing graphs (emphasis mine):

Bush said he also wants to start a program to help high school and college athletes deal with the pressures and temptations that come when their ability provides them celebrity and fame before they've turned pro.

"You're still a kid, but you're still asked to make adult decisions," Bush said, alluding to a handful of college teams -- including North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina -- dealing with probes into whether their players had improper contact with agents.

"Whatever the NCAA has, whatever programs they have, aren't working and it needs to be changed. If it's not changed, it's going to continue and it hasn't stopped yet," Bush said. "It's going to continue year after year after year and you're going to see kids be ineligible. You're going to see great athletes missing their junior and senior year and seasons because the system doesn't work.

"Obviously something has to be changed. You've got universities making millions of dollars off these kids and they don't get paid. The majority of college athletes who come in on scholarship come in [with] nothing. That's where you have a problem. You're making all this money off these kids and you're giving them crumbs and then you're surrounding these kids with money and telling them not to touch it," he said.

They don't get paid?

They don't get paid?

According to USC's own website, a student who attends USC for the 2010-2011 school year should expect to pay, in tuition and fees, room and board and for books about $54,100—not including personal expenses.

Now, when Reggie was there, it was a little bit lower—around the $40,000 to $45,000 range for the cost of attendance. Even so, let's say that you're there three years as a potential first round draft pick. You have received (tax free) something in the neighborhood of $120,000 to $140,000 if you attend a private school.

Is that money directly in your pocket? Well, no. But as an educator, it irks me when people who call for athletes to be "paid" discount the fact that a post-secondary education is a very expensive proposition. There are plenty of bright students who would kill for a chance to have a free ride to Southern Cal and wouldn't view it as "not being paid."

Additionally, even if you are receiving an athletic scholarship, there is nothing to stop you from getting a paying job during the summer. You are not obligated to take courses during the summer, so you can work if you need walk around money. Would it be enough to buy a tricked-out Impala with rims? No, probably not.

But I find the line that college football players are not receiving anything for their hard work to be laughable at best and downright sad at worst.

Additionally, name me a university that is making millions of dollars off of athletics. Hell, only 14 FBS athletic departments reported positive net generated revenues in 2009, which is a decline from 25 in 2008. Many public colleges and universities have had to resort to furloughs or layoffs for faculty and staff and are cutting programs, services and departments because of the sorry state of their budgets. So where could all of this money that the colleges and universities are allegedly making be going?

Here is a larger question I have for those, though, with the sentiment that football players should be paid: How are you going to do it?

Title IX doesn't appear to come into play here, as the Office of Civil Rights within the Department of Education (which oversees Title IX) states that:

Unequal aggregate expenditures for members of each sex or unequal expenditures for male and female teams if a recipient operates or sponsors separate teams will not constitute noncompliance with this section, but the Assistant Secretary may consider the failure to provide necessary funds for teams for one sex in assessing equality of opportunity for members of each sex."(34 C.F.R. §106.41(c))

So that isn't an issue at this point, unless pay for play gets implemented and a lawsuit generates because of it.

The questions I have:

1) Where is the money coming from? Who is actually going to create the fund that will pay the football players? Obviously, revenue is not coming directly from football itself; those funds are usually used to help prop up the so-called olympic, or non-revenue sports. Which, if paying football players forced those sports to be cut or reduced, then you could find yourself careening towards a potential Title IX conflict.

2) Who is going to determine how much a football player gets paid? Would that be expected to come from the NCAA to ensure some kind of fairness and level playing field? Or would it be left to the conferences or even the schools to set their own pay scale?

3) Scholarship athletes only, or are walk-ons eligible for a check?

4) In addition, do starters get more than third stringers? What happens if a player is a starter one year and gets beaten out the next?

5) Is this year round payment, or only during the fall semester/quarter?

If someone from the pay-for-play side can provide a well-thought out response to these questions, it would be greatly appreciated. But you have to be convincing.