Should college atheletes get paid? Options

[impala454]

This subject came up at work and we fiercely debated it for a while. We all kinda came to the general conclusion that paying atheletes a salary is a bad idea.

The general argument ended up being whether or not the players deserved anything extra. My thoughts were that it seems pretty crappy to me that a star player can go out and literally make millions of dollars for the school and not be compensated any more than some 4th string tackling dummy who never sees a down in a real game. Do you cut them a check? No... but can you increase their monthly stipend or give them some extra perks? I dunno maybe. Some were saying having a free education & all the services/training the athletics coaching/facilities provides is payment enough. Or that the chance of making millions in the NFL is good enough. Well in a lot of star player's cases, I'd be willing to bet that their contribution to the team made far more money for the school than the cost of an education.

Also on the reverse side of that, do we really need to give a full ride to some guy who goes and plays golf? Or jumps hurdles?

Anyhow I thought it was a pretty interesting topic and figured it'd fire up the college sports forum here

[theIncredibleEdi...]

Ok, so you laugh at my example of expenses of the Tech athletic dept, but that's only ONE of many.

[impala454]

Ok, so you laugh at my example of expenses of the Tech athletic dept, but that's only ONE of many.

well keep on goin then damn. you're all the way up to $24,000 for one football game, you've only got $1,476,000 left to spend to outweigh the revenues of just the single game tickets.

and you seemed to completely ignore the actual data I posted from the NCAA. you can theorize costs all day long but facts are facts. the NCAA data shows that 40% of division 1 schools turn a profit, and over the entire division 1 that average profit is 2 million dollars. unless you can show me some data that says otherwise I don't see how you can continue to tell me that there's only 3 or 4 schools in div 1 that turn a profit.

[theIncredibleEdi...]

well keep on goin then damn. you're all the way up to $24,000 for one football game, you've only got $1,476,000 left to spend to outweigh the revenues of just the single game tickets.

and you seemed to completely ignore the actual data I posted from the NCAA. you can theorize costs all day long but facts are facts. the NCAA data shows that 40% of division 1 schools turn a profit, and over the entire division 1 that average profit is 2 million dollars. unless you can show me some data that says otherwise I don't see how you can continue to tell me that there's only 3 or 4 schools in div 1 that turn a profit.

I ignored it because it was 4 years old.

So lets see....according to those OLD numbers, Division 1A schools made an average of $29,400,000....and had an average of $27,200,000 in expenses. That means that there's an average profit of $2,200,000 for the entire Division 1A. A little over 2 million is a lot to me, but to a large number of schools that's not shit. And there are how many schools in Division 1A of the NCAA? I believe it is 128. So, that's an average profit (when divided between all the schools) of $17,187. Wow! A whole 17 grand per school! Let's go build all new facilities!!!
While I admit I may have grossly underestimated the number of schools making a profit from their athletic programs, I still hold my position that a majority of programs DO NOT make a profit.

That same document says that the trend is more schools are making a profit, but the average profit itself is going down.