The NCAA has a bewildering welter of rules preventing athletes from making money during their sport's season and limiting them to $2,000 of income in the offseason, though there's no limit to what an athlete can make during school vacations, as long as it's not made as a result of prowess in his or her sport.
Of course, athletes in big-time programs also get state-of-the-art training facilities, first-class travel, food and road accommodations, general adulation and the opportunity to rake in a fortune -- both legally, by turning pro, and less so, by playing footsie with rich boosters.
But only as long as athletic eligibility remains. Kendall Youngblood, a radio advertising salesman and former Utah State point guard, co-founded the fledgling Former College Athletes Association in Salt Lake City to try to help former players make the sometimes difficult transition to life after sports. He says he has mixed feelings about paying players, pointing out that when he was in college a decade ago he had trouble managing the small amount of cash he had access to.
"But maybe that money is put aside to where they get it when they graduate, they get it when their eligibility is up," he says. "I think that's what you need to do. I don't think you say, 'OK, here's your $5,000 a month.' But you give them incentive."
Peter Roby, director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University in Boston, says that despite popular perception, it's mostly a myth that college athletes are an exploited class who are kicked to the curb as soon as they can't help the team anymore.
"I think there's plenty of high-profile examples of that," he says. "Maybe that makes people think that every athlete that goes to a Division I program gets exploited and they don't end up getting an education. The majority of people that go through Division I schools are actually getting a very good education."
Roby, who played basketball at Dartmouth in the late '70s and later coached there and at Stanford, Army and Harvard, says that education is the forgotten part of the discussion of paying athletes. The center helps former athletes by running the National Consortium for Academics and Sports' Degree Completion Program, in which the 217 member schools agree to waive tuition for athletes who return to school to finish their degree, in return for community service.
"We can't forget that the reason that institutions of higher education even exist is because people are supposed to be going there to get an education," he says. "It's not supposed to be a minor league for the NFL. So to suggest that because they've built this thing into a monster, now they have to do something else to compensate the players -- why don't they scale it back instead? Why don't they make it less taxing on the athletes so that they can in fact go to school? They're throwing bad money at bad money, and that to me is not the answer."
Michael Kinney got an education at Southwest Missouri Baptist University, where he also played football in the mid-'90s. He parlayed his book-learning into a job as a columnist for the Sedalia (Mo.) Democrat, and in a column Sunday endorsing the idea of paying college players, recalled being so broke in school that he couldn't afford gas for his "smooth Geo Prism."
"As valuable as an education is," Kinney wrote, "the blood, sweat and tears that most football players shed during their tenure is more priceless. Besides that, you can't put a scholarship in a gas tank."
"The point I was trying to make is that, yes, athletes do get that scholarship, but they're not allowed to participate in the rest of college life," Kinney said in a phone interview this week. "Other people are allowed to do, you know, going out, late night, have a bite to eat or something like that. A lot of athletes may come from lower income families, and that money's just not there for them to be able to do that. So in my mind, that's something that -- I'm not looking for two or three thousand dollars or anything like that, but $100 a week or even $50 a week would be a little more helpful."
If you've never sat down and thought this through -- and there's no reason why you should have -- you probably don't realize how complicated things can get when you start talking about paying college athletes even nominal sums. The obvious question is: Where does the money come from? Perhaps only programs that show a profit should have to pay their players. But anyone who's taken Accounting 101 or is a fan of the movies or major league baseball knows how easy it is to hide a profit. If only revenue-producing athletes, who are almost all male, get paid, then Title IX issues arise.