Pay for Student Athletes: Revisited

Happy Thursday Cougs!!!

If you missed it, a couple of weeks ago Longball ran a great post about pay for student athletes, which has been a pretty hotly debated topic in the sports world recently.  If you didn’t catch his post, you can read it here.

I, for one, am vehemently against it.  Some of the scholarships these kids get are already worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Out of state tuition and room and board for WSU is about $35,000 a year, according to WSU’s office of financial aid.  So say a kid from California comes to WSU on a full-ride football scholarship, redshirts, and finishes his 5-year career.  He will have accumulated about $175,000 in scholarship money throughout his career.  That’s a lot of dough.

I fully understand the other side of the argument, that the NCAA is making boatloads of cash off of these athletes and they deserve a piece of the pie.  I just think that once we cross that point, we take the amateurism out of college sports.  

Once I heard people start to debate this, I never thought it would be a possibility.  For one, you can’t just pay football players.  With the guidelines set forth by Title IX, you would have to pay all D-1 athletes.  However, this topic actually seems to be gaining a lot of traction as a real, tangible possibility…

Some school presidents and conference commissioners, including our very own Larry Scott, are behind the idea of giving D-1 athletes a piece of the pie.  In fact, it’s gaining so much steam that NCAA president Mark Emmert will host a summit on the future of D-1 sports, and this will surely be a large part of the agenda. 

If you didn’t hear, the SEC coaches had an interesting proposal in regards to paying their players.  Steve Spurrier offered to pay 70 of his players $300 a game out of his own pocket, a proposal supported by the rest of the SEC coaches.  He claims that it’s totally feasible, and would cost less than $300,000 a year for a team that plays 14 games.  

It definitely is feasible…for SEC coaches.  If you look at the D-1 coaches salaries from last year, you’ll see that $300,000 a year is chump change to most of the SEC coaches.  But what about Dave Clawson of Bowling Green, or Todd Barry of Luisiana Monroe who made $206,000 and $215,000, respectively?  Their entire salary wouldn’t even cover that proposal.  And there’s just NO way that you could offer that to one conference and not any other.  Recruiting is already as cut-throat as it gets, but could you imagine coaches having to recruit against an SEC coach who is literally offering kids money out of their own pocket?  Not that the SEC has to compete much with Bowling Green or Luisiana Monroe for recruits, but you get the picture.  It would create a huge divide, if there isn’t one already.  

Even Paul Wulff only made a meager $600,650 last year, lowest in the Pac-10.  Spurrier’s proposal would knock off half of his salary.  But while he might not support Spurrier’s proposal, Wulff had some interesting quotes on the topic in a story from the Denver Post yesterday.  

Wulff advocated a $200 a month stipend, saying, “I think the kids need more money, period… They say they can work a job, but it’s unrealistic for what we ask these guys to do.”

“The only reason I say that is to make sure they can eat,” Wulff said. “In my opinion, I’d rather not give them any more money but have the ability to feed them two meals a day minimum every day. I don’t want to hear a kid say, ‘Coach, I don’t have enough money to eat.’ It harms their performance.”

Again, personally I disagree.  I know that there are grants and loans that are available to all students, including athletes.  If coaches are really concerned about their athletes not eating, maybe they should be more involved in teaching them how to budget properly.  By the way, this is coming from a kid who paid for his own school, WITHOUT a full-ride scholarship or rich parents.  Sure I got help here and there, but don’t tell me it’s not possible to budget a $4,000 Pell grant to feed yourself for a year.  

That’s all for now Cougs, it will be interesting to see how this one shapes up.  

GO COUGS!!!