Your Feelings About College Athletes Being Paid?

I can't think of any way that is legal or fair to other students to pay athletes cash in present time or deferred. No matter how much they try, universities cannot separate the enterprise of sport from the rest of the university structure. Amateurism is amateurism and the large in-kind cash value of scholarships - under the banner of amateurism - already is what separates those who pay versus those who do not. Start adding cash to the mix, and the next thing you know, football players are banking more cash than adjuncts, food service employees, etc... Probably alot of issues with laws in the areas of racketeering, antitrust, employment law, etc... start generating piles of lawsuits.

I would tell you that the whole college financing system for those who pay is going to collapse soon, as the cost of college and the debt incurred with a crap job market will make so many more opt for online courses and distance learning, and community college.

Two models gaining steam to get ahead of this are

(1) Harvard, which comes up with scholarship money so students only pay about 25% of the tab;
(2) The state of Oregon, which has proposal in legislature to make college free.

Now while you have big football-tradition schools wanting to break away from the NCAA, that will not change the amateurism - it will just be a way to streamline the rules and get control of making the rules.

Also, while vv's paragraph on better and more noble re-distribution of profits into support structures is good - recall that only a handful of schools actually make money on football. Maybe the growing conference allocations will help, but again, there's only a few big conferences that payout so much.

Unless someone else has a viable model to show, the only thing that can happen in the current environment is for football to become just like baseball. High school baseball players have a choice - they can go to college for 1-4 years and be an amateur, or, they can go play minor league baseball for pay. That's the only un-developed ground for football. Minor league football, either run by the NFL or run independently. Right there - players can earn, form a union, gain a share of revenues, and profit off their name.

The problem with that - the public loves college football and pro football, and rarely if never supports the games of the talent pool in between the two, i.e. preseason football, arena, etc...

Prediction: Nothing changes and the status quo dominates again.