Debate of the Day

So, while watching ESPN coverage of the Ohio State game and players' apologies for selling their football-related junk or at least exchanging it for tattoos, I was thinking once again about the issue of compensation and college sports. My big issue with the rules about compensation comes from the fact that someone does profit from it: the school sells tickets (which pay for the stadiums and the uniforms and the buses and all that, but in great Division I schools, some of that money is "left over") and jerseys with players' names and other memorabilia. I understand that allowing students to sell their own jerseys, or worse, play the game professionally, is fraught with all kinds of problems. I went to a Division III school with a laughable football team and was actually encouraged to attend by that fact. The last thing I want is for good academic programs to be undermined by kids playing a game. Nor do I want 18 year old kids to abandon their education to focus entirely on a career that has an outside chance (at best) of paying off.

But the fact is, that is already happening. It's a "problem" of our culture that we value sports to this ridiculous degree. We will pay $40 for a ticket to a baseball game and $50 for a jersey and $10 for a popcorn and whatever else. And in the majors, that money translates into massive salaries for players, and no that is not unfair: they are entertaining us and they deserve that portion of our ticket (though it would be pretty great if they'd pay concession workers a living wage and provide health insurance, etc, with all that money swimming around...). As long as we value college sports just as highly, I think that the players should get some portion of that value.

As an English major, I thought of it like this: if I wrote for my college newspaper, and they sold that newspaper at $10 a pop (because this is like the most popular college newspaper ever and apparently has naked lady pictures in it), but I did not get paid, would that be fair? What if then they decided to take the stories I wrote and bind them into a book and sell that at bookstores around the country and I still didn't see a dime? What if there were television shows about my writing and advertisers paid millions to put my name on their products, but I still sat in my dorm room, eating frozen pizzas?

Of course, from this arrangement I get a nice little resume boost, and the fame certainly will help me with publishers, but let's say I'm not allowed to even talk to those publishers until I leave the school newspaper, and those publishers are certainly not allowed to offer me any kind of advance, and in fact I'm not even allowed to write stories on my own time and publish them on the side, because then I'll be ineligible to write for the newspaper and lose my scholarship. And then what if my writing is actually pretty dangerous, because I write about skydiving and fighting in Iraq and my work on the offshore oil rigs, and all those stories get published and make a lot of money for other people and then right before I'm going to graduate and finally cash in on my fame and my resume points, a giant shark attacks me on a story and eats out half my brain and I can never write again. Now, I live out the rest of my life in a nursing home with someone wiping my ass and I can't even get the hot nurse because I have no money, and all the people that profited from my talent just move on to the next big thing.