The NCAA’s Refusal to Pay Players
The NCAA is the National Collegiate Athletic Association. They are the non-profit regulators of college athletics for nearly half a million student-athletes spread across the United States and Canada.
However, do not let the term “non-profit” confuse you.
The NCAA makes a fortune off of collegiate athletes that excel at their sport, banking over $1 billion dollars of revenue in the 2017-18 fiscal year alone.
Sports like College Basketball, Football and Baseball are money-making machines, yet, the players that are risking their bodies for the NCAA’s benefit, are not paid.
Student-athletes instead are given a full-ride scholarship to attend the university that they choose to play for, a value that is worth tens of thousands of dollars depending on the school. This might sound like a fair trade, but when a school like Duke rakes in nearly $31 million dollars from their basketball program alone, the math doesn’t add up.
Students that join the school’s athletic program are not only asked to spend nearly 40 hours a week on practice, film study, and schoolwork, but are also expected to risk their bodies on the field for the benefit of a school that will not pay them.
Most reasonable people would be asking themselves how exactly is this legal?
The reason the NCAA is able to continue these practices is due to their classification of the student-athletes as being amateurs.
Amateurism in the NCAA prohibits players from making any sort of profit from their name or likeness while in school, and we mean any profit.
The bottom line here is that the NCAA simply does not want to pay its college athletes. They would rather pocket the one billion dollars that they earn annually instead of allowing the student-athletes to profit off their own name and talent.
The classification of college athletes being amateurs is the driving force behind the constant legal battles that the NCAA faces from former athletes and other organizations, which leads us into the lawsuit in question: O’Bannon V. NCAA.
