The players can sell their faces.
It is the Fourth of July weekend and no big-time college or university sports program has gone out of business because so-called student-athletes can now make some money off of their names, likenesses and images or in other words, their faces. The National Collegiate Athletic Association wanted to keep athletes from making money. The NCAA no longer can do that as it struck out with the Supreme Court of the United States, with Congress and with local governments. The student-athletes can be paid but none of the salary is coming from the NCAA. An athlete can strike a deal with any company and get paid from that company. None of the money is coming from the poohbahs of college sports. And the poohbahs are unhappy because others are paying the athletes who are the stars of the show.
Paying college athletes has been talked about for more than a century. In 1929, the Carnegie Foundation published American College Athletics, a report that accused many schools with prominent athletic programs of recruiting athletes, giving them cushy jobs, and paying them. The athletes according to the Carnegie Foundation assessors should be grateful to play college sports and if they got a scholarship, all the more reason to be happy. The Carnegie Foundation said college athletics in its current form in 1929 posed a threat to education. Just why college sports was an amateur endeavor is not exactly clear. But it has been that way since the Rutgers-Princeton 1869 football game. The term student-athlete was invented by NCAA executive director Walter Byers in 1955 as a dodge which allowed schools to get away with not paying athletes. Every other aspect of big-time college sports is professional from television contracts to corporate support to selling big ticket items like luxury suites. College sports is a profession.
Evan Weiner’s books are available at iTunes – https://books.apple.com/us/author/evan-weiner/id595575191
FILE – Nebraska quarterback Adrian Martinez warms up before an NCAA college football game against Iowa in Lincoln, Neb. in this Friday, Nov. 29, 2019, file photo. A new era in college sports has arrived. For the first time, NCAA athletes will be permitted to profit from their fame. Nebraska quarterback Adrian Martinez isn’t a big social media guy, but he started thinking about ways to take advantage of the changes last fall. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File)
