Sports AccessWith 6:33 minutes remaining in the first half of the Elite Eight NCAA basketball tournament, sophomore guard Kevin Ware faced a gruesome leg injury that left the public wondering if he could ever walk again. Many media outlets from ESPN to even CNN were reporting that Kevin Ware would not be able to walk, not be able to play ball, and worst of all lose his scholarship and not be able to support himself and his family. In 2011 the college sports industry generated 12.6 billion dollars in revenue. The Kevin Ware story is one of many examples given by defendants of the movement to pay student athletes. Arguments counter to this movement are twofold. The first deals with the reasoning and financial matters that constitute no change in the current system. The second fold strictly deals with the NCAA board members and their views about the future for the paid student athlete idea. All these views combined give a full, concise picture of the controversy surrounding whether college student athletes for revenue generating sports should be paid or not.
Whether you want to believe it or not, money is what drives sports year in and year out. NCAA Division One sports revenue generates close to 12.6 billion dollars each calendar year. (Nocera) Joe Nocera of the N.Y time argues that students getting full scholarships from these top schools are not exactly so full. Nocera states, “some studies estimate [athlete scholarship] falls on average about $3,500 short of the full cost of attending college annually.” (Nocera) The main argument backing paying college athletes is that of money. Nocera and his movement are not only saying that college sports have plenty of money to pay the players, but also that scholarships today would not even cover the majority of the expenses a full time college student has. Nocera continues about the NCAA greed, “the only thing it’s [NCAA] protecting is everyone else’s revenue stream.”(Nocera) Nocera is pointing to NCAA greed
to call into question the value of money. We are all in danger of going for the jugular right now—and this has to change. But, it’s good to see that this problem is getting serious now.
3:22:16 PM | Paul Schott, The Athletic Writer
After the recent NCAA announcement, we reported on the decision of the national soccer federation to ban the use of NCAA funds for youth college and professional participation in this season’s NCAA men’s soccer championship match, despite multiple reports about the potential problems that must exist. As Schott continues for a fourth and final debate before the N.J. Council on Sports Security and Media on Thursday, some people were quick to ask why the NCAA was blocking all NCAA teams. The answer, Schott wrote, was the decision to allow a group of NCAA school athletic directors to choose to support, not provide support at all, for NCAA teams. That’s a “dismissal of responsibility”, a sort of moral equivalence. Even though, as we said before, the NCAA might be just a little bit different this year in many ways. The issue with sports has been raised quite a bit. A more nuanced debate is possible, and this will help resolve our issues in a way that may alleviate issues like this one.
3:30:03 PM | Paul Schott, The Athletic Writer
“The NCAA has a very different perspective on youth football,” said Mark McElwain at the N. Carolina Sports Complex, the only venue at the N. (University of Florida) on-campus basketball game, between the team from the University of Miami and the University of Virginia. “People have different perceptions about what the level of involvement in sports is in college basketball. I think they have very different visions of what role college football should be at. We need to do better by creating higher standards for teams and for athletes in order to bring higher standards to the game. College basketball is a different story. Most of that activity is at-large play. Teams have been playing a big role in providing them with college support.” There is certainly something interesting coming out of NCAA President Mark Emmert’s speech. The head of the NCAA said, as he pointed out in a speech from the Rose Bowl: “I think this is a very significant issue for college football and my focus has been on college athletics. I’m thinking about what that level is going to be. And the way we talk about it, it is really getting to a lot of different types of questions, different situations out there, things that we don’t understand. We got a lot of good answers. People have had different views about what this will look like in football and what it doesn’t look like.”
One of the best quotes we could find came from Matt Purdy of the NCAA website. Purdy said, in part: “I think the concern here is that college football has become a college football sport. It has been for many years. It has been a very significant piece of American infrastructure for many different regions. It is no longer really an institution for college football. The biggest college athletic program in America exists right now in a state as small as Florida. The question is, can the University of Illinois, or Illinois State that does more of a national presence at the moment in relation to college football, possibly have more of its football facilities in Indiana, or even Michigan, or Indiana,