Sign Up | Lost Password

Knudson: Pay for Play? Here's How It Could Work

By Mark Knudson, The Mtn. Insider
October 31, 2011
 
The NCAA has decided the best way to combat the rampant cheating in college sports is to give the players a little something extra in their scholarship checks.

Maybe that will keep them out of the tattoo parlors, etc.
 
Adding an extra $2,000 to some scholarships in the name of "cost of attending" is a nice gesture for kids that aren't allowed to and don't have time to get a part-time job and often times can’t afford a pizza or going to a movie. But the idea has spawned some controversy and dissension from both those who don’t want college athletes further compensated and those who want them to draw actual paychecks.
 
Some think a free college education is more than enough compensation, especially when the guy majoring in chemistry is paying his own way. They add that $2K is too much; it will hamstring some schools and thereby benefit others. Others say it’s not enough. Athletes, not chemistry majors, generate thousand and thousands of dollars for these schools every season.

Both groups are probably right. And what happens to those schools that can't afford to add $2K to a kid’s scholarship? This could indeed widen the gap between the power (i.e. wealthy) programs and the rest.
 
But there could be a way to address the issue that hasn't (as far as I know) been brought up before. It's what professional leagues like Major League Baseball do, and absolutely no one has ever complained. It's the way baseball divides the money brought in from licensing and merchandising. In MLB, the entirety of the MLB Players Association – this means every single player that has spent at least one day on a MLB roster for that season – gets a share of the money that is generated by licensing and merchandising rights and sales. It's a big pot that gets bigger every year.
 
Here’s how it works: MLB grants licensing rights to dozens and dozens of companies all over the world, making that company "The Official blah blah blah of Major League Baseball." Could be anything and everything from candy bars to catcher’s masks. Each and every company that wants to produce anything that bears the MLB logo or any team logo has to pay a rights fee to MLB, and then baseball gets a share of the sales, too.
 
When it's all said and done, all the money that's generated from merchandising sales is taken in and then divided 50-50. Half goes to the owners and half to the Players Association. In my days, the union held that money back and banked it for our "strike fund" so that players could draw some sort of paycheck in the event of a work stoppage. Once a new collective bargaining agreement was signed, we got all our money at once. It was a wonderful bonus for guys who were already getting paid. One year, I simply paid off my car loan.
 
How did the union divide the money among the members? If a player spent the entire season on the Major League roster, he received a full share of licensing money. Half a season, half a share and so on. By the time I retired, a full share of licensing money was worth close to $100K per year for each player. If you spent half the season on the big league roster, you got about $50K and so on.
 
We all know that the NCAA generates huge amounts of money from merchandise sales every year. What about the idea of taking all that money that is generated by these sales and putting half into a fund that’s then dispersed to the student athletes regardless of school and regardless of sport as an addition to their scholarships? Yes, you’d need some sort of formula to determined who got how much, but I trust that someone can come up with a fair plan. It won’t amount to $100K per athletes, of course. There are a lot more collegiate athletes than Major League Baseball players to divide it by, but it would likely be more than $2K, too. It would not give any school an advantage because the NCAA would be supplying the funds, not the schools.
 
At present time, Kellen Moore can receive exactly zero of the money that's generated by the sale of Kellen Moore jerseys, t-shirts and the like. I'm not saying that Moore should get all that money, but wouldn’t it be fair and reasonable if he and his teammates and all the other athletes at Boise State were to at least share in those sales? If you pooled all the money brought in by every school, it wouldn’t matter whose jersey was the top seller, just that jerseys were being sold and that student athletes were sharing in the revenue they helped greatly to produce.
 
As described, this a simplistic answer to a complex question. A lot of important details would have to be worked out by someone smarter than I am before it would be the answer to paying student athletes. But this could be the best way to solve this problem, couldn't it?

Since the athletes are the ones who are responsible for people like us buying t-shirts and the like, it's fair to let athletes share in the benefits.
See all of Mark Knudson's blog entries HERE.