The California Senate has passed a bill that allows college athletes to make money off of their own likeness. This means that student athletes are able to act in commercials, be in video games and even sell their own autographs. Organizations like the NCAA are fighting against this bill for their own benefit. If this bill is able to spread across the country, there will be a profound change in college athletics and I think it will be for the better.
Every year, it seems like more and more people are arguing that big time college athletes should be paid, and this new California bill, should it spread across the country, is the obvious solution.
This would keep the amateurism in college athletics as it wouldn’t be the schools or leagues that would be paying the athletes, but the players would be making money off of themselves. This is an important distinction because it means there would be no argument in the pay of athletes across different colleges and sports. Athletes would be paid based on who has the most value from a marketing perspective making the new system a complete meritocracy.
College athletes being unable to make money off of their own likeness is immoral. The NCAA, for example, made over one billion dollars in 2017. All of this money was made off of student athletes participating in their sports on national television. These players who make the money for the NCAA are then not able to make any money on the side due to NCAA regulations.
This is hypocrisy at its finest and what makes the situation even worse is that the highest revenue-earning sports, football and basketball, often have student athletes who are from households below the poverty line. This money that they could potentially make is life changing and could positively affect the life of these athletes and their families.
An argument that an organization like the NCAA might use against the new bill is that this will ruin the parity of college sports because players will be forced to choose universities based off of marketing opportunities and not education.
However, this argument is faulty because there is very little parity in college athletics. This is because the elite high school players are choosing from a select few of schools.
For example most talented college football players choose schools like Clemson or Alabama whereas if these schools were chosen based off of education, then schools such as Northwestern or Duke would be national powerhouses. All this new bill will possibly change is the location of the elite college sports programs, moving them more likely towards big cities.
If this new bill were to go through nationwide, Saint Xavier could really benefit from it.
This is due to it being located in the third biggest city in the United States. Chicago, with its massive marketing potential coupled with our elite NAIA sports programs could lead to Saint Xavier’s athletes being among the highest paid in NAIA. Doing so could improve SXU’s ability to recruit athletes to come to the school, which in turn, would help the sports programs.