1.8 Billion

1,800,000,000.

That is the amount of money generated each year by Division One college football players.

0.

That is the amount of money college football players are paid.

1.

That is the percent of college football players who will go on to play football professionally.

Here is an interesting article, by the always interesting Michael Lewis, examining the question of whether college football players should be paid.

I have several thoughts on the matter.  But first, a question:

Is college football a business?

If the answer is yes, than I think that any right-minded individual would agree that a business should pay its employees.

Okay.  So what about other sports?  Should baseball players be paid?  Softball players?  The rifle team?  Should each athlete receive the same pay check?  If not, how is the pay scale determined?

And what about high school sports?  Don't schools make money off high school football?  Should they be paid?

Which leads me to the heart of the problem (and I speak as a former high school basketball coach).  The problem, ultimately, is that athletics and academics should not be mixed.  It is foolish to mix them, even at the high school level.  They are two completely different things.  Look at Europe, which has a club system (which has its own faults, the biggest being that 15 year-olds drop out of school to play sports full-time.  But hey, it's not like we don't have our own dropout problem).

The club system is not influenced by academics and academics are not influenced by the club system.  Every coach in this country has played against (or fielded) a team which included players who were not academically eligible.  Many teachers can recount stories where they were pressured to change a grade so the star player could play in the big game.  And that is just at the high school level, where most schools don't make a profit.  Although LeBron James' high school certainly made a mint off of him, what with televised games on ESPN.  And how much did ESPN make off of selling advertising blocks during those games?  Or, closer to home, several years ago there was controversy in Jackson over the eligibility of Renardo Sydney, who was attending Piney Woods, a 2A school that plays in the district of Rankin County.  Officially, the coach of Piney Woods was found to have recruited Sydney to play and, thus, Sydney was ineligible.  Unofficially, rumors swirled that the Jackson Public School District (where Sydney would have played) and the Mississippi High School Activities Association (the governing athletic body for Mississippi) did not want to lose out on the revenue that would be generated by having one of the best players in the country play in Jackson (as Monta Ellis, of Lanier High School, had done a few years before.  Lanier ended up moving a bunch of games to Jackson State University so they could sell more tickets ).

At the college level it is a different story, both in terms of preferential treatment and dollars.  Let's just look at the above-the-board money.  At a small school in a mid-major (Southern Miss and Conference USA respectively) college athletics is worth more than $50 million to the town of Hattiesburg, according to this article.   I imagine “OIe Miss” must at least double (and probably triple) that.  So, at the very least, college athletics is worth $100 million a year to the City of Oxford.

And what is the football team alone worth to the University of Mississippi?  The stadium has 60,000 seats.  Say $40 a ticket.  Another $20 per person in concessions.  That is $3.6 million each home game just on tickets and food.  Add in another $11 million each season from television revenue for playing in the SEC.  Apparel.  Donations to the athletic fund.  May be $40 million a year to the university (at the very least).  The entire university athletic budget is $25 million.

If the entire country moved to a club system, and people followed the local club team with as much passion and interest as they do for their college team (England suggests the answer to this question is a yes), then the local town would not see much impact in terms of revenue.  But the university would.  Ah, there’s the rub.  Given the amount of money that is generated each year to a university by athletics (revenue generated because the employees are not paid) why would a university (or an association of universities, i.e., the NCAA) want to give that up?  The answer, of course, is that they would not.  There is no meaningful economic incentive to change that system, regardless of the corruption that invariably comes with it.

Given that we, as a nation, are not moving to a club system any time soon, do I think players should be paid?  Actually, no.  I’ve argued for the last 15 years that all of the money should be taken out of sports, an idea that Lewis covers in his article:

If the N.C.A.A. genuinely wanted to take the money out of college football it’d make the tickets free and broadcast the games on public television and set limits on how much universities could pay head coaches.

That is exactly what I think should happen.  Of course, then CBS would lose out on the billions it generates from advertising revenue...