Paying Collegiate Athletes Won't Fix the NCAA's Mess

It's standing in a line at Best Buy in mid-July to buy the latest release of EA Sports' NCAA Football for Xbox360.

It's an early-November night in Blacksburg, Va.

The sun goes down, the air turns crisp, and 66,000 crazed Virginia Tech fans flood Lane Stadium in hopes that their squad is about to take down a rival ACC school on ESPN.

It's a Saturday morning in Baton Rouge, La., or State College, Pa. Students wake up after a minimal night's sleep and take to the parking lots, grilling meats, and drinking beverages in preparation to take down their next victim.

It's flipping through the channels on a Saturday afternoon, watching Lee Corso put on the head of some school's mascot, watching Lou Holtz mumbling non-sense, watching Notre Dame lose at home to some once-laughable opponent, thinking to yourself, "Why the Hell does this team play on national television? They just lost to Connecticut."

It's the fight songs, tradition, rivalries. I get all worked up at the thought of it.

It, of course, is college football. And it is a beautiful thing.

And for the NCAA and its participating schools, it's a lucrative thing, too.

It's no secret that television networks have paid extraordinary amounts of money for broadcasting rights to the NCAA's biggest sporting events.

It's no secret that the schools are making big dollars from naming rights, advertising revenues, jersey sales, ticket sales, and bowl games.

And it's no secret that the athletes attending these colleges don't receive any kickbacks despite generating millions of dollars for their schools.

Wait, check that last part. You mean they are receiving kickbacks?

Yes, naive sports fan--it's true. 

It seems like every week another one of the nation's top football programs is finding themselves in hot water brought about by coaches hiding information, players circumventing rules to make an extra dollar, recruiting infractions--the list goes on.

Ohio State, Oregon, Auburn, West Virginia, North Carolina, and USC have each had to answer difficult questions from the NCAA regarding their programs over the last two years.  And sadly, the list of schools committing violations is likely much longer than those that have been exposed.

As a response, their has been increased dialogue by media members from coast to coast about colleges throwing kickbacks to NCAA athletes. The main argument isn't so much that athletes deserve a piece of the pie, but that instituting a pay to play system will somehow magically rectify the rapidly deteriorating integrity of college athletics.

Schools will pay players so they won't make closed-door deals with boosters, agents, and other financiers looking to take advantage of young, naive athletes. Schools won't have to cover up infractions. Recruiting violations will diminish because coaches won't have to entice five-star prospects with money and perks they can't legally offer.

Seems like a logical theory. It's also a flawed one.

Why do people believe that if colleges pay top-rank athletes it will prevent them from violating NCAA rules? There's no such thing as "enough money" to most people in our society, let alone ego-driven athletes who are predisposed to a sense of self-entitlement. Give an inch, they'll take a mile.  

Here's the problem, making one ammendment to the system isn't going to generate sweeping change. Sweeping changes to the system will generate sweeping change.

Paying athletes is the least integral part of the process. If anything, athletes should be allowed to speak at engagements, sell memorabilia, and endorse products. Allowing student-athletes to make money by any legal means possible will help reduce the dirty laundry produced by FBS schools.

For those that want schools to pay athletes, fine. But lift all the regulations. Don't act as if cutting a starting running back a check every two weeks is going to clean up collegiate sports.

I love the game. I love the traditions unique to each school. 

But there's still a large portion in this country that have foolishly convinced themselves that the best part of collegiate sports is its purity. That the game is removed from the egos and big dollars that have contaminated professional sports. Maybe there was a time that this was true. But that time has come and gone. It's far gone.  

So let's adapt with the times, allow each individual athlete to operate as a free enterprise, get what they think they're owed, and we can enjoy the game for what it is.