Should We Pay College Athletes Essay Example for Free

Should We Pay College Athletes Essay Should we pay college athletes? That is a big topic in NCAA sports right now. People think that college athletes work hard and that they deserve to get paid. Michael Wilbon is one of these people. At first he was against paying college athletes, but now he is all for it. He says that he is interested in seeing the people that make revenue share a little piece of it. Then you have people like a reporter from the Daily Evergreen. He is against paying the athletes. He states that when you are a student athlete it is student first and athlete second, and that if you start paying college athletes it will put being an athlete first. I strongly think that college athletes shouldn’t be paid for playing sports in college. Paying players to play sports in college can cause players to ruin their career, cause the NCAA to be one sided, and would take away scholarships. The first problem with paying college athletes is that it could ruin a college athlete’s future career. For example, what happens when you give a little kid money? They spend it on junk that they don’t need. So the same thing would happen with most young college athletes. Think about it, you’re giving a teenager straight out of high schools a bunch of money to come a play sports at your school. Teenagers are not responsible with money. A prime example of this happening is Josh Hamilton. Hamilton is a professional baseball player in the Major Leagues. He got drafted out of high school and signed a contract with the Tampa Bay Rays for nearly 4 million dollars. He got hooked up with the wrong people and ended up blowing all his money on drugs and tattoos. He even got kicked out of Major League baseball for a while. I think that this would happen to a lot of player in college if they got paid. Another problem with paying college athletes is that it will cause the NCAA to become one sided. It will make college sports just like professional sports. The colleges with the most money will have the best teams and the colleges with the least money will have the worst teams. The competition would disintegrate. Take a look at professional baseball for example. The highest paid team in the Majors is the New York Yankees, and they are also the best. The lowest paid team is the Kansas City Royals, and they are the worst team in baseball. New York has money to buy the best players out there, while the Royals don’t. They can’t get good players because of their budget. This is exactly what would happen if college athletes got paid. The college with the highest budget would get the best players in the country, while the college with the worst budget wouldn’t be able to get good players. This will make the same teams good and the same teams bad year in and year out. It would take all the competition away. The third and final reason that paying college athletes is a bad choice is that it would take away scholarships. Think about it, you are already paying college athletes to play by giving them scholarships. Why would you need to pay them more to play if they have a scholarship already? You wouldn’t. Which means that scholarships would be gone all together and that’s not fair to everyone else? What about the people that are non-athletes? They wouldn’t be able to get scholarships because they don’t play sports. This would cause the student population to decrease. Lots of people can’t afford to go to the colleges they go to. The only reason they can go is because scholarships allow them to. It’s not right to take away the opportunity for less fortunate people. So I think that paying college athletes is a bad idea. It could ruin a players career giving them a lot of money at a young age, like it almost did to Josh Hamilton of the Texas Rangers. It would also cause the NCAA to be uncompetitive and become exactly like the professional leagues. And lastly it would get rid of scholarships, which would take away opportunities of a lot of college students that are non-athletes Works Cited Chait, Jonathan. â€Å"Fixing College Sports: Why Paying Student Athletes Won’t Work† New York Magazine Mar.2012. Web. 29 Mar.2012 Hamilton, Josh, and Tim Keown â€Å"Beyond Belief† New York: Hamilton, 2008 â€Å"College Athletes Should Not Get Paid To Play† The Daily Evergreen Aug. 2011. Web. 29 Mar. 2012