With the recent college bowl games occurring nightly for the past 2 weeks, there has been a lot made of the issue that the bowl games bring in millions of dollars for each school, and that college players give up a lot to play football, yet with all that money coming in, they aren’t paid to play. I watched a few interviews on ESPN and I thought, “You’re getting a free education and room and board!” Moreover, many of the stars on these teams will continue on to the pro level where they can make more money in a few years than an average person with a four-year degree will probably make in their lifetime. Of course, don’t forget that while the athletes are making their millions after graduating with a free degree, if they graduate at all, the rest of us will have to pay back our student loans while working an entry/low-to-mid-level job making a fraction of what their signing bonus was.
Don’t give me this crap about how they should be paid to play. They have even more of a choice than everyone else has; play sports and get a free education or don’t play sports and work a real job like the rest of the world.
The bigger problem here is that the sponsors for the bowl games and the networks have ramped up the prices for everything so they can afford to dish out these multimillion-dollar awards to the teams who represent their products in the “Tostitos Fiesta Bowl”, the “Nokia Sugar Bowl”, the “Chik-Fil-A Bowl” or the “Rose Bowl presented by Citi.” It’s obscene how much money universities get for playing a game. The driving force for a school should not be how much money they can make by developing a quality athletic program, it should be how many quality individuals can their education department turn out year after year. This is among the many reasons our education system is backwards and our kids priorities are so screwed up.
