College players and compensation: What do you think?

One of the things that keeps college sports a bit more fair than professional sports is the players cannot be compensated in any way. There are certain booster groups that try to offer off the book incentives to lure star athletes to their universities, but they have to be very careful about this and many schools have been busted offering cash, gifts, and even something as small as a good deal on purchasing a new car. Athletes can only be compensated in getting a free education via a scholarship from the university and nothing else. Living expenses and things like food and drink are allowed, but even this is something that is tightly controlled; IE a university cannot put a player in a 4-bedroom mansion and call this "accommodation."

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The universities on the other hand, make a ton of money off of having a really good team, especially in football (the American type) and basketball. Some of the largest stadiums in the world are the homes of college football teams and normally will completely sell out all of the home games. You don't have to be a math wizard to realize that even if they are only charging $20 per person for entrance, and most charge a LOT more than this, that multiplied by nearly 100,000 this is a very big number. This is before we even factor in concessions and merchandising.

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_{HUGE money}

You may recall that about 20 years ago college sport video games disappeared and this was really disappointing to sports fans because at least for me, these games were a lot more fun than the professional sport games because like most people, I kind of prefer college sports more than professional ones. There are also a lot more teams so the games were very complicated to make.

The reason why the games vanished from existence is because a group of athletes lawyered up and sued the companies making the games because they were not being compensated for their likenesses being used in the games. Professional athletes are compensated for this and the bigger your name is, the more you are going to get.

Because the athletes in question kind of won, but not in that they were going to get compensated because they weren't, but now the games couldn't be made at all.

The discussion has once again come up in the media and with the NCAA about athletes being compensated and I don't really have a full-fledged opinion. Without considering my feelings that I'd really like to see college video games aside, I don't think it would be a good idea because colleges would probably find a way to unfairly get certain players much more money than others and this would result in the same schools being the top teams year after year. This is the reason why there are very few dynasties in NCAA sports and teams that were good for a very long time had to do so fairly, and by building better programs rather than just hulking up their team from nothing via massive payouts to players.

This is something that kind of irritates me about professional sports, especially ones where there are no salary caps. This is particularly true for football (of the soccer variety) where the same teams are the best almost without exception in various European Leagues. Man City is a great example of this: They were an average team until some crazy amount of money was pumped into them and now they are and will likely remain one of the best teams in the league forevermore. Barcelona is always good because they are spending sometimes 20 times what other teams in the league are paying for their athletes. It is extremely rare that there is an exception to this.

In college sports in the United States, "good teams" come and go and without maintaining a level of excellence in their staff and facilities, teams that were at the top for many years can quickly fade into obscurity. Nebraska is a very good example of this: They were basically dominant in the 80's and early 90's and these days they are a non-issue every year. In basketball, we have seen teams like Georgetown almost completely disappear after decades of being top contenders. We also have teams like Gonzaga that came out of nowhere and rise to the top. Even though I have been into sports almost my entire life, I never even heard of the small school until the late 90's. I didn't even know the school existed but it turns out it has been around since 1887.

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They have a slightly less impressive stadium than other teams but what do you expect with a school that only has just over 7,000 students? I still don't know how they managed to rise to power, so to speak, but they have become a team that everyone expects to win most of their games. I was as shocked as anyone else that they were eliminated in this year's tournament during the round of 16. They were overall favorites to win the entire tournament.

Now let's get back to compensation for players. I can't even imagine how complicated this would be. There are thousands upon thousands of athletes in both basketball and football and there would probably be some argument about how everyone should be paid equally for their likeness being used. If this ended up being the case none of them would end up receiving any sort of meaningful amount of money because it would bankrupt any game company that tried this. If they offered bigger names bigger money, the teams would be able to manipulate this and it would result in teams remaining dominant due to additional exposure.

Basically, I don't think they should do it. I don't think there is anything very wrong with the way colleges are allowed to lure players to their colleges as it is now and changing that, even though it would bring back the games, would probably only complicate this situation and make it very unfair and favorable only to the richest schools.

I think that players who are good enough, should probably try to get into the pros earlier where they will almost certainly be compensated very well. The only ones who are going to lose out on this are players that aren't good enough to make it to the pros, so that wasn't ever going to be an option for them anyway. The cream rises to the top and I believe that compensating players would ruin this. For a fictional but still very good look into how money in college sports can ruin the game, have a look at the movie Blue Chips that was made in 1994.