Paying college athletes

NCAA takes first step in allowing players to cash in

The NCAA has finally taken its first step toward letting college athletes get some compensation for their efforts in the $1 billion industry of American college athletics.

The guidelines the NCAA board of governors reluctantly approved in late April will not allow athletes to get a paycheck for their work in college sports. In fact, most analysts believe stalling that sort of payday was the main motivation for the NCAA’s move to allow athletes to be paid for the use of their names, images and likenesses.

The rule change would let third parties — not the colleges and universities for which the athletes play — pay student athletes for things like using their photos in advertising or their names on the backs of jerseys (so long as the jersey isn’t that of the school where they play.)

The governing body of American college athletics has been under increasing pressure in recent years to spread the wealth and drop the pretense that college athletes area mateurs.

Last fall, California’s Legislature passed a bill that would allow college athletes to be paid for some endorsement deals. Other states followed and a bill was introduced in Congress that would challenge the NCAA’s tax-exempt status if it continued to deny athletes the right to make money off such endorsement deals.

The NCAA took great pains to emphasize that the new rules do not make college athletes employees of their universities — a key element of the argument that they should get paychecks just like their professors and coaches do.

The NCAA may hope that this move is a sandbag pile that can hold off the flood that will be paychecks for athletes, but they should instead see it as a logical step in that inevitable direction.

Paying college athletes for their labors would be complicated and could pose troubling issues for women’s teams and sports that don’t draw huge crowds or television contracts.

But the amount of money in college sports has grown obscene. Universities rake in millions on the sale of merchandise, and top coaches routinely are the highest-paid public employees of most states.

There is big money in college sports and the time has come for the athletes who play those sports to get their share of it.