Let college athletes be like Jodie Foster

Student actors, musicians earn money. Why not jocks?

As we grapple with the evils of money and college sports, we might want to remember Jodie Foster. When she enrolled at Yale University at age 17, she had already been nominated for an Oscar, been paid for many Disney movies, and even hosted Saturday Night Live.

At Yale, she studied drama, and in her freshman year, she appeared in a school theater production. Then during her summer break, she went off to make another movie. And guess what? No one got fired or investigated. No one declared she would never act in a school play again.

Why is college sports so different? Why is it that if a basketball player lets an agent buy him lunch, he has violated rules and put his program in hot water? Why can’t a college quarterback make his own milk commercial?

Why is it OK for a college flute player, on a music scholarship, to play in the school band and then get paid for a nightclub gig — but if “student-athletes” take money for playing five minutes somewhere, they’ve sacrificed their college eligibility forever?

The answer lies in the NCAA and its antiquated yet profitable adherence to amateurism. But given the insanity over a recent FBI probe that suggests major NCAA violations by many wellknown schools (and why the FBI is wasting taxpayer money on these mostly non-criminal activities is beyond me), we should rethink the idea of amateurism and college sports. Especially since it’s been dead for years.

If you are new to the topic, you need know only this. The president of the NCAA, Mark Emmert, makes $3 million a year. The coach of the Duke Blue Devils, Mike Krzyzewski, makes about $9 million a year. The TV broadcasting rights for college hoops were recently extended for more than $1 billion a year. And the players get paid nothing. That’s not amateurism. It’s a sham. Instead of schools shaking in their boots over who paid for a player’s pizza, we should rethink the whole model.

The first thing people say is “pay the players.” After all, there’s billions coming in from TV rights and shoe deals, right? The problem is, college sports are ruled by Title IX, a federal law that demands equal treatment for men’s and women’s sports programs at schools. Which means if you paid the men’s football players, you might well have to pay the women’s lacrosse players — and at the same rate.

That’s not likely to happen. But if the schools and the NCAA are going to get rich, they should at least allow athletes to do the same on their own.

Which brings us to the Olympics sports model. Don’t pay for participation in competition, but allow athletes to earn money outside of it. If a figure skater wants to do a Hertz commercial or an autograph session, fine.

If we just allowed this for college players, we’d eliminate a good chunk of the wasted time, money and sweaty nerves our current system produces.

How about getting paid for non-college competition? If there are sanctioned all-star games in the summer, why can’t an athlete get paid the way Foster got paid to make a movie? And if a college kid wants to go to a camp and charge for it, why not?

It may all seem radical, but that’s because we’ve gotten used to the system as it is. We’ve bought into the notion that a scholarship should be enough. But one side can’t be told, “That’s enough,” while the other side keeps saying, “Give us more.” This chasing of phone calls, lunch bills and bus tickets is a colossal waste of resources. And given the NCAA’s wealth, it’s hypocrisy.

The only policing we should worry about is if a player is directly paid to attend a school. That’s wrong. Plus, the NBA needs to let players enter directly from high school. Forcing kids into college who don’t belong or want to be there is both folly and injustice. The NBA used to allow it (that’s how LeBron James got there) and the reasons it stopped are no longer strong.

Meanwhile, a huge gap could be closed if the Olympic model were adopted right now. It would at least allow players some income. And who bought whom lunch wouldn’t be a federal issue.

Mitch Albom is a sports columnist at the Detroit Free Press, where this piece first appeared.