When you looking through a TV guide most of the times, sports are being broadcast on several channels. These sports are broadcast live to the audience in many popular channels like CBS, NBC, ABC, TBS, SportsCenter and many others. In other words, millions of viewers are watching sports as their past time. When airing these games, channels must pay the professional sports teams or universities for the rights to broadcast their games.
These contracts bring in enormous amount of revenue to professional teams and universities. I believe that professional sports team needs these huge contracts because they have stadiums, coaches, trainers, practice faculties, doctors to pay and also the most expenses one is their players. While on the other hand, universities do have to pay for their stadiums, coaches, trainers, doctors, practice faculties, scholarships, room and board but not their players, which bring in ridiculous amount of money. Scholarships for players are pretty expense but the revenues overweight the expenses so profit is being made by these universities.
According to this article, “Paying College Athletes: Not If, But How”, from the HuffingtonPost.com, by Rachel Cohen and Ralph D. Russo, shows the profit one school will make this season, “Notre Dame will get scholarships worth about $52,000 per year and the school will receive $6.2 million for playing in the title game – to go with the $15 million NBC reportedly pays just to televise the school’s regular-season home games”. In other words, the school is making almost 20 million dollars in revenue from the several contracts. I understand running a universities takes a significant amount of money but these contracts are absurd to be given. These universities are making huge amounts of profits from these young teenagers. While these teenagers work so hard all year around to keep their grades and physical abilities to high standards. This article, “A day in the life of a college basketball player”, by Tomeka Davis, shows a typical day of a college athletic, “the mornings began at 5am with a 2 mile jog. After my first set of classes, it was lunch and to maintain a proper body weight, eating what the school provided was out of the question. I mostly skipped lunch for studying or weight training. Then it was back to afternoon classes, dinner, and game film. After game film, came regular practice, which consisted of running, executing plays, more running, and scrimmage games. Once practice was over it was back to the dorms for more studying, around 8pm, a shower and sleep”. Also Davis states this ,“Being a college basketball player was much like having a full time job, to be able to do the thing you loved, you worked. You pushed your body to the limit for no pay, basically education, room and board. I think people should really consider paying these athletes small amount of money, especially those without scholarships.That’s why you see all these basketball players jumping ship to go pro., they wonder why they should play for free when they can be paid for the same thing”. I feel that he makes valid argument in this article to push universities to pay college athletes some amount of money for playing for them. You see how hard these teenagers work, it makes me want to pay them something for their efforts. Also these players have no time to work so no money is being made of these teenagers for their personal needs. This is insane to me.
Throughout the year, colleges have many tournaments or championships games that fans want to see and be a part of this event. One of the most popular one is the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament or March Madness. In the article, “Paying College Athletes: Not If, But How”, By Rachel Cohen and Ralph D. Russo, tells us exactly how much these universities make from March Madness, “The NCAA’s current men’s basketball tournament agreement with CBS and Turner is worth an average of more than $770 million per year”. This amount is divide by conferences and then distribute to each college. I feel that these universities are being greedy with their money. Student athletes should fight for some commission from these universities because they are the source of all the profit for these universities. Just imagine if these players strike or boycott the loss would be catastrophic to this universities. I believe in a few years, these college players will be pay some amount of money maybe not great but something is better than nothing. Hope you enjoy reading this blog and send me some feedback on this issue.