The college sports landscape has been altered forever due to the nuclear impact of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL). Players are finally earning money for the hard work they put in for their sport. However, there is a clear disparity in how some players are being treated as compared to their very own teammates, and how some sports are receiving less attention than others.Â
Rutgers University had two top five picks in this year’s NBA draft: Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey. Harper reportedly made $1.7 million and Bailey was a bit behind making $1.6 million. These are large figures, but when put in the context of the program as a whole they are astronomical. Rutgers’s basketball team was reported to have a total of $3.5 million allocated to them for NIL. This means Harper and Bailey took ninety-four percent of the pot, leaving $200,000 for the rest of the team.
Many may cite that Harper and Bailey are superstars that deserve more lucrative contracts. While this may be true, there are 13 other players on that roster that put in just as much time and effort in practice, the weight room, and film to help the success of the team. Dividing out the remaining amount of money left in NIL, each player would receive roughly $15,000. This may seem like a large sum of money, it is not enough to even cover a semester of tuition for a walk-on player such as Max Fradkin. These problems are only going to be further amplified by the introduction of a salary cap.
In a recent settlement, the NCAA will allow for schools to pay up to $20.5 million to their players, with most going to football and basketball players. The issue with this is that there are far more sports that colleges support than just those two. Sports like baseball, volleyball, and Olympian sports are not large money makers for the school, but still receive money from the same athletic budget as football and basketball. As more money is allocated to those two sports, it will force less revenue generating sports to receive less funding, be demoted to a Division Two or Three, or even be eliminated from the school altogether. These sports have absolutely incredible athletes, some that are better at their own sport than Harper and Bailey are at basketball, but since they do not generate enough revenue for their school, they may be forced to quit playing the sports they love.
The addition of NIL and paying players is a good thing for college sports as it makes sure that kids are not receiving nothing when they give a lot to their school. But, there needs to be ways to protect them and not just for the big sports, but for all sports. A way to advert the problem is to start pushing for a players’ union and collective bargaining.
The more you look at it, collegiate level sports are turning into the mold of major sports leagues like the NBA and NFL. One of the most fundamental aspects of these leagues that prevent players from being exploited are players’ unions.
These allow for players, as a collective, to protect things such as health, working conditions, and wages. The bottom line of these unions, however, is to make sure that no matter if a player is a superstar or a player fighting to make the roster, they are entitled to the same rights from the league, or in this case, the NCAA and their respective school.
If a proper union for all NCAA athletes is established, multiple safeguards can be used to make sure that every player has basic equal rights in their sport. These provisions could include that the salary cap is equally divided among all sports, every player gets an equal amount of money from a school’s NIL pool, or the NCAA starts contributing to a pension which players can access post their college career. No matter what it is, there needs to be something to ensure the security of these athletes.
Players have long been exploited by the NCAA and punished for the slightest violation of previous regulations on payment. As restrictions ease and players start seeing dollar signs, there must be a way to prevent a new era of neglect towards the vast majority of athletes. If the solution is a players’ union remains to be seen, but no matter which way the topic is looked at, kids should not be thrown to the wayside when they give so much to their schools.
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