NYT Mag article on how to pay college athletes

[Cadillac]

NYT Magazine - Let's Start Paying College Athletes

This isn't an argument in favor of paying players. This is a crack at a plan to make this thing work, and work better.

The plan has five elements:

1. Offering contracts to players, essentially bidding for their services
2. Salary cap for every team/minimum salary for every athlete
3. Athletes who stay four years get additional two-year scholarship to focus solely on education
4. Lifetime health insurance
5. A players union to manage insurance, help set salary caps

I would add a stipulation where up to a certain point, football or basketball could "borrow" some of the salary cap space from the other sport, as long as it evened out. If we choose to go after more five-star hoops players, and recruit mostly under-the-radar football players, well, that sucks for me as a football-first fan, but hey, that's what we're kind of doing now (we're #1!!!).

To hear the gnashing of teeth by those who believe that money will soil college sports is to hark back to the days when baseball was on the cusp of free agency, or the Olympics was considering abandoning its longstanding adherence to amateurism. In both cases, critics feared that the introduction of serious and legitimate money would damage the sports, turn off the fans and lead to chaos. Instead, baseball and the Olympics got much better.

 

[Cadillac]

Oh and just to get this out of the way,

"Hey, they shouldn't get a dime! They get to go to school FOR FREE while I'm in debt forever! Plus they get to be BMOC and get all the anonypoon they could possibly want!"​

Hey, I get it. I didn't get a shout out over the PA when I walked into Konrad's. I can tell you 100 different ways to eat a can of chickpeas. But let's hear your thoughts about this article and not how lucky these guys are, mmmkay?