Good thing college football players wear helmets. They just got kicked in the head. Again.
The $21 million annual windfall that the University of Colorado will receive in a new television contract as a member of the Pac-12 Conference is a big rip-off for the grunts who work hardest for that money: the players.
College athletes deserve to get paid. Now more than ever.
Fans crave a more entertaining way to crown a national champion in college football. Heck, even President Barack Obama is applying new pressure for a playoff.
There’s just one problem.
Every time college football dreams up a new way to create entertainment revenue, everybody benefits except the quarterbacks and linebackers actually doing the entertaining in Folsom Field.
It is 25 years past the due date for dumping this quaint notion that a scholarship is its own reward for a college athlete. Playing big-time Division I football is a job, plain and simple. It’s a job worth more than the price of admission to campus.
Do the math.
Under NCAA rules, the Buffaloes are allowed 85 scholarships to stock the football team.
Tuition, room and board in Boulder cost an in-state student roughly $20,000 per year. The price doubles for a student from outside Colorado.
In the new Pac-12 TV deal, worth a staggering $3 billion dollars over the course of 12 years, each of the 85 Colorado football players who are on scholarship will help generate an average of nearly $250,000 per season.
This coming season, CU offensive lineman Ryan Miller, a legitimate, homegrown NFL prospect from Littleton, will be compensated at the bargain price of his in-state tuition, a bed to rest his weary bones, some juicy steaks at the training table and a fun-filled trip to play at Utah on Thanksgiving weekend.
It doesn’t compute as equitable to me. The Buffs are getting off cheap. The players are getting exploited.
Of course, you might disagree.
Alabama football coach Nick Saban enjoys an annual salary of $5.9 million. The Crimson Tide can afford it because out on the practice field, Saban runs what smells suspiciously like a sweatshop.
College football players deserve to get paid.
Running backs and safeties alike should be allowed to profit from endorsement deals and fees to have their image used in video games, with the money placed in a trust fund until after college eligibility expires, if that makes lovers of the amateur ideal more comfortable.
Even NCAA president Mark Emmert admits it’s time to discuss adding real dollar value to scholarships so athletes can have spending money in the wallet.
OK, I can hear the objections from soccer moms and volleyball dads. If you pay members of the football team, you can’t snub the other athletes on the CU campus, without a swarm of lawyers in your face, screaming Title IX and threatening to kill more trees than a pine beetle to file a lawsuit.
So, being a generous soul, I say let every scholarship athlete at Colorado benefit from this Pac-12 media bonanza.
Let’s give athletes in every sport a monthly stipend of $500 for pizza, gasoline or a plane ticket home. Cut the check on the first of the month, from September through May.
There were slightly more than 200 athletic scholarships granted at CU this academic year. The total cost of the stipend would be slightly under $1 million annually. That’s not chump change for the university.
But giving roughly 5 percent of the annual revenues from the new Pac-12 media contract to athletes is the least any fair employer should do, don’t you think?
Oh, pardon me. I forgot.
The purists insist that playing college sports should be about education, love of the game and all that other outdated bunk from the 1950s.
College sports are regarded only as a business for those coaches, administrators and NCAA bureaucrats getting rich from the blood, sweat and tears of young athletes.
Mark Kiszla: 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com
