Playing For Pay

LANE KIFFIN recently signed a contract worth ninety million dollars to coach the football team at LSU. The university also promised him twenty five million dollars "N.I.L." money to be distributed among his players. These days, when you offer an athletic scholarship to a college student, it comes with money. College athletics are now free lance small business owners, marketing themselves. Having granted athletes release from their hundred year old tradition of essential bondage, no longer free labor, athletes are now being given a cut of the money that universities would never have accessed without it. That all athletes be allowed to profit from their own name, image, and likeness seem fundamental, a "no brainer" as we like to say, and long, long overdue. Pity the poor player who completed his or her collegiate athletic career immediately before the advent of paid professional college athletics. Sometimes you miss out for being late. They missed out for being early. College athletes have always been paid. Suddenly, a few years ago, it becae legal, then accepted,and now, mandatory. Any major university refusing to pay its athletes risks being left behind, without any revenue generating athletic department at all. At long last, but almost predictably, the purity of amateur athletics has been supplanted by the relentless forces of the freemarket, powered by human greed. Hence, your average high school super star quarterback can be a millionaire before he enters his or her first ever college clssroom. The university I attended and later taught is begging the public for handouts, looking for donors, knocking hopefully on the doors of millionaires and billionaires. So is every other university in America with a football program which generats tens of millions of dollars for the institution. A few years ago, after a particularly successful school year athletically, the same university donated one million dollars to the university library. One of my former students, a basketball star who later enjoyed a long and successful career in the NBA, told me that he is happy to have an athletic scholarship, room, board, books, and tuition paid for by the university, grateful for the opportunity he was being given to hone his basketball skills while getting a "free" education, but that, in all honesty, he wished he had a little spending money in his pocket. He told me that he had thirteen dollars to his name, and that he would have to make it last for the rest of the week. This was on a Monday. He said he was expecting a check from home, his weekly allowance, and was lucky to have such loving, supportive parents. I handed a twenty, and told him that there was more where that came from. I also reminded him to be patient, to wait a year or two, and the money would come. It eventually did, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. I thought I was getting a baragin. He was a good student, came to class, gave me great joy by using his basketball skills to entertain me and help my beloved team win. I helpd him a few more times. We joked that I wasn't paying him to play basketball I was paying him to come to class. A few years later, he sent me a ckeck for one thousand dollars, with a note explaining that this was no handout from a suddenly wealthy professional athlete to a tired poor old professor. It was a token of his appreciation, because he had graduated, and planned to use his degree to pursue a career in sports business management upon retiring from playing. Funny, now, the thought of college athletes needing handouts from their professors. Nobody is happy with the N.I.L. system. Nobody should be. From one extreme to another, like a convulsion, as, we often to do in our great American funhouse. As we like to say: whatever works.