Three weeks ago, the NCAA, college athletics’ governing body, voted unanimously to allow college athletes to profit from their own likenesses and images, a groundbreaking decision for college athletes. This is a shift away from what had been the status quo. For instance, if Stanford Quarterback K.J. Costello wants to get paid for being in an advertisement for The Melt at Stanford Shopping Center, he now can. Under the old rules, K.J. profiting from his likeness would have been a violation of NCAA rules.
However, this rule change does not mean that athletes can make money directly related to in-game performance. Athletes still receive none of the money they generate for the NCAA or their respective schools. Despite this, allowing athletes to profit from their athletes demonstrates that allowing players to be paid seems to be the direction that the NCAA is headed in. So exactly how would this impact college sports?
To begin, NCAA athletics would likely move towards being a competitive industry, where firms compete for revenue. This means that players would naturally gravitate towards programs which can pay them more, which would be schools with much larger athletic budgets such as Texas or Alabama. This, in turn, would lead these schools to be more increasingly successful in athletic competition, further generating more revenue than their counterparts with smaller budgets for paying athletes.
Paying athletes also has the potential to shut down college athletics programs. This is because budgets would have to account for paying players as well. For athletics larger programs, such as Michigan, generating roughly 196 million dollars in the 2017-18 school year, this would not be much of an issue, but this would put small schools such as Bowling Green, barely making any profit at all, at risk of having to shut down.
This increasing cost of running a college athletic program could also mean that colleges would no longer be able to pay coaches such as Kentucky Basketball Coach John Calipari or Alabama Football Coach Nick Saban contracts in the tens of millions of dollars. This would incentivize high-level coaches to look to professional leagues for bigger contracts, taking away the greatest minds in college athletics.
Overall, while the question of paying college athletes remains a pressing issue, the repercussions it would cause have the potential to completely restructure the industry.
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