And because they play a violent contact sport where injury is always possible, these students should never worry about paying for therapy or health care for injuries sustained in the line of their playing duties. Finally, the NCAA needs to thoroughly reassess the rule book as to what constitutes an Illegal Benefit and reconsider actions which athletes can be punished for such as discount in restaurants or clothing stores. .
BUT--- to implicitly state that these athletes provide unpaid labor as Frank Deford states in his essay Awful Injustice: Its Time to Pay Revenue-Earning College Athletes is not only melodramatic, but laughably dishonest. .
The first issue with Defords essay is right there in his title. Revenue Earning. This is a concept which is ever changing and is completely inconsistent across the top levels of big time football or basketball. Lets examine the term revenue-earning for a moment. Revenue is drastically different from university to university. According to Business Insider, The University of Texas football program took in $104.5 Million Dollars in Revenue in 2013 in what was considered by fans and media to be a very average season. The University of Southern California brought in $34.5 Million, also after a below average season. Meanwhile, Utah State University, which had football expenses of $5,881,831, had revenue of $5,881,832 to bring a total profit of $1.00 according to the U.S. Department of Education. Yes. Remarkably, $1.00. .
How then do we handle these three separate cases? Should all three schools uniformly pay their football players equally because they fall under the industry accepted moniker of revenue earning and are in the FBS? Or do universities change rules each year as the state of their football program changes from up years to down years?.
Lets examine Utah State considering this information. Using Utah State Universitys tuition cost calculator on their official website, we see a non-Utah resident full time student would pay an estimated $22,158.
