Lots of students here at Sinclair play sports.\u00a0 They work hard, run hard, study hard, play hard, all of that.\u00a0 And–this is key–Sinclair makes money off that.\u00a0 They sell tickets, hot dogs, ball caps, shirts, hoodies, basically anything and everything.<\/p>\n
The market for those items is strengthened–but not entirely created by–Sinclair having good athletes.<\/p>\n
I’m reaching a bit here because the biggest grossing sport by a mile tends to be football, and Sinclair does not have a football team.\u00a0 Football makes a lot of money.\u00a0 Don’t believe me?<\/p>\n
Despite the rough economy, Bloomberg<\/em> reported earlier this year that the University of Texas’ athletic department–fresh off two appearances in the last five years in the sport’s biggest match up, the National Championship Game\u2014now has an operating revenue of $138.5 million, up 32 percent from $90 million four years ago.<\/p>\n The point of the article was that Texas decided to invest in refurbishing their stadium instead of investing in stocks four years ago, and now they are reaping the rewards.\u00a0 But that’s not my <\/em>point… my point in bringing the figures up is\u2026 well\u2026 $138.5 million!\u00a0 Yes, that is revenue<\/em>, not profit, and of course Texas has expenses, but I\u2019m sure they\u2019re doing fine.<\/p>\n My proof is coach Mack Brown’s massive new contract\u2014$5 million per year for as long as he’d like to coach there\u2014and that Texas’ football program generated $87.5 million in 2008.\u00a0 That doesn\u2019t smell like \u2018struggling to pay the bills,\u2019 does it?<\/p>\n The big story here is the jump in revenue seen after Texas reached their second title game.\u00a0 As good a coach as Brown is, he should not receive sole credit for that.\u00a0 I’m pretty sure he has players, and they had a hand in all of this success.<\/p>\n But should they get paid?\u00a0 The answer is yes.\u00a0 Without question.<\/p>\n The one major myth in this that I want to immediately dispel is the idea that the\u00a0scholarship they are probably coming to Texas on is payment enough.\u00a0 Absolutely not.\u00a0 Not in a million years.\u00a0 That education is worth a lot, but it’s not quite worth what they are providing.\u00a0 Remember, the players are in essence providing a very lucrative service to their university.<\/p>\n Here’s my solution, though.\u00a0 Each player is not worth an equal figure, obviously.\u00a0 The punter doesn’t equal the quarterback.\u00a0 Plus, many college presidents have complained that paying the players would crush the schools financially.\u00a0 Okay, fine.<\/p>\n If that’s the case, then change the rules and allow NFL teams to draft high school players.\u00a0 The best players will still come from college due to the experience, but if a player is good enough right now to play professionally, then he should be allowed to.\u00a0 Let the market work it out; if making the jump is too hard, then players will stop and everyone will go to college.<\/p>\n But at least give them the choice.\u00a0 If paying them is not possible for a college team, then they should be allowed to make a living plying their trade elsewhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lots of students here at Sinclair play sports.\u00a0 They work hard, run hard, study hard, play hard, all of that.\u00a0 And–this is key–Sinclair makes money off that.\u00a0 They sell tickets, hot dogs, ball caps, shirts, hoodies, basically anything and everything. The market for those items is strengthened–but not entirely created by–Sinclair having good athletes. I’m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":229,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tartan-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5s3vR-1sh","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/229"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5597"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5599,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5597\/revisions\/5599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}