Unpaid College Athletes.

Micheal Lewis has officially been added to the egg recipient short list.

His most recent piece makes a cohesive argument for why college
athletes at power house schools are entitled to receive payment
for their work.

Man. This is one of my favorite topics.

Right up there with Doom, High Achieve Low Income students
and feminist and hip hop.

Full disclosure, I had a preexisting affinity for Michael, as he
wrote the national bestselling Moneyball about my darling A's.

He writes:

College football’s best trick play is its pretense that it has nothing to do with money, that it’s simply an extension of the university’s mission to educate its students. Were the public to view college football as mainly a business, it might start asking questions. For instance: why are these enterprises that have nothing to do with education and everything to do with profits exempt from paying taxes? Or why don’t they pay their employees?

So. Its about education. Right. If that were the case, why does it take
athletes so long to graduate, why are they excused from classes more so
than the average student, why are they allowed to remain students while
being functionally literate.

Uh. 'Cuz they can throw the ball like a f*cking..

Shit is all about the benjis.

Awww. And here is the passage that garners egg avaialbility status.

This is maybe the oddest aspect of the college football business. Everyone associated with it is getting rich except the people whose labor creates the value. At this moment there are thousands of big-time college football players, many of whom are black and poor. They perform for the intense pleasure of millions of rabid college football fans, many of whom are rich and white. The world’s most enthusiastic racially integrated marketplace is waiting to happen.

Sound like hip hop to you?

Reading shit like this makes being a model minorty, that much more tolerable.

But between buyer and seller sits the National Collegiate Athletic Association, to ensure that the universities it polices keep all the money for themselves — to make sure that the rich white folk do not slip so much as a free chicken sandwich under the table to the poor black kids. The poor black kids put up with it because they find it all but impossible to pursue N.F.L. careers unless they play at least three years in college. Less than one percent actually sign professional football contracts and, of those, an infinitesimal fraction ever make serious money. But their hope is eternal, and their ignorance exploitable.

Then he kills it, doing puff puff pass to the elephant in the room.

But their hope is eternal, and their ignorance exploitable. SO much of
what I perceive about minorities, model & otherwise, is summed up
by this statement.

And then there is this statement.

Put that way the arrangement sounds like simple theft; but up close, inside the university, it apparently feels like high principle. That principle, as stated by the N.C.A.A., is that college sports should never be commercialized. But it’s too late for that.
College football already is commercialized, for everyone except the people who play it.

Reminds me of reading 40 Million Dollar Slaves.

Also reminds me of Frank Lucas a dude with money, but NO wealth.

Oh. And the word on the street is that that USC Reggie Bush sh*t is about
to go Barry Bonds.


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Should college athletes get a compensation?

If so, why or why not?

What if anything should change about college ball?

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