Great read on why paying college athletes would NOT be doomsday

quote:

---

For the sake of argument, however, suppose current cost structures remained fixed. Florida women's lacrosse can't function without a $15 million building. There is no way to replace Louisville athletic director Tom Jurich with a perfectly competent executive who will accept less than Jurich's $1.4 million annual salary. Now suppose that in a free market, schools have to shake the couch cushions and come up with, say, 50 percent more money to compensate and/or bid for revenue sport athletes. Guess what? They could find the money. Without slashing women's rowing. Fact: sports are a small part of overall campus budgets. In 2009-2010, total expenses for non-revenue sports (that's for everything, not just scholarships) at Florida were $79.5 million -- approximately three percent of total campus revenue. At Michigan, the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois and UCLA, total non-revenue sports expenses over the same period were approximately one percent of the same. If schools truly value scholarships in sports like field hockey and track, they can find ways to pay for them -- just like they do in the here and now, even as overall expenses go up.

Contrary to his self-serving, fear-mongering public pronouncements, Remy is smart. So is Delany. So are many of the people running college athletics. They might be disingenuous, paternalistic and unwilling to share their toys with the other kids in the sandbox, but they're also adaptable. If O'Bannon wins, they'll adjust. More than a half-century ago, the NCAA adopted something called "the Sanity Code," which permitted schools to offer athletes need-based financial aid for tuition -- a once unthinkable, amateurism-sullying practice -- but not money for room and board. Arguing for the rule, association president Karl Leib warned that anything more generous would create "chaos worse than anything we ever dreamed of" while fretting that "if athletes are obtained on the open market, I pity the schools who cannot bid high." A year later, the Sanity Code was dead; today, Kentucky men's basketball players reside in a $7 million player dormitory that includes a private chef.

The end is always nigh. Except when it isn't.

---