re: Have to do a speech on why college athletes should NOT get paid.

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There are many, many, student athletes outside of power conference football and basketball. Only around 5-7 (look it up for sure) athletic departments are self-sustaining.

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Seven schools don't receive any outside subsidies (LSU, Nebraska, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Penn State, Purdue, Texas) LINK. About 20 schools currently make a profit using the accounting that is often cited saying schools can't afford the stipends (revenues minus expenses minus subsidies) LINK. These numbers are skewed for two reasons:
1) many of these Ath. depts actually have net revenue when you factor in the subsidies they receive. These funds exist whether or not the players are paid. AD's love getting the funds, but they don't like counting them when they are telling everyone how broke they are.
2) athletic departments have a habit of spending every dollar of revenue to justify the constant raising of prices. So if they have to pay players, many would be able to trim some fat in their budgets to cover the costs.

For Example, West Virginia is #21 on the 'profitable' list with an operating "deficit".
$73,245,211 in revenue (minus subsidies)
$73,501,593 in expenses
$256,382 = amount of deficit they have
$4,461,487 is the subsidy they receive. Which means without any changes, they are operating with over a $4 million surplus but according to NCAA accounting, they aren't 'profitable' and couldn't afford to pay a stipend.

Will paying players hurt the lower tier schools? Of course. But don't think for a second that schools like Ole Miss, Auburn, Tenn, would be having financial issues if they had to shell out a small stipend to the players. The money is there.

LINK

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Athletic departments are trying to walk a rhetorical tightrope. They want to hide their profits to make it easier to keep them away from other would-be claimants. They also want to avoid looking so poor that other stakeholders within academia use sports' apparent poverty to strip them of power. Rhetoric that turns a price into a cost, and a transfer of profit into a loss of money, helps play a role in confusing things enough that the moment in the magic trick where the profit is moved from one pocket to the other gets obscured.

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