NCAA "Amateur" Status

I'm not even a huge sports fan, but I was a varsity NCAA athlete at a Big Ten school, so I think I am qualified to have an opinion on this.

The NCAA's rules preventing athletes from financially profiting from their participation in collegiate sports are utterly immoral and unfair to athletes -- especially those at the top of their game in sports where they could be expected to earn good money from sponsorships.

I went to OSU. OSU Buckeye football is big business. It probably rivals some professional franchise for the size and strength (and fanaticism) of its fan base.

Everybody associate with Buckeye football -- the school itself, the athletic director, the coaches, the people who are licensed to sell Buckeye branded clothing and paraphernalia -- everybody makes out like a bandit, except the eleven guys working their asses off down there on the field.

They are gambling their bodies and their futures that their performance will attract the attention of an NFL scout. That and a scholarship are about the extent of their official compensation. Now, a full scholarship to OSU is nothing to sneeze at, but it's a far cry from the money being made by everyone else on their behalf.

And, at any time, a college player can be injured, and all that hope they've been banking on goes down the drain, or they can make it to the NFL and get injured early on, or never really make the transition and become a bench warmer, or get traded frequently -- there are a thousand ways things can fail to pan out for a would-be NFL player.

But those three or four years in college, when they were packing the horseshoe every game, when multi-millions were being made on their behalf, they weren't allowed to profit from it.

This doesn't apply to any other activity at school, only sports. If you're an engineering major and you come up with a really hot idea and exploit it, nobody comes and tells you "Oh, you're in college, you're only an amateur engineer, you're not allowed to profit off your engineering skills while you are in college. The guys who invented Yahoo!, one of the first big internet success stories, were students at Stanford and originally ran Yahoo! on Stanford computers -- it was something like http://www.stanford.edu/yahoo or something like that back in its early days. But there were no rules in place to keep them from profiting. Thank goodness, or they probably would have just shut the whole venture down when it got to be a big deal and enormous amounts of innovation in search portal development would have been lost.

The fact that I got paying part-time and then full-time jobs in my field before I even finished my degree didn't mean I was somehow compromising my "amateur" student status.

The idea would be considered ridiculous anywhere outside of sports.

I was on the fencing team at OSU. Fencing's not a huge sport in the U.S. and it's even a fairly eclectic sport in Europe. But, if I had been one of the few fencers good enough to maybe earn some modest sum in equipment sponsorships in the insular world of fencing, what right does the university have to tell me I can't profit from my own hard work and talent? It's ridiculous.

It's exploitative of the student athletes, for colleges and universities to garner so much prestige and money from top athletic performers, but to not allow them to directly profit from their use of their talent, it's criminal and I'd go so far as to say un-American.