The Ways in Which The Ncaa Manipulates College Athletes for Their Own Profit

Along with the discussion of whether some or all college athletes should be paid, many people are unaware of the other policies that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has in place to control the student-athletes and their college experience. The NCAA has a mandated system where if students want to play a sport in college, they mustahide by a privatized system where they are held under separate rules than normal students.

In the film Schooled: The Price of College Sports and in his writing as an author, Taylor Branch argues that college athletes lack civil rights, due process, and compensation for their services under the amateurism label. In the film he discusses a situation where all student at Universities are amateurs to be consistent. He says “that means that you can’t get a job at the campus bookstore if you’re an undergraduate, that you can’t be paid as a teaching assistant if you’re a graduate student. You’re an amateur.” From a similar perspective, writer Stanley Litzen compares college sports to a plantation system as the student-athletes are exploited economically. The overseers are the coaches who extract the labor from the workers. The workers are owned by the plantation and…produce riches for their masters while receiving a meager return on the plantation’s profits. Many people argue that players are getting their full college education paid for with some other small benefits-which is true.

The NCAA has set-up a system where the economic benefits of college sports funnel back to them without the players being compensated. Also shown in the film is former University of Tennessee running back Arian Foster. Meanwhile, because of his outstanding performance, Tennessee raked in that much more money.

In the contract of an athletic scholarship, it states that the players will get an education while playing their sport. One of the main reasons why the NCAA does not want to pay plavers is because they are still students. But on the ther hand, the NCAA system does not allow student-athletes to receive a comparable education to regular students.

A common practice of college students and student-athletes is transferring schools. For a regular student, they apply to the school and if accepted they can enroll at their new institution. The NCAA has a rule in place where coaches are granted the power of not allowing players of their team to be able to transfer to certain schools. Under the scholarship contract created by the NCAA schools and coaches can control their athletes.

College sports are a beautiful thing for fans. Millions of people attend or watch televised college football games every fall Saturday aftemoon. “March Madness brings in more than $1 billion in just a three week period of college basketball games. If the NCAA wants to implement a “student-athlete” system, they must allow players the power to meet the education they want at the school they want.

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