It's familiar, isn't it?
A familiar beat from a familiar drum, the echoing, operatic cries for the NCAA to be torn down and rent asunder, sung in chorus since days of the Fab Five at Michigan in the early 90s. Across both basketball and football, the proverbial horse that has been NCAA has been beaten relentless. "Pay the student athletes! Share the wealth!" Yet the horse refuses to die.
For the longest time, the NCAA's argument has been that they are "student athletes", that these players are, in essence, amateurs who solely at a particular institution to earn a degree, that their sport of choice is merely a side-show, a hobby done alongside their academic career. This couldn't be further from the truth, as many know. The life of a college athlete, in basketball and football in particular, is a constant juggling act. Expectations are that they perform at the level of a paid professional athlete, while also excel academically. Any college student will tell you just doing the later is hard enough. Now add athletics into the question.
Now in an ideal world were the NCAA's profit margin was an even zero, and no one in college sports was making money, this wouldn't matter worth squat. The NCAA loves to sell that image, even if though everyone and the stray dog knows better. The NCAA in 2014 alone made $989 million. And zero of that went to the student athletes. At the same time, academic institutions themselves continue to make record profits year after year, and are able to pay their coaches (at least in the majors sports such as basketball and football) millions per year, as well as their Athletic Directors. All the while, the student athletes, whose blood, sweat, and tears generate the millions of the NCAA and their member institutions, receives next to nothing.
So there in lies the controversy and vitriol that springs up every time new allegations of payments to college players come up. The players got to make money some how, and working at the Domino's on the corner isn't going to cut it for most.
The most common, and now most redundant, argument put forth against paying student athletes is that these players scholarships, which are good for four years, are the school's form of payment of the players. This is true, in a sense, and an opinion I too share. But the situation has become so complicated and fuzzy that one cannot boil everything down so simply.
So now we enter the murky world that the NCAA desperately wishes doesn't exist. The payment of student athletes has been often investigated and punished internally; mostly by the NCAA, and the odd time by the institution in question itself, and it almost always ends the same; wins are vacated, a coach or AD resigns or gets fired, and student athlete is punished, and a booster or two (if any are involved) are banned from activities related to the institution, sometimes (though rarely) for life. Everyone carries on their merry way, football stadiums get sold out every Saturday during the fall and winter, and everyone fills out their bracket during March Madness.
This time, the latest allegations of paying student athletes has received a whole other level, with a legitimate sports agency, ASM Sports, now the focal point of an FBI investigation. In documents obtained by Yahoo Sports, former NBA agent Andy Miller has been tied to several former and current college basketball players, including former No. 1 overall pick Markelle Fultz, as well as at least 20 Division 1 schools, with Louisville, North Carolina, and Kansas to name a few. Payments made in the form meals, monetary loans, and homes were mostly made by Miller's associate, Christian Dawkins.
If allegations of high-profile Division 1 schools using a sports agency to actively recruit players to their programs, using cash incentives as a means are true, then this should be the final nail in the coffin for the NCAA to be considered a legitimate organization. In truth it was broken from the start, the NCAA refusing to see the forest for the trees, but now it really needs to do some soul-searching if it wants to save face.
So how does this problem of paying student athletes get solved. The easiest answer is to simply pay the players, or at least let them make money via other means other then those sanctioned by the institutions and the NCAA, but that looks highly unlikely. The next possible answer lies in professional sports.
The NBA has the one-and-done rule, which has been the subject of criticism since its inceptions. The rule allows the NCAA to make as much money as possible on college basketball stars before they run off to the NBA. Many high schools players simply want to go straight to the NBA and bypass college, but can't due to the one-and-done rule, which mandates they must do one year of college before entering the NBA. Football has an equivalent rule in that you must complete three years of college, and since there's more money to be had in basketball then in football while the later offers a greater chance of injury, the desire to go straight to the pros is less.
To fix the basketball problem, high school players should be offered a choice; you can either immediately enter the NBA draft, or you have to complete four years of college before you can enter the NBA, getting a degree at the same time. It gives power to those who put in the hard work that makes the schools and their governing body wealthy. While it may spell the end for the NCAA as we know it, at some point the horse does have to die.