Paying college athletes

The mess at Miami, where a jailed university athletic booster has claimed he provided illegal benefits to school athletes, has raised the question once again whether college athletes should be paid in some form.

I’m convinced they should be and I’m also convinced there’s a sensible way of paying them that would allow university compliance officials to track how athletes spend the money they receive and prevent athletes from abusing the system.

Here’s the reality of the situation. Colleges will recruit athletes, many, if not most of them, from backgrounds that would not afford them a college education if they had to pay it for it themselves. Their tuition is provided, and, in most cases, their schoolbooks are paid for, they are given room and board in a dormitory and that’s it. If they want to go to a movie, if they want to treat a date to a dinner at Chili’s, if they want to purchase a new polo shirt, they must do that with their own coin. Yet NCAA is so restrictive on how athletes can earn extra money, it’s no wonder some of them are attracted to outside, often illegal, benefactors.

Here’s all that needs to happen. Have the NCAA contract with either Mastercard or VISA to design a special all-college “smart card.” The compliance officials at individual universities will then decide which business establishments at their respective locales will accept the cards. The first one should be the university’s book store. Then it should be casual-dining restaurants (the cards would be good for anything at the restaurants except alcoholic beverages), movie theaters and casual clothing stores, perhaps some convenience/grocery stores (maintaining the alcoholic beverage prohibition), barbers/beauticians, dry cleaners/laundries, even auto service stations. Each month additional cash would be loaded into the cards and the athletes would be given secure account login and password information to be used to determine at any time how much money was in their account, The statements of expenditures would go to the compliance officials so they could track the expenses of each athlete to detect any abnormalities.

I’m not going to speculate on how much money should be loaded on the cards each month, only to argue it should be tied to a cost-of-living index of the school’s locale. But the member NCAA universities should be the final arbiter of that. I would also argue that a female athlete on a volleyball scholarship should receive the same monthly allotment as the school’s starting quarterback.

I’m convinced this is a sensible solution and a workable plan. Which means the NCAA will never adopt it.