Hello World
In today’s culture it’s clear to see that professional male athletes get paid an absurd amount of money. Maybe they deserve it, maybe they don’t. Perhaps the market for athletes is completely inflated. No matter what your position on that is, it doesn’t really matter because there’s no changing it, male athletes bring in the dough, and their salaries just keep growing. For some perspective to my non-sports fans, in the NBA, the salary cap, which is the total amount of money a team, can offer 12 players, recently jumped over 30 percent. As a result, it was raining dollar bills in the league this summer and a fairly unknown player named Mike Conley scored the richest guaranteed contract in the history of the NBA at 5 years and 140 million dollars, which is exactly 28 million dollars a year average. In the MLB, similar movements are occurring, in the past offseason another fairly unknown player named David Price signed the richest average salary per year deal in MLB history at 7 years and 217 million, which is just below 31 million a year on average. Now I don’t want to go overboard on numbers and facts, so very quickly, in the NFL and NHL athletes get paid less but still the average salary is just over 2 million for both sports. It’s wonderful that these athletes get the opportunity to provide for their families and I’m not to here to complain about that. Rather, I’m here to complain for the athletes who don’t get paid but deserve to. More specifically, I want to address the question: should college athletes get paid. This is intriguing to me because as an economics major, I love to look at financial markets and get a behind the scenes take of what’s going on, dig deeper as some would say. You don’t have to be a sports fan to be engaged in this conversation, as it’s not particularly about the game of sports but rather the finances of sports. To me it’s astounding that the market for college football can be as profitable as it is, and still there is no compensation for the athletes who the sport deeply depends on. I mean it’s a fact that college sports are a significant tool to gain publicity and as a result money for the school. It’s estimated that over 60 percent of Division 1 schools total media coverage comes from athletics. At a school like USC especially, most of the attention we get is solely tied to the football program, and with that comes purchases of tickets for games and apparel and it adds up to equal massive amounts of $$$$$$$. During my blogs I want to discuss more specifically the rare college athlete whose popularity changes the culture of the school and the reputation it has worldwide. Athletes like Johnny Manziel and Tim Tebow are two people who come to mind, yet both never played more than 3 years in the professional league where you get compensated for. Considering they never made it to the pros, they could’ve really used some of that money that they undoubtedly raised for their school in the form of apparel purchases and sold out stadiums. While I understand the point that they were given an unbelievable opportunity to attend a 4-year university for free, I do not understand why these guys wouldn’t even get a cent if fans bought their college jerseys. It’s mind boggling to me and I hope to address why they should get paid more specifically in my future posts.
