Should College Athletes Be Paid?

Sponsors are another notorious group that takes players in and hands out money.  Sonny Vaccaro is an ex vendor for the worldwide company Reebok.  Vaccaro broke away from the company to “clean his act,” but he revealed news on why he targeted the kids.  “90 percent of the revenue made is from one percent of the athletes, 90 percent which are African American” Vaccaro said (Branch).  Vaccaro talked about how universities often grasped at the money from exploiting their athletes.  The money continues to flow up until it gets to the NCAA, so technically the NCAA is exploiting these kids to and are blind to it.

The Competitiveness of Sports Agency in amateur sports is another thing the NCAA tries to regulate.  With the large amount of illegal benefits floating around, a lot of them come from sports agents.  The purpose of a sports agent is to sign an athlete when they graduate to play professionally and work out contracts for them.  The thing is, sports agents don’t always wait till the athletes graduate.  In a Sports Illustrated article “Confessions of an Agent” by George Dohrmann, a sports agent by the name of Josh Luchs comes clean about his dirty past.  Josh Luchs has represented over 60 NFL players and gave out benefits to the majority of them before they graduated.  Josh’s first story of offering players money when we wasn’t supposed to was when he was 20 years old and trying to sign his first player (Dohrmann).

At the University of Colorado linebacker Kanavis McGhee was a top rated recruit that was projected a high pick in the NFL draft.  Luchs was power hungry and would do anything to sign his first client.  After camping out at McGhee’s apartment they spoke about a possible future partnership.  Luchs recalled how McGhee brought up his mom was going to be evicted if she didn’t pay her rent and he needed 2,500 dollars to cover it.  Luch’s thought about it and gave Kanavis the money in the end.  While feeling good about the decision, a teammate called asking him for a favor that involved 2,500 dollars as well (Dohrmann).  Though it seemed the players didn’t have a legitimate reason for receiving money besides just wanting it, there was still the motivation of getting money since they were not getting paid.