Auburn quarterback Cameron Newton has been in hot water in past weeks because of his alleged involvement with a man named Kenny Rogers, who reportedly attempted to solicit funds from Mississippi State University in order to attain Newton's services.
According to ESPN.com, Rogers attempted to attain six-figure payment for Newton to play for Mississippi State. Now while Newton has been receiving most of the attention in the news for the allegations, the fact is that much more emphasis needs to be placed on recruiters and agents as wrongdoers as opposed to the athletes.
After all, many of these kids are 19 or 20 years old. Many also come from very difficult backgrounds, so when a large amount of money is thrown around in front of them, it has to be tough to let that slip away. The problem is with the agents and recruiters who target these kids, knowing very well the backgrounds that they come from and how money can be used to persuade them.
This is why I feel that college athletes should be paid and this controversy done away with; mostly because of the very large amounts of money that college athletes bring into college campuses. The universities market their prime time players, bringing in millions of dollars, without any players seeing a dime of those millions raised at their expense. It is ridiculous to think as well about the NCAA video game franchise made by EA Sports, which also makes millions off of players likenesses, but can somehow get away with it by simply calling athletes WR #2 or QB #1. How EA Sports continues to use players' likenesses and not be punished is beyond me.
Paying these athletes would eliminate blurred lines with regards to agents and boosters, where the parameters of what contact players can have or cannot have with those professionals are often confusing. Some might argue being on scholarship is being paid. Now while that is true to an extent, the amount that certain players bring into college campuses is far beyond a four-year scholarship. The problem is that universities want that money to themselves; they don't want to see the millions being spent on athletes.
So let's do away with this double standard that college athletes are put into, where they are told not to make money professionally but are marketed as such by their respective universities, and let's provide some recognition to the kind of money they bring into their schools and let's pay them accordingly.
4 Opinion
Andrew Cluxton
