a sport cannot be played without athletes. The NCAA uses the name amateurism as the reason it doesn't pay student-athletes. Opponents against paying student-athletes say that they should not be paid because through scholarships, they're already being paid. "A University education is priceless," says Richard Jacoby, member of the NCAA committee. But that is only true if the opportunity to get an education is taken advantage of. Yes, a scholarship is a form of payment. A scholarship is nice, but it is not enough. A scholarship will not pay the bills. A scholarship will not feed a child. Life wouldn't be so hard for many of the student-athletes if they were permitted to hold jobs. But the NCAA does not permit scholarship players to be employed during the school year. During the summer, these athletes are forced to train, practice, and compete in order to keep their roster position. This leaves little time to earn money.The truth is that the beginning of the end of amateurism came in 1952 when the NCAA negotiated its first arrangement with network television. NBC paid $1,144,000 for the right to televise NCAA football games. Today, networks and cable channels pay hundreds of millions of dollars for the right to televise college football games. NCAA basketball, which has its wildly popular March Madness, is currently in the middle of a contract that pays almost $2 billion. The contract expires at the end of 2002. How much money will the next contract be? Awkwardly enough, the money ends up in the pockets of the NCAA and respective universities.The NCAA does not pay either state or federal income taxes because it claims non-profit status while working to "maintain a balance between intercollegiate athletics and academics." But statistics indicate that over the past 23 years, the NCAA's total revenues have increased almost 8,000 percent and the NCAA's $1.7 billion contract with CBS for rights to the NCAA Tournament is bigger...
