There are two things that really tick me off in college athletics: the NCAA and UCLA. The former is much easier to understand than the latter.

My question that I will present to you today is why can’t college athletes make any money off of the millions they make for their school?

From my understanding, it is the NCAA that makes the rules that screws over all of these athletes. If you look at the tax returns of the top 14 executives from the NCAA, you will see that all of them combined made $6 million this year. That averages out to about $2.33 million for every executive at the NCAA. Now, that’s quite a large sum, right? Take into consideration that the NCAA is a $6 billion company. How on earth can a bunch of greedy executives spend $6 billion to make rules and such? Do they just have really nice pencils at their offices or expensive Herman Miller chairs?

Now lets think about the moral standpoint of this greedy organization. The top executives make $2.3 million a year, and the athletes are lucky if they get any sort of scholarship. You have to realize that not all athletes are D1 with a full scholarship. So we have an industry with an unpaid labor force? Since when is it legal in the good ol’ US of A to allow for such a wrongdoing?

It is also important to take into consideration that the NCAA is not the only one profiting off of this dilemma. Colleges are profiting to extreme amounts. Remember when Andrew Luck was across the street? Well, yeah, on the football field on some of the Saturdays of the year, but I’m talking about Stanford’s huge ad campaign about him. They use his name, his picture and his reputation to spur ticket sales so that the farm can make some money. Where is the actual Luck in this story? In his dorm room drinking away his sorrows because of all the money that is being made off of him.

Before I proceed, there is this idea that if Luck is so good then he’ll just make a ton of money in the NFL. This is wrong. Luck put his 110 percent effort into each and every game. You could see it on the field. Then he switched over to the NFL and continued to put the same effort into every game. So now you are telling me that he was worth a full scholarship valued around $250,000, and now he is making $390,000 a year. For comparison, that is his complete scholarship every year plus $140,000 more. That is like taking the mail man in a law firm to making him partner all in the course of one year – the probability of that happening is most likely 0.0001 percent.

So after this you could address the counterargument that college athletics is based around school pride, and that athletes should play for free to gain dignity. Look at every CEO of a major corporation today. They have insane pride for their company and they make boatloads of cash. Why can’t college athletes do the same?

College athletes don’t deserve to get paid, they need to get paid. They should be able to take multimillion dollar contracts for advertising and whatever they want because it is fair, and represents the actual world of business more.

As for UCLA, I’m going to USC, so screw the Bruins.