Mossman Prophecies No. 026

July 2, 2007

Heard another talking head last week spouting how college athletes should be paid. Of course, what the gentlemen really meant was that college football players and perhaps men's basketball players should receive compensation based on the lucrative bowl, NCAA Tournament and television packages.

When pundits call for college athletes to be paid, most of them have no regard for the tennis player, the soccer player or the track and field athlete. No, they're talking about dollars for those student-athletes that just happen to play revenue-generating sports.

Talk about a recipe for anarchy. Talk about illegal.

Title IX legislation was put in place to create equal opportunities for all student-athletes. Mostly, it balanced the playing field for women.

What that measure does not address is the business end of college athletics, the pluses and minuses. OU Athletics, like many of its peers around the country, receives no direct state tax support. The athletics department is self-sufficient.

And, OU, like most athletics programs on the I-A level, has only two sports that generate positive revenue - football and men's basketball. Note that both of the revenue producers are men's sports. Does that mean only male athletes would be paid in a move to pay athletes?

No, you can be certain that if pay-for-play was ever imposed, it would be implemented across the board for all student-athletes and all would receive precisely the same pay check. Federal law would guarantee as much.

So let's just say you do pay all of them. How much? One hundred dollars per month? $500 per month? $1,000 per month? Even the latter of those is less than what a graduate assistant makes. So let's use $1,000 per month for our example.

Spread that over 20 sports at OU (Stanford, with its 31 sports, must be cringing about now) with 400 student-athletes and that's $400,000 per month. Over a nine-month school year, that's $3.6 million.

Even at Oklahoma, such a thing would require serious adjustment and the impact would be dramatic.

For most of the Division I-A schools, whose balance sheets look a lot different than the one in Norman; paying student-athletes would be downright back-breaking.

It would mean fewer academic services and fewer overall programs for those same student-athletes.

It would also mean less for fans in terms of the staff that work to meet their needs.

But the questions don't stop there. Would this be BCS only? Wouldn't an athlete at a school with many television and bowl appearances deserve more of the money than an athlete at a less-successful, less visible school? And if that was permitted, wouldn't it impact recruiting in an interesting way? Should a walk-on get a piece of the pie or is it performance-based?

See the endless stream of ethical and economical questions that are born out of such a suggestion?

The thing that has always been devalued by pay-for-play proponents is the college scholarship. I have a son in college now. I can tell you that I would dearly love to have him on a full-ride. It would account for a significant amount of money.

It's time for us to stop treating college scholarships like a throw-in. They're not. They have great value.

Another thing that is ignored is the enormous commitment that has been made by athletics programs to upgrade training facilities, academic assistance facilities and the staffs that inhabit both.

One national commentator pointed to graduation rates, most of which are figured with a misleading formula that fails to account for transfers, early professional departures, etc., and said that universities are not taking the money they earn and funneling it into the educational process for student-athletes. How utterly false.

Today's student-athlete has more academic and training opportunity than any predecessor, and that's to say nothing of the travel and other amenities that are top rate. All of that is due in very large part to the money that college sports has generated.

OU Athletics, like most of its competitors, employs an army of advisors and tutors and dedicates more than 30,000 square feet to its athletics academic assistance unit. Any student-athlete that fails to graduate does so as a result of personal choices. The system, right down to a stringent class attendance policy, to facilitate academic success is there for the taking, and it's state of the art.

Eight out of every 10 OU student-athletes that complete their eligibility also graduate, so don't tell me that the educational part of this process is being ignored.

As an aside, did you know that less than 60% of the general student populace at OU actually graduates? Athletics graduation rates seem alarming when any context is left unprinted.

You will see a rate at 50% or lower on occasion for student-athletes (forgetting to tell you that transfers and early pro departures were counted as non-graduates) and everyone will gasp. Would they gasp in the same way if they saw that such a rate is consistent with the general student body?

The argument for paying college student-athletes is often misinformed. As the debate continues, just keep this in mind ... all student-athletes would have to be paid under such a plan and the majority of Division I programs would struggle mightily to survive as anything close to what they are today.

Cite the Oklahoma's of the world as an example if you must, but realize that most college programs don't live on that street.

I love the student-athletes and want them to get what they can within reason, but college sports, with all their warts, still belong to the amateur. Has that notion been tarnished over time? You bet. A lot.

But if we ever give up on that idea altogether I honestly don't think many of us will like the new landscape or the tremendous divide such a move would further create between athletics and the campus at-large.

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Kenny Mossman, Associate Athletics Director for Communications, provides his perspective on Oklahoma Athletics in his regular column on SoonerSports.com.

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