Comment by Thriptic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Thriptic | Hacker News Reader

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The amount of benefits is miniscule relative to the value they are generating and their true market value. Further, the biggest benefit, free college, effectively doesn't count because no one in a competitive program has the time to major in anything that would plausibly provide a good job right after graduation. It is a big story whenever a football player graduates with a STEM degree given how hard it is from a time management perspective (or at least this used to be very rare iirc). Also if we are being real, a lot of these players don't belong in college academically. They would not be accepted on grades alone and would not survive without the hilariously enormous support system in place solely designed to keep them in compliance with the rules.

Most college students in STEM won't even work unpaid internships and yet these guys are expected to generate orders of magnitude more value while being unpaid or hilariously under compensated.

You're right, it's unrealistic. But the benefit value to the player is only miniscule if you ignore the biggest benefit, which almost no one includes:

The biggest benefit is the free 4-5 year top-of-the-line professional training camp.

(I didn't mention it above because I don't think this dollar amount should be counted against scholarships, if you could even calculate it.)

They're getting (upto) 5 years of intense training in their field, by teams of professional-grade coaches. All of their required equipment is paid for, facilities are free, they're being marketed to the pro scouts, traveling across the country, and they're getting all of this with free room and board.

It's really hard to put a true dollar amount on that, but the closest comparison in the professional world is a college degree. Which they should be getting, and at no cost to them.

When this is included, I think it balances out enough to be fair.

Or to put it another way... How many of these players could go pro without the benefit of college training. I'd argue very few. And by definition, fewer than the number who declare early for the draft, which is already a small number.

And I don't feel any more sympathies for them than I do any other startup millionaire that probably could have skipped college but didn't.

Tangent: I've also argued that being an athlete should/could be a degree in and of itself, given a properly designed program. It should include classes in kinesiology, dieting, health, financial management, speaking to the media, marketing yourself, etc. I think that would also solve many of these issues.

Very fair point. I had never considered this before.

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