My Special Buddy

Ever since college sports have been created many people have argued the idea, should college players get paid? Every year a top prospect comes out of high school to play college sports. These students break their backs to help schools gain 30 to 40 million while the teens make no money at all. College athletes deserve to be paid money but not too much.

While it is true NCAA does not allow athletes get paid it still happens under the table. What I mean by that is called pay to play. When students are in high school college boosters will pressure the students with money and gifts to come to their school. One of the most recent stories is Cam Newton, an Auburn Quarterback. In 2010 he was the most outstanding college player and voted the Heisman Trophy winner. A report from a Mississippi State University booster accused Newton of being offered of 180,00 dollars. Newton is not the only college player being offered sums of money to join their school. This is a huge problem in America and must be fixed before it spreads to later generations. The question from the opponents of paying college athletes inevitably comes back, "What would stop a star player from agreeing to shake hands at a local car dealership for $50,000?" The answer is, nothing. If a car dealer wants to strike that deal then good for the player in question. If a music student goes out in the summer and earns 50 grand, who objects? Who even knows? The student-musician is no less a college student because he struck a lucrative deal. Neither is the student-journalist who spends his nights writing freelance stories and picking up as much money along the way as he can.

If the student as athlete can find a way, he/she should be able to endorse products, to have paid-speaking gigs, to sell memorabilia, as Allen Sack, the author and professor at the college of business at the University of New Haven has suggested in recent years. The best college athletes in the two revenue-producing sports have always been worth much more than tuition, room, board and books. The best football and basketball players in the Big Ten have produced to the degree that a television network has become the model for every conference in America, a network worth at least tens of millions of dollars to the member institutions. Yet, no player can benefit from that work. The players have become employees of the universities and conferences as much as students -- employees with no compensation, which not only violates common decency but perhaps even the law.

Michael Wilbon is a featured columnist for ESPN.com and ESPNChicago.com. He is the longtime co-host of "Pardon the Interruption" on ESPN and appears on the "NBA Sunday Countdown" pregame show on ABC in addition to ESPN. Wilbon joined ESPN.com after three decades with The Washington Post, where he earned a reputation as one of the nation's most respected sports journalists.