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Glenn Garvin’s Hilarious Account of the Emerging American University…

… is totally worth a read. Garvin summarizes the pay college athletes argument:

The sky’s the limit [on salary]. And they shouldn’t be distracted by having to go to class, either, or even having to read or write.

He crunches the numbers colleges will need to anticipate:

The average NFL player’s salary, Bloomberg Businessweek magazine reported earlier this year, is about $1.9 million. If colleges wind up paying even a tenth of that — a lowball guess — that means that the University of Miami football team would need a payroll of $16 million just to cover the 85 scholarship players the NCAA allows. (Though, if we’re doing away with the requirement that players be able to write their own names, I don’t know why we’d be nit-picky about silly things like roster limits.)

UD‘s laughing out loud here.

And don’t forget taxes!

Right now college athletes don’t pay taxes on their scholarships because their schools sports programs are tax-exempt. But once you start paying the players (and especially if all pretense that they’re getting an education is dropped), the IRS will certainly want its cut. And that will include the value of the scholarship in addition to whatever salary they’re getting paid. A year at UM costs about $55,000 these days; at current tax rates, that means a UM football player would be around $12,000 in hock to the IRS before accepting another cent.

Margaret Soltan, August 29, 2011 6:03PM
Posted in: sport

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One Response to “Glenn Garvin’s Hilarious Account of the Emerging American University…”

  1. Mr Punch Says:

    $190,000 for college football players is by no means “a lowball guess,” at least based on this derivation. Minor league baseball players (who haven’t been in the majors), even at the AAA level, aren’t paid that much – and salaries are higher in baseball than in football.

    The right way to make this argument, it seems to me, is to apply the NFL formula linking pay to revenue.

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