After becoming jealous of his friend Wiley Spears' radio show, Mikey Jarrell got in on the action and the two recruited IT master Matt Glatt to assist them in their quest. In addition to broadcasting Bowdoin sports live for WBOR, they have a weekly show, "Mike and Wiley in the Morning," that airs on Wednesday afternoons, from 2 to 3 p.m. And now begins their venture into print.
Matt Glatt: What do you guys think about an idea I've seen thrown around lately, that D-I college athletes deserve some compensation for their service to their programs. I think this could alleviate problems teams have been having with boosters, those less-than-legal individuals who essentially bet on players to make it big.
Wiley Spears: Well, there are boosters at each college who are used as incentives to lure top recruits, like how Cam Newton's father literally shopped Cam around to see which school's boosters would pay him the most.
MG: I was talking about the situating involving Chris Webber and the Fab Five from Michigan in the 1990s. The booster, Ed Martin, gave the players loans for things like gas and shoes, and things eventually got out of hand. Martin had good intentions, and yet his actions absolutely wrecked the Michigan basketball program. That's the kind of stuff that could potentially be fixed by just paying college athletes in the first place.
WS: Paying student-athletes would not solve anything, and I don't think it would eliminate boosters. Besides, they're already getting paid essentially $200,000 to go to school in the first place. Is a free education not enough for them?
Mikey Jarrell: Some of these players have nothing. They dedicate so much time and energy to their teams and they deserve to see some of the money that their school makes from selling tickets to watch them play, from selling jerseys with their names on them, and from raking in cash from TV networks. Yet many top-level student-athletes can't afford a movie ticket.
MG: You can't possibly tell me that if Bowdoin sells 10,000 Pat Noone jerseys, he doesn't deserve any of the profit.
WS: How about they just use all that money to better the school? That means more financial aid, better dorms, etc.
MJ: These football and basketball programs are bringing in a ridiculous amount of money for their schools. The University of Texas football program made over $90 million in 2010. It sounds like they have some cash to spare.
WS: Keep in mind that you are only using Texas, one of the best football programs in the country, as your example. Out of 120 Football Bowl Subdivision schools in 2010, only twelve made a profit. How can you expect the other 108 athletic programs, who are struggling to barely break even, to now shell out even more funding to pay their athletes? Texas has to be one of the only states where people know more about the I-Formation than the iPhone.
MJ: All right, then just pay the athletes of schools whose programs are profitable. But I don't believe for one second that they can't afford to pay their players. If you got paid for that "job" of yours at Studzinski, I see no reason why athletes can't get paid for doing a significantly more strenuous job, especially the ones who have no chance of making it to the professional levels.
MG: Then it would just turn into a business.
MJ: And it's not already? I read in an article by Taylor Branch in The Atlantic that the NCAA signed a TV broadcasting deal for March Madness worth almost a billion dollars.
MG: But then every recruit will just try to go to the school that will pay them.
WS: If it gets to that point, you may as well just let them skip straight to the pros. There's something special about college sports where players play for the fun of the game and not for the money, and I think paying college athletes would take that away and spoil the integrity of the game.
MJ: If you want all that nonsense, just go watch Division III sports and be done with it.
MG: Well, that's all the time we have for today; thanks for tuning in!
MJ: But not before our "No-Fail Predictions of the Week!"
WS: The Pittsburgh Pirates will have their first winning season in 19 years.
MJ: I wouldn't be so optimistic. I predict that the Pirates will win at least three games this year.
MG: I predict that this will be the first and the last Orient article we ever write.