On Saturday morning, Nigel Hayes brought a sign to College Gameday. It was meant as a protest, a message to pay college athletes. It said, simply, “Broke College Athlete Anything Helps” with a link to a Venmo account, similar to the beer money sign earlier this season.
This, as expected, touched off another debate about paying college athletes. And in this debate there’s entrenched sides and arguments, all of which are fairly predictable. Athletes get a free education, valued somewhere in the low-six figures per year, which some think is enough. That’s money that exists in theory, but in reality is the cost of an education to the school — an education that may provide those future returns for the player, but does nothing in the present while an athlete is spending years of their prime on theoretical future returns.