Professor Proposes Pay for College Athletes

A law professor from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio has proposed a compensation model that would pay collegiate athletes.

David Grenardo, a former football player at Rice University, advocates his position in the paper “The Duke Model: A Performance-based Solution for Compensating College Athletes,” which has been accepted for publication by the Brooklyn Law Review.

The Duke Model “provides a detailed, comprehensive and flexible structure for compensating these college athletes in a fair and reasonable manner,” reads the paper’s abstract.

Under the model, athletes would be eligible to receive compensation in the following ways:

1) A base compensation system that pays football players based on how many games a player started, and whether the athlete is a starter, back-up, or third stringer. Men’s basketball players would be compensated similarly, based on an average of minutes played during a season.

2) Compensation based on statistical or external athletic achievement or honors, (Heisman Trophy winners, All-American honors, etc.).

3) Compensation based on an athlete’s academic performance.

“One cannot dispute that education for college athletes possesses value,” Grenardo writes in the paper. “Nevertheless, some athletes contribute to a growing industry of major college athletics that generates billions of dollars in revenue. Those athletes who create such a valuable product should be able to earn compensation for their efforts as every other American is entitled to do.”

What do you think of Grenardo’s model? Let us know in the comments.