Should college athletes in revenue-generating sports be paid beyond their scholarships?
We have gone back and forth with this question for years now and even though support for the idea has grown tremendously, NCAA President Mark Emmert has made it clear that this will not be happening anytime soon according to ESPN.
“There’s certainly no interest in turning college sports into the professional or semi-professional,” Emmert said at the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in New York City.
Emmert also discussed his contempt for the NBA’s 19-year-old minimum age for draft eligibility.
“It’s illogical to force someone to go to college when they want to do something else,” Emmert said.
He dismissed the idea that having better high school players play one season in college has substantively made the college game more marketable.
“When LeBron went [to the NBA], we still had a Final Four and it was pretty good and people showed up and we had good numbers,” Emmert said. “And nobody said college basketball sucked because Kobe went.”
I guess the best way to answer a question is to deflect the attention from one organization to another.