The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of The Prowler.

The payment of college athletes has been a controversial topic that has been debated up to the Supreme Court.  I believe that college athletes should not be directly paid by the universities themselves, but should be able to be sponsored and to make money through their sponsorships. The reasons for this are that if college athletes are directly paid from the university, it will cause problems with some sports making less money because they make less money for the school. Instead of having the university decide who makes money, companies should be able to decide which of the players they think deserve the money.

Some people think college athletes should be making a salary from the university, but I believe this will only lead to more controversy. If universities paid players, sports like football and basketball would be paying their players exponentially more than sports like water polo. This is simply based on the amount of money each sport brings into the school every year. Only the top four or five sports in each school actually make the school a profit, so should only those teams be paid? The whole ordeal of having to decide salaries would only create more problems. 

The other side is that college athletes should not be able to make money at all. This is the worst argument of them all because these athletes put their bodies, which are their futures, on the line to make this school money and get nothing in return. If an athlete has a career-ending injury before even having the chance to make money at a professional level, they might be out of a job for the rest of their lives when they simply could have made the money in college. For example, every year Alabama football makes the school $30 million, but the players who make the money for the school get zero. 

While the US Supreme Court did not decide whether companies could sponsor players in an NIL (name, image, and likeness) deal where some of the top players are making millions of dollars a year, these college athletes are valuable parts of every university and deserve to be able to make money because of it.