I never pictured myself at Michigan. In high school I was I was advised to attend a small liberal arts school. I essentially only applied to small schools, but when it came time to actually visit them, I realized that the only outlier in the mix that I applied to was also the only place I could actually see myself: Michigan.
I wasn’t prepared for Michigan. I may have been prepared academically, however in no way was I prepared for the jock culture that I would come to be exposed to. Everywhere you turn there’s a store selling maize and blue apparel or various deals associated with the Wolverines. The athletes, in particular the football and basketball players, are treated like Gods. They stand out in a sea of somewhat nerdy and bookish students. It’s not hard to tell who is an athlete at Michigan. Just ask anyone at this school.
Most people I talk to outside of Michigan can’t separate the University entirely from its football program. They may know who the football players are and what position they play, but when prompted to list what some of Michigan’s best programs are they come up blank.
It makes sense, however, when athletics is such a crucial part of this school and the revenue it produces.
So in what way are the athletes profiting off of this revenue? They work just as hard in many ways as the adults who make decisions for them. They go by a complicated schedule that doesn’t make a lot of room for their studies or a life outside of their team. They give most of their time and energy to the sport, Michigan, and its fans. While fans may give them recognition (there are many athletes on this campus that receive VIP status), they also don’t get much compensation after they leave the school. Athletes face the risk of concussions and other serious injuries that could greatly hinder their quality of life, not just their abilities on the field. These are injuries that players in professional sports encounter. Yet, they don’t get paid like these pro-players.
We could make the argument that they should be playing for the learning experience and getting a discount on a great education is payment enough, but when adults are profiting off of them, how is that fair?
It’s not. They’re devoting the majority of their time to the sport, they face injuries, and they also take the heat when the team doesn’t do well. Michigan and its fans already treat them like they’re celebrities, so they should be getting the payment of a celebrity.
If athletes are paid, though does it take the fun out of the sport? Indeed, it does appear that it takes some of the play and leisure out of what is meant to be an enjoyable diversion from the everyday monotony of work. It is meant to entertain. Athletics that involve play does not fit in with the definition of play that is given in Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga. He believes that play should be meant to be a diversion from regular life and still maintain the fun.
This hardly fits in with what we witness in college sports today, specifically at Michigan.
Does M Club really support you?
So to conclude, what we have going on with athletics at Michigan is a system that profits off of 19 year olds who are getting their heads smashed in with little compensation. The fun is taken out of play for the sake of monetary gain. This debate will continue to be ongoing, but it is clear that athletics at Michigan need to change. The system isn’t working.
The Political Habitat 
I think that this is an important issue to look at and you have brought up many good points. One of the articles we read in the beginning of the year dealt with this same issue on the basketball side. If these players’ images are used in commercials, video games, and college promotions they should receive some sort of compensation like how the professional players are when they sign deals with companies like Nike and Under Armor. Football at Michigan brings in hundreds of millions of dollars and some of that money could easily be used to pay the football players some sort of stipend. Hopefully in the near future, a school will set the precedent for this to happen!
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Being a student athlete at the University of Michigan, I would love to agree with this post because it would be great to be paid for what we love to do. Yet being notified throughout the recruiting process of NCAA rules, I always ask when I hear “should college athletes be paid”, where will the money come from? As NCAA recently released data showing that only 14 programs in the country are able to make profit without using the institutional support of the university. Also how do you decide what athletes get paid? Is it just the sports bring in revenue? and is it every athlete that would get paid or just the elite ones? Many NCAA rules would have to be bent if athletes were too be paid. In my honest opinion if athletes were too be paid I would like to think that only the revenue-producing sport athletes should be paid.
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