He had a great career playing for the Gators and was able to transition to the pros as the 18th overall pick in the draft, but recently Maurkice Pouncey has been accused of accepting $100,000 from a sports agent’s representative while he was still on the Gators’ roster.
He denies it, and coach Urban Meyer said at SEC Media Days that he believes Pouncey. It may turn out that Pouncey acted in his own interest, but we owe him the benefit of the doubt at the very least. But this news brings up a question as old as the NCAA itself: Should athletes be paid?
College sports are romanticized as the last bastion of amateurism in American sports, where athletes are driven by passion for their sport and not a paycheck. But let’s not kid ourselves. It’s a business.
Most sports aren’t bringing in a lot of money, but nobody can deny the importance of the Gators football team as a financial asset to the school. A good team sells a lot of tickets, wins a lot of games and gets the university a nice check at the end of the year for playing in a big-name bowl game. Giving athletes a free education is simply not enough; most Florida residents already get that through programs like Bright Futures, and there are similar programs in other states.
There are restrictions on how many hours a school can require athletes to practice, but the time players spend in the weight room or studying game footage usually doesn’t factor into the tally. It all adds up to being more than a full-time job. Trying to tack on another 20 hours a week to earn some spending money is a hard pill to swallow, making back-alley deals from agents even more enticing.
We aren’t advocating it, but it happens. Miami Hurricanes players were getting under-the-table payouts from 2 Live Crew star Luther Campbell in the early ‘90s. Florida State Seminoles players were taken on all-you-can-carry Foot Locker shopping sprees. And let’s not forget about those paid internships doled out to University of Southern California Trojans during Pete Carroll’s reign. If the allegations against Pouncey prove to be true we would be more than disappointed but far from shocked.
Getting through school on a shoestring budget is hard enough without the time commitment and responsibility of being on a team, but treating kids like indentured servants while their athletic feats are writing checks for Jumbotrons only adds insult to injury.
It wouldn’t take much money to keep kids afloat, and more than likely a small paycheck could help keep some student athletes in school through graduation day — not to mention it would probably cut down on those embarrassing stories of athletes stealing to get by, ahem, Cam Newton. It wouldn’t compare to the amount of money athletes could make in the pros, but at least it would help.
Maybe it would kill the magic a little bit, and maybe it would snuff out the amateurism — but it might do wonders for integrity. In the meantime we’re keeping our fingers crossed and hoping that Pouncey is blameless.
