A recent report from Yahoo! Sports has surfaced, that report included alleged incidents that included many elite players and programs and had a lot to do with paying athletes, which we all know is very illegal and a huge NCAA violation. Personally I don’t think you can blame the kids for taking the payments, after all, they’re 17-19 year old kids for the most part, and many of them come from less than perfect situations at home, you’re telling me you wouldn’t take the money? I also feel as though you can’t blame the coaches, I say this because there is no way that they are directly involved with the actual payments of the athletes (excluding Mr. Pitino). Asking the coaches to have to monitor if their players are involved in scandals that the NCAA does not approve up is preposterous on its own, but to ask them to do so on top of recruiting, game planning, practices, games and the occasional family time, I mean that’s kind of insane. I think the only people who are to blame is the NCAA itself for not having come up with a better solution by 2018.
There were a number of programs and players mentioned in the Yahoo! Report, Big East schools such as Seton Hall, Villanova and Xavier were among them, and more specifically Edmond Sumner and Isaiah Whitehead who were accused of receiving the money illegally, in one way or another. There’s no way of knowing just yet how true the allegations are, or what the punishments will be, but you can definitely expect the NCAA to have some kind of repercussion with all of those programs mentioned.
As I write this, I still have no suggestions as to what the NCAA can do. There are numerous suggestions and even more arguments against those suggestions. They range from the education on top of the stipend players already receive is enough, to if the athletes are making all of this money for these schools, why don’t they see a cut of it, and the most intriguing one to me which is will it take away from the actual game, suggesting that paying the players will make the games more like the NBA which any basketball fan will tell you is a much different style. I do feel strongly that the athletes should be paid, I also feel that it can’t be from the schools and that all the athletes at every program should receive the same amount of money, the big programs will completely dominate recruiting even more than they already should if they can pay them themselves and choose how much they want to pay them. Not much of a suggestion, and I do understand how tough of a spot the NCAA is in, but the bottom line is the NCAA needs to come to a "happy medium" where they come up with something that the athletes, coaches and fans can all benefit from. In a perfect world, that would be an easy conclusion. And even though this isn’t a perfect world, I feel as though the NCAA has the money and capabilities to come up with something that can help out every stakeholder in college sports. The ball is in their court.
