College football being "a business" (even if you accept such a proposition) and educating kids are not mutually exclusive things. You can run a business AND educate kids all at the same time. It happens every day.

High schools charge money to get into football games. Rec leagues charge money to participate. Yet no one is claiming they are "businesses." The difference here is merely one of scale and that's all.

If the argument is that college is "a business" because there are billions involved, versus the $272 a rec league collects, then where is the exact revenue line someone would have to cross to suddenly become "a business"? $100,000? $1 million? $1 billion? Deciding that line would cause heated argument that would never resolve because no position could be supported by numbers or reason. Any argument about whether a specific amount of revenue is acceptable is ultimately a moral one and this would subject such things to the whims of regulators and politicians. This would be bad for everyone and is one reason why such things are not legally defined by someone's opinion about how much money is morally acceptable to take in. If you are for-profit, you are a business, if you are non-profit, you are not.

I would bet that virtually all of the people who blithely throw around the statement "college sports is just a business" or "amateurism is a sham" also believe that the players should be paid. These phrases were just constructed to provide justification for pre-determined belief that players should be paid just because, because, well just because. I want more money. You want more money. We all want more money. There are many ways to get more money. One is to claim that morality dictates you are owed the money. In my view, that's all that's happening here.




[Post edited by pienkows at 05/16/2018 6:33PM]