Should college athletes be paid? two recent rulings may change the face of college sports.

• Author: Majerol, Veronica
• Position: SPORTS

Big time college football and basketball programs generate billions of dollars a year in TV and marketing contracts, ticket sales, and merchandising. The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) gets a cut; universities get a cut; coaches get a cut. The only ones not cashing in, it seems, are the players themselves. Under NCAA rules, they've been considered "amateurs" who aren't allowed to profit from their sports.

But two recent rulings may change all that--and alter college athletics forever. In August, a federal judge decided that players in top college football and men's basketball programs--the big-money sports--are entitled to receive payment if their "names, images, and likenesses" are used in video games or TV broadcasts. And a few months earlier, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) granted football players at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, the right to be recognized as university "employees" and to form a union. Both decisions are being appealed.

"There's an issue of fairness," says Risa Lieberwitz, a professor of labor and employment law at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "The question that's being raised here is ... whether the amateur label is simply a cover for exploitation."

Intercollegiate sports date back to the 1850s. For most of the past 150 years, playing for the love of the game rather than for profit has been a powerful ideal.

"A gentleman never competes for money," Walter Camp wrote in his 1893 handbook on college sports. The NCAA's amateur code was officially adopted in 1956, and since then the organization's view has been that college athletes are students, not professionals or employees entitled to paychecks. The NCAA says top athletes get other benefits, like scholarships--often covering tuition--and college degrees that prepare them for the future.

Avatars in Video Games

The line between elite college athletics and the pros has been shrinking, however. Top college football and men's basketball players put in up to 60 hours a week in games and practice, leaving them little time for academics. Injuries can saddle them with years of medical bills. Still, the average full-scholarship athlete accumulates $3,200 in debt for each year they're in school, according to a recent study, because meal plans and other incidentals often aren't fully covered.

"There are ... nights that I go to bed and I'm starving," Shabazz Napier, a star point guard for the University of Connecticut, told...