<i>&gt; First, there&#x27;s the &quot;me too&quot; effect. If colleges pay football players, other athletes will want to be paid. They&#x27;ll ask, &quot;What makes football special?&quot;</i><p>That&#x27;s easy: what makes football special is that <i>it generates absolutely gigantic piles of cash.</i> If a delegation of athletes from, say, the college ultimate frisbee team were to demand similar compensation, the burden would be on them to demonstrate they&#x27;re generating similar revenue.<p>(And if they can actually <i>make</i> that case? Then heck, pay them too!)<p><i>&gt; Then we&#x27;ll run into some unhappy truths regarding sports. For example: If colleges base compensation on revenue, the wage gap between male and female athletes will be massive.</i><p>Wait -- because we <i>might</i> end up paying female athletes less than male athletes, we shouldn&#x27;t pay <i>any</i> of them <i>anything?</i> Surely we can cross this particular bridge when (and if) we ever actually come to it.<p><i>&gt; Then there&#x27;s the problem of mixing sports and education.</i><p>Which isn&#x27;t really a problem, because the &quot;education&quot; many (most?) college football players currently receive is pretty nominal anyway.<p><i>&gt; It seems to me that most of these problems would be solved by creating a minor league separate from college.</i><p>I&#x27;m always wary of a proposed solution whose first step is &quot;change everything,&quot; not least because frequently it&#x27;s proposed less to provide an actual alternative than to delay taking any steps at all to improve the situation. Don&#x27;t make the perfect the enemy of the good, in other words. You can advocate for creating a whole new league if you want to, and maybe someday that will happen, but in the meantime there&#x27;s all these real people getting really screwed out of real money they&#x27;ve really earned. A whole new system that takes 10 or 15 or 30 years to get worked out and implemented doesn&#x27;t do <i>them</i> any good. So let&#x27;s just start paying them, and then we can take all the time we want to work the bigger questions out.