Paying athletes ‘would ruin the sense of college sports,’ Obama cautions

Paying college athletes “would ruin the sense of college sports,” President Obama warned in an interview aired Saturday.

Obama also said, however, that colleges should guarantee scholarships and healthcare for their student athletes.

“The students need to be taken better care of because they are generating a lot of revenue here,” Obama said in an interview with the Huffington Post published Saturday.

The solution the president offered was for colleges to maintain scholarship offers even if the athlete is cut from the team or gets injured and can’t play.

Paying student athletes is a contentious issue. The nonprofit National Collegiate Athletic Association is nearing a billion dollars in annual revenues, and some big-time schools make over $100 million annually from their athletic departments, while the players are unpaid.

“What does frustrate me is where I see coaches getting paid millions of dollars, athletic directors getting paid millions of dollars, the NCAA making huge amounts of money, and then some kid gets a tattoo or gets a free use of a car and suddenly they’re banished,” Obama said. “That’s not fair.”

Nevertheless, he stopped short of calling for players to be paid, citing the problems of opening up bidding wars for star players.

“I think the challenge would just then start being, do we really want to just create a situation where there are bidding wars? How much does an Anthony Davis get paid?” he asked, referencing the NBA star forward who was a dominant college player at the University of Kentucky.

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