Should NCAA Div 1 Basketball and Football players get paid?

The debate whether college athletes should get paid or not has been a hot topic for some years now. Good arguments can be made for both cases, a college athlete getting paid or them maintaining their amateur statuses. The article talks about how some athletes can be compared to slaves because of how they are exploited. College sports are what drives universities. A tremendous amount of revenue is created solely from sports alone. The amount of time put into practice, meetings, games, film studies goes unnoticed to most people. Then come game time they are expected to perform for thousands of spectators. All while jerseys and other memorabilia are being sold at the student store and the athletes themselves never see a dime of that money.  According to the article The Shame of College Sports football teams such as Texas, Florida and others earn between $40 and $80 million dollars a year in profit. With money like that athletes deserve to get some type of compensation. There are a lot of pros with universities paying their athletes can be seen as beneficial for the NCAA organization itself. Perhaps the biggest one pro would be potentially stoping the NCAA of all kinds of violations they have been dealing with over the years, such as athletes taking money from agents. Athletes take money from agents for a number of reasons; to help their families out, to buy new “bling”, but the main reason is because they often times don’t have any. There are however plenty of cons that go along with paying the athletes. The first thing that one must consider is which athletes should get paid, and at which universities. Some universities make a lot more money than others, and lets face it other than football and basketball most sports do not generate a significant amount of revenue. Another con would be that the NCAA could potentially lose its non-profit status that could lead to many issues that the NCAA board do not want to face. In my opinion athletes should get paid. With me being a college athlete I think about this all the time. I believe that we should be entitled to some type of compensation. It does not have to be a huge salary like the professional athletes, but simply a little extra spending money to buy new clothes or go to the movies on the weekend would be nice.