How Much Is a College Quarterback Worth? $2.4 Million

The pandemic has imperiled college sports. Canceling the Division I men’s basketball tournament last spring alone cost the NCAA an estimated $375 million. Athletics departments are cutting staff and salaries. Even universities as rich as Stanford are dropping sports that don’t generate significant ticket sales or television revenue, thereby crushing the dreams of swimmers, fencers, and rowers. Billions still hang in the balance.

So this might not seem like the best moment to float the idea of paying college athletes. At the same time, the focus on the enormous sums that college sports programs are losing because of Covid-19 is a reminder that some of them bring in enormous sums. It’s also a reminder that players don’t share in those profits. Even the belt-tightening at some universities draws attention to just how much money is routinely thrown around. When Jim Harbaugh, the coach of the football team at the University of Michigan, took a 10-percent pay cut, it reduced his take-home pay this year to a mere $6.75 million. Mike Krzyzewski, the basketball coach at Duke University, who earned $7.3 million last year, reportedly took a reduction of between 2.5 and 10 percent. Hard times indeed.

With that in mind, maybe now is an ideal time to reflect on the big business that is college sports. In a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Craig Garthwaite, an economist at Northwestern University, and his co-authors lay out a detailed case for paying players, arguing that because the vast majority of revenue at colleges with major sports programs — they looked specifically at the so-called Power Five athletics conferences — comes from football and men’s basketball, those players should get a piece of the pie. A large piece, in fact: By figuring out what colleges made from those sports, mostly from television contracts, and looking at how professional athletes are paid as a guide, they estimate that a starting quarterback should earn $2.4 million a year, while a wide receiver should be paid $1.3 million. In men’s basketball, a point guard should make $1.2 million, while a small forward should pull in just shy of $1.1 million. The guys on the bench do pretty well under this proposed system too: A reserve offensive linemen would make $138,000; a backup shooting guard, $250,000.

Paying players huge salaries would undoubtedly create a host of new problems. Among them is that colleges that are not in top-tier conferences would be unable to pay their players anything, which would lead to obvious recruiting disparities. But even for colleges that could afford to pay, there would be unfortunate ripple effects. As it stands, the revenue from football and men’s basketball subsidizes other sports, and so paying players seven-figure salaries would almost certainly mean cutting spending elsewhere, and probably eliminating programs entirely unless colleges could come up with new sources of funding. Goodbye, lacrosse; so long, volleyball.

Indeed, Garthwaite tells me he has received unhappy emails from coaches, including a tennis coach at a Division I university, complaining that the idea, if carried out, would destroy their sport at the collegiate level. He’s also heard from Title IX advocates about the likely negative impact on women’s athletics. They may very well be right, Garthwaite says, but he doesn’t think that should change the calculation. “That’s just status quo bias,” Garthwaite says. “It’s not that we want to punish you, but you’ve been living off of the largess of these other sports for a long time.”

He’s also heard the case, one that‘s made every time the topic comes up, that athletes are already compensated with scholarships. Garthwaite doesn’t find that argument compelling. “I don’t think in most labor markets we say, ‘If you’re paid anything, we’re paying you the equitable amount,’” he says.

The sports that make the most money for colleges happen to be those with the highest proportion of Black athletes: About half of football and men’s basketball players are Black, while athletes in other college sports are overwhelmingly white. In the paper, the researchers examined socioeconomic data related to the hometowns of every athlete at colleges in the top conferences in 2018, and found that football and men’s basketball players come from school districts with a higher percentage of students living in poverty than do athletes in other sports. They concluded that the funding of college sports at those institutions “effectively involves a transfer from students who are more likely to be Black and more likely to be from poor neighborhoods to students who are more likely to be white and from higher-income neighborhoods.” Should Black athletes really continue to subsidize sports played mostly by white athletes?

Garthwaite and his co-authors are not the only ones to reach that conclusion. A paper published by the National College Players Association last July, titled “How the NCAA’s Empire Robs Predominantly Black Athletes of Billions in Generational Wealth,” also calculates the per-player value of elite-college athletes compared with professional athletes, though it doesn’t break down values by position (the authors estimate, for example, that the average basketball player in the Big 12 Conference is worth roughly a half-million dollars per season). They argue that, from 2017 to 2020, about $10 billion that should have been earned by predominantly Black athletes was essentially transferred to coaches and administrators who are predominantly white.

Similar cases have been made for decades. In 1990, a paper published in the Notre Dame Law Review argued that sports programs in the “power elite” should pay their players (“The NCAA invokes the shibboleth of amateurism, and the public and the judiciary bob their heads”). In 1997 a paper was published in the South Texas Law Review titled “Pay for Play for College Athletes: Now, More Than Ever.” In 2012 a paper published in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport argued that it’s “due time that institutions treat college athletes, particularly Black male revenue athletes, as having value in themselves rather than as a means to enhancing their school’s public visibility and making money for athletic-department coffers.”

The arguments were just as passionate then as they are now, and it’s entirely possible that another decade will pass and more papers with variations on the same thesis will be written, published, and more or less ignored. Meanwhile, the amount of money being made by colleges continues to grow larger.

Yet there’s at least some reason to believe that change might be on the way. Last year California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed the Fair Pay to Play Act, which permits athletes to receive compensation for the use of their names and likenesses. Sports Illustrated called the law a “game changer” for college sports. In August, 10 U.S. senators proposed a “college athletes bill of rights” that includes revenue-sharing agreements between athletes and colleges. Among those supporting the bill is Bernie Sanders, who, in a statement, called it “ludicrous” that the NCAA still doesn’t allow players to be paid.

“In the midst of this pandemic, these athletes must have a seat at the table when their health and safety is on the line,” he said. “These athletes are workers. It is long past time they be treated like it.”