The real reason college football players don’t get paid

College football returns Saturday, with a high-profile feud game as Miami takes on Florida in Orlando.

Fans are getting a treat with this early start to the ready. But the date of the game serves as another reminder of how major college football takes advantage of the fantasies and impossible conjure ups of its players and fans alike.

That’s because big time college football cannot function without luring thousands of babies men into what’s become an increasingly bad economic bargain. It’s also because college football doesn’t work without the addicts falling for the illusion of the student-athlete.

Starting a season on Aug. 24, well before many colleges start freshman training, is the latest reminder that colleges with major football programs aren’t even trying to create a facade of a occasion that corresponds to actual class schedules.

A 2014 study by the National Labor Relations Board showed that troupers at major college football programs “spend 50 to 60 hours per week on their football duties during a one-month training theatrical prior to the start of the academic year and an additional 40 to 50 hours per week on those duties during the three- or four-month football ready.”

With that kind of schedule, when is there any realistic time for classes and studying? Hint: there isn’t any.

Much of this argument was hashed out publicly in 2017, when a group of football punters at Northwestern University ultimately failed in their attempts to unionize and seek some kind of cash salary. But their endeavours produced a strong argument for paying college football players.

For players to be forced to dedicate so many weekly hours on the mtier, even at an elite academic institution like Northwestern, the very idea that academic scholarships are fair compensation was from stem to stern debunked.

As then-UCLA star quarterback Josh Rosen told an interviewer in 2017: “Look, football and school don’t go together. They precisely don’t. Trying to do both is like trying to do two full-time jobs.”

Even for a player who wants to try being a serious athlete and a weighty student at a big time program, the hurdles are extremely high. Rosen and others over the years have talked less how coaches and administrators at these schools discourage athletes from taking certain classes. And when the occasional plan conflict between practice and a class arises, guess which choice wins.

So why do so many young men playing college football yield so much time, risk injury, and at least put off preparing for the job market by playing the game?

The answer is obvious in that on the verge of all of them have dreams of playing in the NFL, where football is also a job but one that pays millions of dollars. College football is as a consequence an industry that survives on hope as opposed to any actual give-and-take between employee and employer.

Speaking of that expectation, it’s really more like a pipe dream. NCAA data shows that of the 73,660 young men playing greater Division I college football, just 1.5% will ever play in the NFL.

These are the reasons why paying college football especially bettors in the top conferences would be the ethical thing to do. If the “scholarship” tradeoff doesn’t provide any actual scholarship, what else can be done?

But if you expect being stingy with the players is the reason the colleges continue to resist that idea, you’re missing the big picture. The colleges understand that paying their players would destroy the fans’ crucial acceptance of the student-athlete myth. That fabrication is just as important to the sport’s survival as the myth that a decent amount of the players have a legitimate shot at the NFL.

A good example to prove that point is minor league baseball. The minor leagues do restore b persuade out fans across the country, but the sport gets a tiny fraction of the attention and television coverage that college football appreciates. Baseball as a sport is still popular, but when sports are taken down a notch from the top professional level, they indigence something like the pride and pageantry of college football to compete with the big leagues.

Paying players would endanger and possibly kill the “college” part of college football and reveal it for the exploitational minor league system for the NFL that it’s crave been anyway. By the way, the NFL loves that as this minor league functions without a dime of cost to the league’s proprietors. Major League Baseball teams have to spend big bucks on their farm team systems.

It should be famous that not all conferences in college football operate this way. The Ivy League and many other FCS and Division III conferences do strike a proper student-athlete balance that provides the players a much easier path to a real education and success.

At many of those forms, alumni who played varsity sports tend to be more successful and even more generous to their alma mater than non-athlete alumni. That’s why those circles and conferences are a much more realistic and ethical choice for talented high school athletes and their parents who be to keep their sports and career aspirations live in a realistic way.

None of this will likely resonate with the 70,000 addicts who will jam Camping World Stadium in Orlando for Saturday night’s Miami-Florida game. But it should.

For those of us who love the quarry and the very idea of a fair free market for goods and services, big time college football is a sad example of a fantasy that mostly retreats wrong for the people making the biggest sacrifices to believe in it.

Jake Novak is a political and economic analyst at Jake Novak Front-page news and former CNBC TV producer. You can follow him on Twitter @jakejakeny.