No one wants to challenge the first sentence

No one wants to challenge the first sentence of the NCAA website’s discussion of the issue: "Student-athletes are students first and athletes second. They are not university employees who are paid for their labor."

That’s fine. This is only a first, tentative step. It is not all about altruism, either. Even if you just gave the money to football and men’s basketball players, the cash cows, you would be talking about $300,000 a year at a football factory-level place. There is no way that people in non-BCS leagues could afford such a thing without tapping a currently non-existent revenue stream.

Thus, the issue: If you are a high school football player, and you are pretty good but not great, and you have a choice between starting for Small U or playing special teams at Big U - and Big U is able to offer you $3,000 a year in spending money on top of the current scholarship - well, let’s just say that Big U and its brethren are going to have the best special teams in their history.

That is the obvious flaw - that a lot of Division I schools couldn’t afford it without finding some money somewhere, while teams in the biggest leagues could write the check without a great stretch. The Big Ten, with its television network, makes a ridiculous amount of money - which is undoubtedly why this has begun there.

But the conversation needs to continue. Coaches have never made more money and leagues have never generated more television revenue. Meanwhile, the players, especially in football, never have been under more financial pressure. We already have seen missed field goals cost schools millions of dollars - the difference between BCS and non-BCS bowl-game payouts.