While celebrities like LeBron James and others are celebrating the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) recent vote to modify rules to allow college athletes to be compensated, former President Barack Obama wasn’t sold on the idea in 2015.
During an interview with The Huffington Post, Obama said he thought compensating athletes would pose some challenges.
“In terms of compensation, I think the challenge would just then start being, do we really want to just create a situation where there are bidding wars?” Obama asked. “How much does a (sic) Anthony Davis get paid as opposed to somebody else? And that I do think would ruin the sense of college sports.”
The 44th POTUS did say he felt the NCAA needed to do better by its athletes and not retract scholarship offers once they’ve been awarded.
“[T]he students need to be taken better care of because they are generating a lot of revenue here,” Obama told The Post at the time. “An immediate step that the NCAA could take – that some conferences have already taken – is if you offer a scholarship to a kid coming into school, that scholarship sticks, no matter what.”
He added that the model at the time was unfair and he was unhappy with the way colleges treated athletes for accepting small gifts when they made millions of dollars off of them.
“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.”
With California’s Gov. Gavin Newsome signing the “Fair Pay to Play Act” into law earlier this year – and over a dozen other states following its lead – the NCAA said it is trying to welcome change and do what’s best for the athletes.
“We must embrace change to provide the best possible experience for college athletes,” said Michael Drake, chair of the NCAA’s Board of Governors, in a press release. “Additional flexibility in this area can and must continue to support college sports as a part of higher education. This modernization for the future is a natural extension of the numerous steps NCAA members have taken in recent years to improve support for student-athletes, including full cost of attendance and guaranteed scholarships.”
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Sen. Mitt Romney is also a supporter of last week’s NCAA ruling. “I was pleased that the board of governors recognizes that we’ve got a lot of athletes that come from very poor families that need some additional remuneration, in some cases to take care of their families, but to provide for themselves as well,” Romney said in an ESPN interview, according to The Hill.
Similar to Obama, he cautioned that the upcoming rule changes needed to be rolled out in a way that wouldn’t be unfair and hurt college sports.
“What you can’t have is a couple athletes on campus driving around in Ferraris while everybody else is basically having a hard time making ends meet,” Romney said, adding, “You can’t have a setting where some schools…are like the honey pot and everybody, all the great athletes, all want to go to those handful of schools. Then you kill collegiate sports.”
