Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields had an interesting take on college athletes getting paid.
Athletes making money at the college level has been in the news a ton recently because California recently passed a law allowing them to profit off their names and likeness. Opinions are all over the place, and the OSU Heisman candidate had a very interesting take.
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Fields said the following about players being able to profit off of their likeness, according to ESPN on Tuesday:
I think some student-athletes need the money, of course, because not every student-athlete grows up in the same background; some student-athletes have poorer backgrounds than others. I haven’t really thought about it much, but I definitely think that some should be paid, in terms of the way they’ve grown up.
While I’m sympathetic to what Fields is saying, it’s an absolutely terrible idea. I think we all feel bad for people who grow up in poverty without any money. (RELATED: David Hookstead Is The True King In The North When It Comes To College Football)
Nobody likes to see that, and we all want to see people rise up out of poor financial situations.
However, if players are going to be able to make some money, we have to have equal rules. We can’t be paying players based off of the income of their parents.
That’s a really bad idea. If people want to get paid, then go out there and try to profit off of their likeness once there are uniform rules from the NCAA across America.
Don’t separate people and create different rules for people from different backgrounds.
Again, I think I speak for just about everybody when I say I’m sympathetic to what Fields is saying, but that doesn’t mean we should start separating people into categories based off of what kind of money their parents made when they were growing up.
That’s a recipe for disaster.