Mark, you make $1.7 million per year. That is $6.8 million over the course of four years, the average amount of time a college athlete spends on campus.

Meanwhile, student athletes are suspended for even taking a free lunch, something any college kid would kill for.

Mark, what are you doing?

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With the upcoming vote Friday regarding Northwestern University football players’ ability to unionize, the age-old debate about paying college athletes is back in the limelight.

Most people take an ethics approach and say it is reprehensible you make seven figures a year while your workhorses at each program won’t make a fraction of that.

They’re right, Mark, you’re kind of a jerk for suspending athletes for procuring freebies off their talent. Or you are a jerk for not even being a former student athlete while governing the body presiding over student athletes.

After all, the old saying goes: It’s all in the game.

But instead of debating the ethics or fairness, let us take this argument outside-the-box and look at college athletes as commodities in a marketplace (after all, we don’t want to treat them too much like human beings).

Mark, you and the people at universities make a lot of money off of college sports. You make money by sitting in your ivory tower and selling the totally-not likenesses of the athletes to video game companies, television stations and just about anyone else who will give you a dollar.

And besides, it’s not like being the upstanding guy you are who runs complex organizations would do anything like sit as provost at a complex organization like Montana State when they were found guilty of a “lack of institutional control” in 1993. Or lose $100 million on a construction project in 1998 at a complex organization like the University of Connecticut. Or massage the academic fraud allegations against a complex organization like Louisiana State University’s football program in 2001.

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That’d be preposterous.

The universities make money by selling jerseys that just happen to be the same number as the star player, selling tickets to sellout games and selling their athletics program as a reason for others to attend the school.

So Mark, why aren’t you taking better care of the commodities that make this money?

You’re treating athletes like indentured servants at this point. Yes, they get prestigious degrees, which will earn them just a little over $2 million during their lifetime according to the Casey Research Center. The sum is far short of what you will make in two years, Mark.

But hey, they’ve got a degree. And that’s cool. Without that degree they would’ve had to go to community college or take out loans.

And this way, you and the NCAA remain “pure” while grandstanding around the country with other people who don’t want to pay athletes. I don’t know what that purity consists of, but it sure is important to you and other people who don’t really matter (read: non student athletes).

Instead of rallying around the notion of purity, Mark, let’s treat the situation like what it is: pure capitalism.

In a capitalist society, firms (universities) compete to put out the best product (sports teams). They do this by paying for better resources (players) than the other firms.

It’s simple really. Keep your workers happy and your equipment running smoothly and you’ll have a successful business (NCAA).

Did you get that, Mark?

It works in professional sports, so why not college? Your answer to every question right now seems to be, “I know how to run a complex organization,” so I’ll let you figure out something as simple as payroll.