Why Paying Players Is the Only Way to Save College Basketball

To pay college athletes or not? That has been the question for ages.

With the popularity of sports nowadays, leagues are making more money than ever before. The universities are raking in the dough from these humongous television contracts, and the coaches and everybody else are seeing their fair share.

Everybody waits in line for their piece of the pie, yet, the ones who make the system work are the ones who don't even get to taste the crumbs that have fallen onto the table. In fact, while everyone is going up for seconds, the athletes don't even get invited to the dinner table.

I think we can all agree that collegiate sports is no longer an amateur enterprise, and I am not going to argue that fact with you. We can save that for a different time and different day of the week. Like everything in life, paying collegiate athletes has its pros and cons, but it would certainly save the sport of college basketball if some type of payment plan was installed.

College basketball is by far a smaller market than college football is. I would say that more than half of the people that fill out the March Madness brackets don't even pay attention to the season until the month of February rolls around. And there are certainly reasons for that. One is that the sport has to compete with college football and the NFL until late January, and another is that the sport is slowly but surely suffering a slow death.

But paying these ball players could fix some of those things and help close the gap that seems to have increased over the years.

I can't tell you how many times I have watched the "Fab Five" documentary on ESPN. I have watched it more than Seinfeld reruns, not because of everything they did for the game or because it was a great piece to keep you occupied when you have two hours to kill, but because I am wondering when or if we will ever see a team like that again.

That squad was put together during the 1991 season, and all five of those players played at least two seasons. Four of the five stayed till their junior years, while two of the Fab Five played out their entire years of eligibility in a Michigan uniform.

Nowadays, teams do land several of the most talented players in the country, but they end up leaving after one season. Even if the player is still raw at the position, needs to add on weight or could use another year to tweak his game, he is still off to the next level the second he hears he is first-round material and is guaranteed an NBA contract.

With the way things are going, we will never see a team like that again. We will never see a program win 10 titles in 12 years like UCLA did back in the '60s and '70s. Having players stay in college longer would provide the chance of seeing a dynasty, creating the teams you love to hate and would make the sport much more interesting. Shoot, even Michael Jordan stayed in college for three years.

In the last 25 years, there have been a total of 14 different teams to win the NCAA Championship. While a couple of those teams have won multiple titles in that span, only two of those teams have won back-to-back (Florida and Duke). Both of those teams had their main core of players for both seasons.

Now, would returning stars for another season guarantee multiple championships? Of course not, but the numbers don't lie. And you’re telling me that if Kemba Walker returned to UConn, Anthony Davis to Kentucky or Carmelo Anthony to Syracuse, those teams wouldn't have had a great shot to repeat the year after they won it all and left for the money?

Having players stay for more than one year would help create greater teams, as those programs would be able to add to the current talent rather than just replacing it. When you think of the greatest teams in college basketball, you think of teams that were likely formed before you were even born. That's because the NBA wasn't handing out ridiculously large sums of money to these athletes and making it such an easy choice to leave college.

Paying college basketball players certainly wouldn't keep every star in college, but it would at least make a player think twice about leaving. Giving him some extra spending money would at least give him a reason to stay in college an extra year or two.

It would also help even out the recruiting process, giving some of these other teams a better shot at competing for a national championship. The players that are going to be one-and-done only want to play for the best of the best schools, so they choose Duke, Kentucky, Syracuse and North Carolina because it gives them the best chance to win a title in the one season they are on campus.

Well, if players were being paid, it would certainly help create a little more of an even playing field. If that player was going to stay in school a little bit longer, why wouldn't he think about staying close to home or joining a school with a little less talent where he can become the star rather than joining a team already stacked with 5-star recruits?

Wouldn't college basketball be a lot more interesting if it had many of the same players every year rather than having to get to know an entire roster every season? You thought Kentucky was good last season? Imagine if Brandon Knight and DeAndre Liggins had decided to stay for another season and had been a part of that championship roster. There is a reason that teams such as Harvard, Wichita State and Murray State are making noise lately, and it has a lot to do with experience on the roster.

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"I just wish there was a way to give our players a piece of the pie," South Carolina football coach Steve Spurrier said (Via ESPN). "It's so huge right now. As you know, 50 years ago there wasn't any kind of money and the players got full scholarships. Now, they're still getting full scholarships and the money is in the millions. I don't know how to get it done. Hopefully there's a way to get our guys that play football a little piece of the pie."

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How much players deserve to be paid and how they would split the pie up are still questions that need to be answered. But they are questions that should be looked into, as they would change the sport of college basketball.

Until then, I'll continue to watch documentaries of what the sport used to be like and reminisce.