College sports is big money but not everyone benefits

Well, March Madness is finally over. And Caitlin Clark is probably now a household name everywhere. It’s been a long way coming. She, by the way earn $3 million during her college career. Time at a time when just a few years ago, sports athletes in college weren’t supposed to make any money. It’s been a long development of college sports to say the least. Let’s start back in 1852 when Harvard and Yale began the idea of extracurricular sports by setting up rowing teams, well, it was basically an after school activity. But by the 1950s, money began changing college sports. And the money came in from broadcasting, selling broadcasting rights to games earn colleges money. And some of the big coaches made in today’s money, the equivalent of low seven figure salaries. Well, that looked attractive, but what are you going to have out the students so the colleges began to create the concept of the student athletes. These people were still just students and they were just playing football, they’re part time. This didn’t really comply with what was actually happening. Coaches expected almost full time participation by the students in the activities, coaches figures now or you’re approaching the best ones and the high seven figures, coaches, excuse me, colleges made millions it was a big moneymaker. It funded a lot of non profitable sports, as well as the overall overhead of the university. Nick Saban, probably one of the leading coaches of all time, made $100 million dollars in his career. He’s also a big opponent of college athletes making money because he feels it rather than skill is going to what that money rather than skill is going to be what drives recruiting. Well, what has emerged is something called an AI ML and AI eye to L stands for name, image and likeness. And your name, your image and your likeness belong to you. And so their names belong to college athletes, and they’re now able to collect money by selling their name, image and license and likeness to advertisers. Players now get financial recognition for what they do.  Now there’s yet another source of money for all of this, and that is gambling. Consider gambling on just the LSU Iowa game. Caitlin Clark was of course, the Iowa star. She had national recognition 80% of the bets placed on that game were placed on Iowa because of Caitlin Clark. Now, there’s another big winner in all this aside from the gambling enterprises, and the students and the coaches and the universities. And this one is going to make sure that everything stays running just swell. And that’s the states. The states tax gambling, in particular online gambling. In the third quarter of last year, states collected $500 million in taxes just in that quarter from online gaming. That’s a lot of money that they’re not about to give up. All sounds like a winner throw states in as winners along with the colleges, the athletes and the coaches, and the broadcasters, and the gambling associations. And who’s the loser? Well, the fact is, gambling is an addictive sport. You may have seen all those sites run helplines, your problem gambler call this number for help. Well, again, gambling is an addiction. Addicts tend not to think they have a problem. And if they do, it’s going to need more of a push than just an advertisement telling them a number or call in order to fix it. So the number of gambling addicts in the country is going to increase. No one wants that. But also nobody, especially the state governments who would regulate it are going to do anything to touch the goose that’s laying the golden egg. This is Larry Lindsey frustrate arrow News.