Paying college athletes

I personally believe that college athletes, especially College Basketball and football players should be paid. First of all, I think that these two sports are the front porch of revenue for Universities. The College football team at schools make sometimes three times more money every year than all of the academic departments combined. The TV deals for March Madness alone makes the NCAA more than $1,000,000,000 annually, and I am not counting other games, let alone college football. Every year the NCAA sells merchandise with players numbers on it, signs billion dollar TV deals, sells millions of dollars of tickets and players earn nothing. Remember that game this year Duke vs UNC, basketball game when Zion blew out his shoe. Tickets for that game were going for like $2,000 each. I think that the NCAA is taking advantage of the players. The players are responsible for billions of dollars every year for the NCAA, without the players you have nothing. The players do not even get paid for their own jersey sales, or their appearance in video games. You know who the highest paid government official is, it is Nick Saban by a wide margin. The highest paid government official in California last year was Jim Mora with $3.5 million dollars. But back in the early days of the NCAA there was opposition to paying coaches extra. Despite this, it is very hard to pay players today, due to the fact that you still have to have a fair playing field. Big schools can afford to pay more than smaller schools, so they can attract more recruits if they have more money which would be corrupt. I think the best way to start is just giving them their jersey sales, and a small stipend every month. Being a college athlete is a job, if I had a 9-5 job I would not be spending as much time on sports as a college basketball player.