(Bloomberg) -- If college athletes were paid like their professional counterparts, how much would they earn?
That's one question a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research seeks to answer. A star quarterback like Clemson University's Trevor Lawrence would probably reap $2.4 million per season, according to “Who Profits from Amateurism? Rent-Sharing in Modern College Sports.”
The findings are hypothetical of course, but as calls for name, image and likeness reform get louder, the possibility of seeing millionaire college athletes has never been more likely. The private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research group also came to a more troubling conclusion: The huge sums reaped by schools divert resources from students who are more likely to be Black and poor.
To reach their findings, the four authors draw parallels from the pros. Assuming college football and men's basketball players in the so-called Power Five conferences were able cash in on their abilities, each would receive $360,000 and $500,000 per season, respectively. Those figures are extrapolated by applying the approximate 50/50 revenue split between players and ownership in the National Football League and National Basketball Association.
In 2006, National Collegiate Athletic Association Division 1 Football Subdivision schools earned $4.4 billion in revenue. That ballooned to $8.5 billion over the next decade.
Read More: U.S. Senators Propose Plan for Compensation of College Athletes
The authors then had to divvy up the players' shares based on position and popularity. Star players receive more than average, while a center in football would get far less. Starting wide receivers could expect $1.3 million per season, while in basketball salaries for a team's five best players would earn $800,000 to $1.2 million a year.
Lost Season
The authors all come from Big Ten schools -- three from Northwestern University and one from the University of Michigan. That conference scrapped its 2020 college football season out of concern over the Covid-19 pandemic.
The researchers, led by Craig Garthwaite of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, address the value of the education that student-athletes receive. But they say the minimum compensation for backup players would be more than double tuition and other assistance on average.
The topic of equitable compensation for college athletes is one with broad social consequences. In proposing a student athletes bill of rights last month, U.S. Senator Christopher Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, criticized the disparity between unpaid Black students and White coaches and executives who profit from the sports they play.
“Early last year, I set out to expose the inequities and civil-rights issues in college sports, and Covid-19 has only exacerbated them,” Murphy said at the time. “We can't return to business as usual, where a multibillion-dollar industry lines the pockets of predominately White executives all while majority-Black athletes can't profit from their labor.”
That's a conclusion echoed by the authors of the paper.
“We find that the rent-sharing effectively transfers resources away from students who are more likely to be Black and more likely to come from poor neighborhoods toward students who are more likely to be White and come from higher-income neighborhoods,” the researchers wrote.
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