President Barack Obama is not in favor of paying collegiate athletes, but that is not to say he is on board with everything the NCAA is doing.
Speaking to the Huffington Post in an exclusive interview, Obama said student-athletes are not being taken care of properly, but stopped short of advocating for compensation in addition to their scholarships. He did, however, say he believes those scholarships should be fully guaranteed.
"An immediate step that the NCAA could take - that some conferences have already taken - is if you offer a scholarship to a kid coming into school, that scholarship sticks, no matter what," Obama said. "It doesn't matter whether they get cut, it doesn't matter whether they get hurt. You are now entering into a bargain and responsible for them.
"Health care. You've got to make sure that if they get injured while they're playing that they're covered."
Without getting specific, the President also referenced an oft-quoted statistic that states only two percent of men's college basketball and football players make it to their respective professional leagues.
"What does frustrate me is where I see coaches getting paid millions of dollars, athletic directors getting paid millions of dollars, the NCAA making huge amounts of money, and then some kid gets a tattoo or gets a free use of a car and suddenly they're banished," Obama told the HP. "That's not fair."
The President argued compensating student-athletes in the two revenue-generating sports would create a free agent market for the nation's top recruits. Some may argue richer schools already have an advantage as it is, so allowing those institutions to offer monetary compensation would further tip the scales.
"In terms of compensation, I think the challenge would just then start being, do we really want to just create a situation where there are bidding wars? How much does a Anthony Davis get paid as opposed to somebody else?" he said. "And that I do think would ruin the sense of college sports."
