Actually, it's way past the time to do so.
The issue of money and collegiate sports goes back decades, before you or I were born.
Let's look at the Pac-12 conference, which includes USC, UCLA, Stanford, California, Oregon, Oregon State, Washington, Washington State, Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah.
From 1915 to 1959, this conference, before the Arizona schools or Utah and Colorado joined, represented the West Coast in the Rose Bowl.
Check out this story of the 1942 Rose Bowl that was moved from Pasadena to Durham, North Carolina, because of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Spoiler alert: underdog Oregon State defeated Duke.
Anyway, athletic payola in the conference goes back to at least 1924, but didn't reach a crisis point until 1956 when the University of Washington became the focal point of corrupt college athletics.
It should be noted that the California schools wanted to get rid of the Northwest schools because they considered Oregon, Oregon State, Washington, Washington State and Idaho to have inferior academic standards.
In that sense, much has changed.
In the state of Washington, the government decided to pour most its college money in to UW in Seattle, while letting the other schools in the state system, particularly Washington State, suffer the consequences.
In Oregon, the University of Oregon and Oregon State both floundered as they tried desperately to stay out of the "Bottom Ten" of collegiate football.
Idaho, after 1959, was never invited back to the conference.
From the 1960s to 1990s, USC, UCLA, Stanford (briefly) and Washington dominated the conference in football.
UCLA owned the NCAA basketball tournament from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.
Flash forward to 2012.
The University of California, Berkeley, which first labeled the Northwest schools academically inferior, came in last place in the Pac-12 in terms of academic performance of its football athletes.
Meanwhile, Oregon graduate Phil Knight founded Nike, which is now the dominant athletic shoe and apparel company in the world.
Beginning in the 1990s, Knight has poured about $300 million into UO. Most of that moolah has gone to ahtletics, but he also paid for the new school library, law school and numerous endowed professorships.
This came at a time when the state of Oregon cut its support from higher education from the 80 percent range to the 10 percent range.
In order to balance its budget, UO accepts almost as many out-of-state students (49 percent) as in-state students
Consequently, the average GPA of incoming freshman has risen to more than 3.5.
That's not to say that the school has improved that much, but the student population sure has.
Anyway, Oregon has upped its game, both academically and athletically.
The Pac-12 conference, which calls itself the "conference of champions" for all the NCAA titles it owns from basketball to football to volleyball and water polo, has emerged as one of the "power" conferences.
Along with Big 10, Big 12, ACC and SEC, the Pac-12 is considered an "automatic qualifier" (AQ) conference in the annual BCS rankings.
These five conferences absorb almost all of the financial windfall from football and basketball television contracts.
In the Pac-12, each member school gets more than $20 million per year from its television contracts.
The other AQ conferences get that much or more.
This obscene amount of money is what's fueling the current call for legal compensation of athletes.
As we've seen with the Sports Illustrated take-down of Oklahoma State University and it's blatant disregard of NCAA regulations, the game of college football is as corrupt as it's ever been with players being paid cash for tackles or touchdowns.
The minimum GPA requirement for schools in the SEC, the dominant football conference, is 1.8.
In the Pac-12, it's 2.7. Consequently, the SEC is the NFL's minor league.
The SEC pays its best players and the NCAA is powerless to do anything about it because the SEC commands the most television revenue of any conference in the country.
Money talks.
The NCAA, though, selectively enforces its rules on conferences, from the Pac-12 to lesser non-AQ conferences, that don't make as much money from television.
Is it fair that the SEC can get away with paying its players while the other conferences, save the Big-12, cannot?
Obviously not. That is why it would level the playing field if all the conferences could pay their players, particularly in the revenue-generating sports of football and men's basketball.
The complaint against such a plan is the fact that these athletes get a college education, where at some schools it could cost up to $200,000 for four years, for free.
Well, that would be a persuasive argument if a college degree meant more than the paper its printed on.
The fact of the matter is that, aside from a handful of colleges, a degree for the average football player isn't worth much.
In the Pac-12, only a Stanford degree has the cachet to be of use to a football player.
In the Big-10, only Northwestern comes close.
In the Big-12, there are no schools of lasting value to a football or basketball player, or even to a non-athlete.
In the SEC, Vanderbilt has some credibility in the South, but not much elsewhere.
In the ACC, only Duke can approach Stanford. Duke, though, is pathetic in football, but transcendent in basketball.
As for Harvard, Yale or other Ivy League schools, sports are clearly secondary to academics, unlike all the AQ schools.
At the very top schools, such as Cal Tech and MIT, sports don't matter at all.
But, without football and basketball TV revenue, most AQ conference public schools would be hard-pressed to keep tuition below $30,000 a year for all students.
We have long passed the point where there are student-athletes in college. They are athletes first, and students second, if at all.
It's ridiculous to claim otherwise.
It's time to pay them for the money they bring in and for keeping college a tad more affordable for all students.
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