The University of Wyoming, too, announced that it would offer stipends to its student-athletes in 2015, resulting in a new expected annual cost of $700,000 to the athletic department. A year later, calls were being made for a reduction in the athletic department because of budgetary concerns. (Those cuts almost certainly would have been made, had it not been for a $4 million subsidy from the state government.)

Gene Smith, the athletic director at Ohio State University, has said that if the N.C.A.A. pay ceiling were lifted and he were pushed to pay basketball and football student-athletes more than their full-ride scholarship packages, he would not expect to maintain the same number of sports. The chancellor at the University of Wisconsin, Rebecca Blank, has also said that her school would consider cutting sports programs altogether.

Forcing the N.C.A.A. to pay student-athletes would undermine opportunities for the vast majority of them. It would create a winner-take-all system in which only a handful of top recruits would get a paycheck on top of earning a diploma debt-free.

Similar problems would arise in the case of so-called third-party payments, in which student-athletes could be paid for things like endorsements. Major brands like Nike would pay top football and basketball talent at the biggest schools, while student-athletes in other sports or at smaller programs would be ignored. Currently, corporate funds go to athletic departments and are generally distributed among all sports; with third-party payments, those funds could instead mostly go directly to a few student-athletes, starving the rest.

I am not opposed to young athletes who decide they would prefer to be paid cash to play sports. For those who think that a free education is insufficient as compensation for playing sports, there are other options: The National Basketball Association’s developmental league, for instance, offers $125,000 contracts to top high-school talent. Such athletes can also pursue a career playing for other domestic or overseas professional leagues.

Millions of student-athletes devote their sweat, blood and tears to sports. Some play football and basketball; others swim, run cross-country, play soccer or compete as gymnasts. Only a fraction of them generate money for their schools. We must ensure that the N.C.A.A. is able to preserve its commitment to all of them.

Cody J. McDavis is a student at the U.C.L.A. School of Law who played basketball for the University of Northern Colorado from 2012 to 2015.

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