Postgame Press: You're an All-Star, get your game on, get paid

Win one for the little guy. After a lot of debating and a lot of waiting, a big decision shook up college athletics. A wise man of many words wrote about the problem earlier this year. Students-athletes are much more of one than the other. The discrepancy between the time they put into the sport versus the time they put in on the academic quad can be huge, but the discrepancy between their pay and their play was even larger: zero.

Up until very recently, college athletes were not paid. Not only that, they could not make money in any way associated with their performance. With the top-25 grossing NCAA football teams making more than $2.5 billion, the players who got them to championship games, were getting injured and risking their futures and being played as characters on Xboxes by kids like me across the country received no payment.

Finally, a decision came in the form of California’s recently passed Fair Pay to Play Act. The bill does not give college athletes salaries and pay them out of pocket. Instead, it takes one of the routes that others have proposed. With questions of how to pay, how much to pay whom and whether that would give an advantage to schools willing to pay more, giving actual salaries to student-athletes might be a lot less complicated and a lot less healthy to the system than this law.

The Fair Pay to Play Act rules that college athletes can profit off of themselves. They can hire agents and sign promotional endorsement deals and for the first time, see the money go to themselves. This may not seem like a huge deal, but to athletes like Shabazz Napier, who made a public statement about not being able to eat enough because he could not pay for it, it makes a huge difference. Oh, and Shabazz Napier won UConn the NCAA tournament the night after he said that. A major star for a team who helps them win a championship and he could not make a buck off of his name or his jersey sales (the one with his number on it but not his name). I will tell you personally that I have bought Rutgers jerseys before and I exclusively buy the number my favorite player wears. I would play NCAA Football 2009 for hours and stare at Arkansas' Darren McFadden’s likeness on the cover. He got no money for it.

I know that this favors some college athletes more than others. Men’s football and basketball stars will profit much more than some of their fellow student-athletes. That being said, this is a great step in the right direction. No student should go hungry, period. Certainly, no student should go hungry when a Final Four appearance earns their school $8.3 million and they are a key proponent of why the team got there. Good for the law and NCAA for coming around. Let’s hope they keep an open mind.