Rich Rodriguez: “Pay the players with Food”

Here we go with another “pay the players” debate. This time, it’s not so much monetary though.

Rich Rodriguez, the Head Coach of the Arizona Wildcats says that they should be able to pay the players, but with food.

“Let’s allow all the schools to give all the athletes meals. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Right now, they get meals, but it comes out of their scholarship check. Let’s provide meals on top of the scholarship. Let us feed them breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

“If nothing else, that’s an easy solution to help them get through their college careers. And everyone wants to feed them right anyway. I think that’s an easier solution than trying to figure out what kind of stipend to give them.” said Rodriguez.

Now, from my point of view, I think that players should get paid but we won’t get into it. This however, is a good idea. Not only to save them on some scholarship funding, but it could benefit teams in the long run. If they are supplied the meals (hopefully better than the average school lunch) the Teams will be able to make sure that players are eating healthy. Of course it’s not going to stop them from going out and getting their own meals, but if a general food sanction was placed, teams wouldn’t have to worry about their guys or girls eating themselves out of the lineups.

In all reality, this could be a great suggestion – or it could be a worthless sentence. They’d have to figure out some uniform way of organizing it all to make sure it actually worked, but if they were able to figure something out it might be nice. Not only could it save colleges the headache of players ballooning, it’d also help out the players in monetary terms so they weren’t using scholarship funds to take part in it.

OCNN Sports Columnist – Justin Arbogast @NFLGuy_SK