crossed, however, when the athletes become university employees in addition to, or perhaps rather than, students. At that point you can no longer honestly call them "student-athletes". Not saying it is right or wrong, but it represents a big change.

Let me draw a comparison, weak though it may be.

My company is going through its annual United Way participation drive. UW is a very successful charitable vehicle. They have employees who go out and aggressively pursue donations to not only pay their staff (about 15% of total costs this year) but to fund the various charities under their umbrella. It is still a charity even though it has an essential and significant business element to it. They also recruit large numbers of volunteers to provide ongoing support to their charities and to staff various Days of Caring. The volunteers might get a T-shirt and some other trinkets as a token of their participation, along with their picture in a few publications, etc. This is analogous to how college football is today. The benefit to the athlete is the education (rather than T-shirts, etc). It is a pretty sweet benefit.

However, if UW starts PAYING a wage to those they used to call "volunteers", the whole face of the organization changes and it can no longer really be called a charity because it is more a business. The overhead increases dramatically and the need for funds mutliplies exponentially.

A weak analogy perhaps, but I really think that full professionalization of CFB represents a monumental shift, and opens itself up to additional, ever increasing costs and headaches.