to simply make athletes employees of the university.

I went to school at BYU and my first job on campus was working in food services. I was a student and an employee. It wasn’t messy at all.

Couldn’t these players be students and employees of the football team for example?

I sincerely don’t understand why it’s thought of as messy. At any point I could have taken my food service skills to another university and been a student / employee somewhere else. It seems like athletics has always been a huge profit center for universities but we’ve been getting a lot of the labor (players) for nearly free.

If we pay them, then there could be contracts and buy outs and expectations clearly articulated. Regular performance reviews, etc.

It seems like this is where this mess has to go or the mess will never get resolved.