Paying College Athletes?

The new sports blog at National Review, Right Field, has an interesting post up about whether college athletes should be paid. There's a number of arguments noted which are mostly familiar, but one was presented that I hadn't heard or thought of previously:

In other words, a significant chunk of top-level FBS programs are losing money. Should those programs be obliged to pay their football and basketball players, even though they aren’t actually producing a net profit? Or should only moneymaking programs be forced to offer player salaries? Would it be “fair” to have a system in which roughly half of all FBS schools paid their players while the other half didn’t? Do we really want blue-chip recruits picking a college based on financial compensation? Wouldn’t the wealthiest programs just scoop up all the best talent?

Meanwhile, would each salaried player on a given team be paid the same amount? If not, who would decide whether the All-American linebacker deserved more money than the All-American wide receiver, or whether the star point guard was more valuable than the star power forward? Would 18-year-olds be negotiating “contracts” with officials in their athletic department? Would they be hiring agents before high-school graduation? And how would all this affect those sports programs that depend on football and basketball revenue to stay afloat?

Can you imagine how much of a mess it would actually be to pay players? What most sports journalists seem to mean when they talk about this is that schools in the FBS should pay their players, possibly major basketball programs too. But how would you end up not paying the women's field hockey team or other equivalent? Can you imagine the mess this would turn into? Granted, that doesn't mean the idea couldn't be considered, but I can't imagine a more unenjoyable drain on college sports than this would surely be.