Inquirer Editorial: Isn’t it time to start paying major-college athletes?

Shock was not exactly the public reaction to this week's allegation that University of Miami football players had accepted cash, cars, and prostitutes from a team booster.

Hardly a month goes by without some new episode of student athletes behaving badly. The Ohio State team - accused of trading rings, awards, and autographs for expensive tattoos and money - barely had time to serve as football's bad boys before being supplanted by Miami.

The allegations against Miami come from a donor to the university who was a frequent guest on the Hurricanes' sidelines, Nevin Shapiro, and who is currently serving 20 years in prison for concocting a $930 million Ponzi scheme.

During his sentencing in June, federal prosecutors said Nevin used investors' funds to pay "student athletes who were attending a local university in the Miami area to which Shapiro made significant donations."

In exclusive interviews with Yahoo! Sports, Nevin said, "Hell, yeah, I recruited a lot of kids for Miami." He said he lured high school students into playing for the Hurricanes by taking them to nightclubs, strip joints, his house, and his boat.

Shapiro said he worked with several Miami coaches. This was before former Temple coach Al Golden became Miami's head football coach in December.

Nevin's extravagance didn't end once a kid became a Hurricane. He told Yahoo that seven coaches and 72 athletes had accepted gifts from him over 10 years, including 12 current football players, among them starting quarterback Jacory Harris.

The NCAA is investigating, and there is a lot of talk about the master of all collegiate athletics dusting off its "death penalty," which bans a team from competition for at least a year and has been used only five times.

In the meantime, the Miami scandal has added urgency to an ongoing discussion of how to compensate student athletes without actually paying them to perform. It's OK for coaches to get million-dollar contracts and shill for shoemakers and sports drinks, you see, but the children must be spared.

The talk centers on giving student athletes a "cost of attendance" stipend. That's because by NCAA rules, so-called full athletic scholarships can only include tuition, fees, room, board, and required books. There's no cash for personal items, transportation, or going to a movie.

Instituting such a system, however, wouldn't be so easy. Not every school can afford the roughly $3,000 per athlete that major schools would provide in addition to a scholarship. That would mean some schools might have a recruiting advantage.

That's not to mention the looming Title IX question of whether all sports, especially women's, would get the stipends, too.

In any case, cost-of-attendance stipends won't be enough to buy the bling, cars, and hookers some sports agent is going to dangle in front of a potential NFL player.

So many major-college athletic programs are in effect serving as minor-league teams for the pros, maybe it's time that they paid their student athletes accordingly.