What is it about this big blog board and people’s unwillingness to let the relative little guy get a taste of the huge corporate money pie? First, we had McDonald’s nonsensical argument about appearance fees zapping gazillionaire Tiger Woods’ motivation. Now we have The Nutty Professor, aka Kiel Christianson, trying to protect the institutions that employ him from actually having to pay an extra small stipend for their athletic labor.

While I usually enjoy the professor’s off-the-wall rants, he’s gone out of his element here. This is actually a real-life issue and he shows as much grasp of reality as most people who’ve never left a cloistered college setting. It may offend The Nutty Professor and his tweed-jacketed brethren that there are jocks who want more than tuition, room, board and books paid above the table, but this is a big business. Nothing less, nothing more.

The only people still defending college athletics and its amateur ideals are two-faced blowhards who are trying to keep every bit of those $640 million March Madness TV contracts in their control. (Say hello NCAA President Myles Brand!) The players on the major money-printing football and basketball programs are more than earning that scholarship and any extras they get. They aren’t your regular college kids. Most college kids do not face the pressure of an ego-maniac coach only concerned with his next seven-figure shoe deal, an arena full of bozos and Nutty Professors screaming at them and those ever-present camera lights.

These players are pro athletes brought in to swell the universities’ coffers. And it’s about time they were recognized as such and compensated accordingly. Saying their already getting paid is a perfect professor copout. It shouldn’t be up to the boosters to dish out handshakes of cash. The colleges themselves should have to sull their pretty images and dip into their own deep pockets.

Unlike professors, these big-time college athletes don’t have a job for life. After four or five years, most of them are right back where they started from. No NBA or NFL career. No tenure. No official recognition that they were pros for four years.

Forget just getting paid. These guys deserve a university pension.

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