Written by Gene Zarnick | 29 August 2009

College students are poor.  Well, most of them at least.  College student athletes are not only poor, but usually don't have the time to handle another job, while they are participating in their sport.  There's always the debate about if college athletes should get paid or not.  Is the school capitalizing off of them?  The athletes get paid because they attend school for free?  There are always plenty of questions when it comes to that issue.  There's ways around the issue though.  We've seen Brandon Jennings, a high school graduate, play overseas for a year before entering the NBA draft.  Now we have a high school player, Jeremy Tyler, who finished his junior year of high school going to Europe to get paid to play.  Baseball players have the choice of playing in college or becoming professionals and playing in the minor leagues.  The same situation is with hockey as well.  The only major sport where it seems that the college player doesn't have a choice anymore is football.  I have the solution for the player as well as a league trying to attract an audience, the UFL.

The UFL should draft high school football players and pay them to play.  Just think how exciting it would be to have a high school player draft where some of the top talent went to a professional football league, earned money, and used the league as their stepping stone to the NFL.  The UFL needs an audience, they need to find their niche and I don't think getting washed up NFL veterans or other players who couldn't cut it in the NFL on their teams is going to get football fans giddy to come watch their product.  As a high school player you would finally have a choice.  You could get paid to play football, compete on a fairly high level, and gain the necessary exposure for the NFL to see you.  Now initially high school players may not jump ship to the UFL in droves, but if the league could prosper and expand then more and more players would come.  The NCAA wouldn't be happy, but who cares, they won't change a single thing to make their product better, unless you're the less than 1% of people who actually likes the BCS.  This wouldn't hurt the NFL at all as they could still keep their rule of the player has to be out of high school for three years, plus they would get to see the players play with other NFL caliber athletes.

So I hope some high school player goes against the grain and joins a UFL team because then maybe someday the UFL will not be another failed attempt at a professional football product, but be the minor league system to the NFL.  We would get to see a player draft every year with standout high school athletes and finally players would be able to get paid to play football and still have the same opportunity to be drafted in the NFL.

Each day I will be writing an article on a specific topic.  This is College Football Saturday so stop by next week to see what I have to say about the subject.