As college sports begins its first season in which players for the nation’s biggest programs will receive stipends worth as much as several thousand dollars per year, recent remarks from two prominent football coaches revealed that confusion still existed about how to treat athletes who are ostensibly amateurs and yet now receive checks from their teams.
In January, representatives from the 65 colleges in the Big 5 conferences — the Atlantic Coast, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pacific-12 and the Southeastern — gathered for the first time under a new governing structure that grants them autonomy to make rules in certain areas.