Jim Harbaugh brings back talk of revenue sharing with student-athletes
With the sudden and horrific injury suffered to senior offensive lineman Zak Zinter against Ohio State on Saturday, it made Jim Harbaugh think long and hard about his thoughts on profit sharing from earlier in the year.
With the way a season could end for a player in the blink of an eye, the need for student-athletes to start receiving a piece of the pie from revenue-sharing has never been more clear from Harbaugh's perspective.
He hopes others can see in the same light as he does.
"Who could be against the players being compensated for what they do? At least even minimum wage. I mean, who could argue against that — when there’s injury or not?" Harbaugh said during a pre-Big Ten championship game media call on Sunday. "I mean, the emotional buildup watching it on TV. There wasn't a commercial that went by, a sporting event that was played all week that you didn't see those two teams and the buildup and the hype and the talk about players’ legacies and everything that could possibly be rolled into one game on the line." And
"Then you see the amount of people that are benefiting financially from those players’ efforts out there. I wonder who could be against that? I ask other coaches to get on board, to use their platform and their voice for the student-athletes — not just football players, all student-athletes — to be sharing in this ever-increasing revenue. That was another thought that I had, and I just don't know who could be against that."
As for Zinter himself, Harbaugh went and visited him and his family in the hospital as he geared up for surgery on his leg.
From Harbaugh's perspective, it appears that Zinter is in high spirits and the gesture that the team showed once he was carted away from the game meant a lot to him.
"It was probably the best of the worst-case scenario because those bones will heal," Harbaugh said. "Other emotions, I know how that can affect a team. It can go one way or the other. ... You saw that with Blake, the touchdown on the next play and to flash up the 6-5. Zak was really moved by that."
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