UConn Head Coach Randy Edsall: ‘Pay the Players’

A surprising move from a current NCAA head coach.

UConn head coach Randy Edsall made the surprising move Friday to call for the NCAA to allow its players to be paid. 

Edsall’s comments were inspired by the recent revelation by Yahoo Sports that several high-profile college basketball players received payments from a sports agency. He sent a tweet on Friday critical of a recent NCAA rule change that will allow schools to employ more people as player evaluators. 

It’s a position held by large swaths of the public and many members of the media but it’s a shock to see a current top-level head coach endorse the upheaval of the NCAA system. Edsall’s fellow college coaches, however, appear to take the opposite side. Clemson’s Dabo Swinney said in 2014 that he opposes paying players because “there’s enough entitlement in this world as it is.” Of course, if some of the billions generated by college athletics found its way into the pockets of the players, there’d be less for coaches like Dabo. (Swinney will make an average of $6.75 million annually until 2024.)

Edsall, who returned to UConn last season after an underwhelming five-year tenure at Maryland, earns an annual salary of $1 million. UConn’s men’s basketball coach, Kevin Ollie, earns $3 million a year and women’s coach Geno Auriemma earns $2.28 million.