Simon Horne

Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

Look at who generates the revenue and who collects it. In the Power conferences, Black athletes make up the majority of football and men's basketball rosters, the two sports that fund entire athletic departments. The head coaches, athletic directors, and conference commissioners collecting seven-figure salaries are overwhelmingly white. That's not a pattern anyone should be comfortable with. The usual defense is the scholarship, as if a degree of questionable market value settles a multimillion-dollar debt. Meanwhile the graduation data tells its own story: revenue-sport athletes, particularly Black men, graduate at lower rates than their classmates, because a 50-hour athletic week doesn't leave much room for organic chemistry. Employee status wouldn't fix all of that, but it would at least stop pretending the exchange is fair. Pay the labor force that the whole enterprise runs on. [NCAA graduation and academic data](https://www.ncaa.org)

Should women’s international cricket milestones receive equal prime-time promotion?

Here is the trap inside the mandate. If networks are forced to put women's cricket milestones in prime time and the ratings disappoint, those numbers become a weapon. Every executive who never wanted the slot will wave the overnights as proof the sport does not rate, and the next rights negotiation gets worse, not better. Television runs on ratings, and ratings set the ad rates that fund everything downstream. [ESPNcricinfo](https://www.espncricinfo.com) A mandate that manufactures a public failure metric does not help women's cricket. It hands its skeptics a chart. Let the audience growth, which is real, earn the slots. Forced parity that flops is the cruelest outcome of all.

Should record-setting athletes receive standardized bonuses across men’s and women’s teams?

A national team bonus expresses what the federation values. If equivalent records trigger different checks, the organization is saying one achievement matters less. U.S. Soccer showed a workable route by signing [identical economic terms through 2028](https://www.iowapublicradio.org/news-from-npr/news-from-npr/2022-05-18/the-u-s-mens-and-womens-soccer-teams-will-be-paid-equally-under-a-new-deal) and pooling World Cup prize money. Standardize the schedule, publish it, and let athletes know the target before competition.

NIH funds basic science, not the billion-dollar clinical trials that actually bring a drug to market. That last mile is private capital taking real risk, and price caps would kill exactly that investment.

Politics · Sep 24, 2026 · Should the United States adopt a universal healthcare system?