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Bill To Compensate College-Athletes Moves Forward In Legislature

Later this week, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament — March Madness — officially tips off. For a second consecutive spring, the pandemic is dramatically affecting how the tournament will be played — including limits on locales and regions.

But one debate that pops up among many fans — and is renewed during March Madness — is how much money the tournament brings in.

Thanks to television contracts and passionate fans, the number can reach into the billions of dollars. But the student-athletes, the players, don’t directly benefit financially from that.

We’re beginning to see some changes, though, in compensating those student-athletes. The Arizona Legislature is moving forward by large margins with a bill that would allow those student-athletes to make money from use of their name, likeness or image.

For more about those developments, The Show spoke with University of Georgia Professor Thomas Baker III.

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Steve Goldstein was a host at KJZZ from 1997 to 2022.