Let's end this pay-the-player debate right now.

Under the mighty influence of Title IX, athletic departments across the country preach fairness and equality for all.

How un-American is that?

Whatever happened to only the strong survive? Or survival of the fittest?

According to the Department of Education Web site, Penn State earned almost $28 million through football from July 2001 to June 2002, and spent almost $10 million on it. It made over $6.5 million on men's basketball and spent just under $2.5 million.

After evoking the power of the calculator, I figured that during that year the Penn State Athletic Department made 72 percent of its revenue on football and men's basketball, while those sports accounted for only 29 percent of total expenditures.

The famous argument for why football and men's basketball should fund virtually all other sports is that all athletes "deserve" the chance to play.

They work just as hard, people say. They love their sport, people say.

And I say: who cares?

The members of the crew team care about their sport. The racquetball players care about theirs. The biochemistry/molecular biology major cares about his major and he works hard at it. Why don't all these people deserve the fruits of the football team's labor?

Penn State's legendary head coach Joe Paterno, a graduate of Brown, had always deplored the addition of games to the schedule because of the stress it caused the student-athletes.

Then, just last season, he saw his team take the field at Beaver Stadium eight times and play 13 games, all for the sake of money.

Paterno can't just concentrate on coaching football anymore. He's carrying the whole athletic department on his back. It's a heavy load, and it's going to keep growing. In turn, he'll continue to disperse the weight onto his unpaid players' shoulders.

Not that the scholarship players mind. Football is what they're here for.

Only the NCAA, by using bloated and hollow words like "amateurism" and "integrity" would continue to perpetuate the blatant, but awfully profitable, lie that anything different is happening here.

Let's face it: the top players in college football and men's basketball are not in any way amateurs. They are pros in training. Every scholarship football player at this university came here with dreams of playing pro ball.

So let them focus on that. Cut out the schoolwork altogether.

Let them spend two or three years here playing football full-time, while receiving a small stipend that would be uniform in the new league.

Yes, there'd be a minor league football organization, run through the facilities, coaches and traditions of the top colleges in the nation and directly tied to the NFL, that would serve as the business front for all this.

After the players play this new "college" ball for a few years, they could give pro ball a shot and probably make a whole lot of money.

Whatever happens with their pro careers -- success or failure -- there will be a scholarship back here waiting for them when it ends. They'll come back able to focus on class, their priorities finally straight in the mind of the professors.

No more charade. Call a pro athlete a pro athlete.

The rest of the athletes can keep playing, but in a downsized environment.

They'll have to live without the football team's money and the athletic department would be forced to operate under the same standards as the school of business or communications.

That is to say, it would have to answer to somebody and operate under an actual budget.

The soccer teams won't be able to travel as much. The baseball team won't get new equipment so often. There will be more hours on buses for all the teams, and less on airplanes.

But they will all still get the chance to play. That's what it's all about, right?

This idea, by the way, isn't my own. It was conjured up by Rick Telander, a former defensive back at Northwestern. He also covered college football for Sports Illustrated in the late 1980's.

But he walked away from college football in disgust.

Maybe he realized that the NCAA had no problem abusing young male athletes for the good of no one other than the NCAA.