NCAA Championship 2017: J.J. Redick congratulates UNC, wants athletes to get paid

The former Duke star shared his thoughts after the Tar Heels title win

After North Carolina won the program’s sixth national title on Monday night, Los Angeles Clippers guard J.J. Redick took to Twitter -- like many other celebrities -- to share a congratulatory message with the Tar Heels. As a former Duke player who once viewed them as an arch-rival (and might still), that is quite a show of sportsmanship.

But Redick had a more pressing topic to address -- that of paying student-athletes.

“Congrats to UNC. Seriously,” Redick tweeted. “Also -- every player on the court tonight should have been paid. Scholarships don’t count. Don’t @ me.”

That’s a pretty complicated proposition, and one that has been debated for years ad nauseam. But it wasn’t just a tweet fired from the hip at 1:07 a.m., even if that’s what it seems like at first glance. In a follow-up Tuesday with the Los Angeles Daily News, Redick again emphasized how important it is to compensate student-athletes and proposed possibly losing the current NCAA model altogether.

“It’s got to be something radical,” Redick said. “It’s not just, ‘Oh, let’s just pay every player $5,000.’ It really requires something really radical. And maybe that’s getting rid of college athletics as we know it.”

That is, in fact, quite radical. That’s not shifting around some money to give student-athletes some beer and popcorn money. That’s a complete overhaul of the system.

“If you’re playing in a sport that is making millions of dollars -- for either your school or the NCAA -- you should get a piece of that,” Redick said, via Sporting News. “And the scholarship doesn’t cover your piece -- your rightful piece. That’s my two cents.”