National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston [pdf]
supremecourt.gov
National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston [pdf]
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Re: National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston [pdf]
#2Alternate headline: "Supreme Court unanimously sides with former college players in dispute with NCAA about compensation" (from ESPN).
Note that this is a narrow ruling about the NCAA limiting educational compensation and what scholarships can encompass-- but some justices gave indications that they disagree with the NCAA compensation restrictions at large.
Re: National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston [pdf]
#3Kavanaugh hits the nail in the head in his concurring opinion.
> In my view, that argument is circular and unpersuasive. The NCAA couches its arguments for not paying student athletes in innocuous labels. But the labels cannot disguise the reality: The NCAA’s business model would be flatly il- legal in almost any other industry in America. All of the restaurants in a region cannot come together to cut cooks’ wages on the theory that “customers prefer” to eat food from low-paid cooks. Law firms cannot conspire to cabin lawyers’ salaries in the name of providing legal services out of a “love of the law.” Hospitals cannot agree to cap nurses’ income in order to create a “purer” form of helping the sick. News organizations cannot join forces to curtail pay to reporters to preserve a “tradition” of public-minded journalism. Movie studios cannot collude to slash benefits to camera crews to kindle a “spirit of amateurism” in Hollywood. Price-fixing labor is price-fixing labor. And price-fixing labor is ordinarily a textbook antitrust problem because it extinguishes the free market in which individuals can oth- erwise obtain fair compensation for their work.
Re: National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston [pdf]
#4From "Law & Crime" [1]:
> Essentially, this is a classic violation of antitrust law. What the NCAA is arguing, however, is that it should be allowed an exemption to that law. The Court wasn’t willing to play ball on that one.
> Justice Gorsuch made short work of the argument that the NCAA is entitled to an exemption on the grounds that it is a “joint venture.” Reasoning that “student-athletes have nowhere else to sell their labor,” the justice wrote, “[e]ven if the NCAA is a joint venture, then, it is hardly of the sort that would warrant quick-look approval for all its myriad rules and restrictions.”
[1] https://lawandcrime.com/supreme-court/unanimous-supreme-cour...
Re: National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston [pdf]
#5Kavanaugh hits the nail in the head in his concurring opinion. > In my view, that argument is circular and unpersuasive. The NCAA couches its arguments for not paying student athletes in innocuous labels. But the labels cannot disguise the reality: The NCAA’s business model would be flatly il- legal in almost any other industry in America. All of the restaurants in a region cannot come together to cut cooks’ wages on…
What's even worse with NCAA compensation is that it is limited to a scholarship and the value of that scholarship is tied to the cost of a given college or university. If an athlete is given a scholarship to an in-state public university their compensation might be $25,000 per year versus another student attending a higher cost private school who could be getting paid $75,000 per year effectively.
You then have the value of the different degrees to the market (which is separate from the cost) so it is very possible that certain student athletes are obtaining a degree worth hundreds of thousands of future dollars in the market versus some who get 4 years of room and board to play sports, make the university money, and then maybe they do not even end up with a degree by the time their eligibility expires (see data on student athlete graduation rates).
Re: National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston [pdf]
#6"I deleted n pages of someone's rules today"
Does this mean players can just do the straightforward thing and negotiate lucrative contracts with schools and we can forego all the backdoor, indirect compensation and self-inflicted corruption that goes on now? If so then these institutions can just be what they are in a straightforward way; football teams that also happen to fund a legacy educational branch.
Re: National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston [pdf]
#7The solution in my opinion is to do away with college athletic scholarships and preferred admission for athletes. Let school's field their sports teams from their normal student bodies and ensure that those teams are truly amateur and the participants really are "student-athletes". Let the NBA and the NFL field their own semi-professional minor leagues like baseball does. If these schools have to start paying their football and basketball players (and lets be perfectly clear, that's what this is about), it will be the absolute death of virtually every other men's sport at the college level, and will likely only leave enough women's sports to offset the football team due to Title IX. I won't even get into the ridiculous hypocrisy of our institutions of higher learning pouring billions of dollars into a sport that is proven to cause brain damage, while cutting other sports that don't. That is not at all what college athletics should be about, it should be about extracurricular opportunities for real students. I think the Division 3 model (no sports scholarships/no backdoor admissions) has been much more successful and has provided many more opportunities for students (men and women) to compete in a wider variety of sports. I say this as someone who was a college athlete on scholarship years ago and still coaches high school.
Re: National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston [pdf]
#8For more about the egregious ways in which the NCAA treats student-athletes, this is a great book:
Re: National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston [pdf]
#9The solution in my opinion is to do away with college athletic scholarships and preferred admission for athletes. Let school's field their sports teams from their normal student bodies and ensure that those teams are truly amateur and the participants really are "student-athletes". Let the NBA and the NFL field their own semi-professional minor leagues like baseball does. If these schools have to start paying their f…
> it will be the absolute death of virtually every other men's sport at the college level
Why's that?
Re: National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston [pdf]
#10The solution in my opinion is to do away with college athletic scholarships and preferred admission for athletes. Let school's field their sports teams from their normal student bodies and ensure that those teams are truly amateur and the participants really are "student-athletes". Let the NBA and the NFL field their own semi-professional minor leagues like baseball does. If these schools have to start paying their f…
> it will be the absolute death of virtually every other men's sport at the college level Why's that?
In the current system, schools need to have an equivalent number of sports teams (and slots) for men and women, with the same number of scholarships (the law governing this is called Title IX). Generally speaking, women's sports don't bring in money for schools, whereas football at a competitive school will bring in money in the form of TV deals and even donations from alumni. So essentially, the football and basketball teams subsidize the rest of the athletic department. If you had to pay the athletes in these sports, then there'd be less money to go around for other teams that don't generate revenue. But at a minimum, you'd still need a few women's teams because of Title IX.
EDIT: to clarify, I personally think it's ridiculous that star college athletes don't get paid given how much time those athletes put in and how much money they bring in for schools, but I also think that at least at the schools with huge athletic programs it'll have some effect on other sports.