In a ruling sure to have a sweeping effect on the sports landscape in America, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the NCAA cannot limit certain benefits of student-athletes under the guise of “amateurism” in what might be a death blow to the NCAA as we know it.
The Supreme Court on Monday said the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) cannot strictly limit certain benefits for student-athletes as a means of protecting their amateur status, delivering a blow to the behemoth organization as it battles efforts to allow collegiate athletes to receive some financial compensation.
The high court ruled unanimously in favor of the student-athletes, with Justice Neil Gorsuch delivering the opinion. The ruling is the most significant involving antitrust laws and the athletic association to come from the Supreme Court in decades.
Led by former University of West Virginia running back Shawne Alston, the dispute before the court centered around the NCAA’s rules restricting certain academic-related benefits for student-athletes, such as post-graduate scholarships, internships, computers and science equipment. A separate battle is playing out in state legislatures and on Capitol Hill over whether athletes can be compensated for use of their name, image and likeness.
Alston and a group of former Division I men’s and women’s college athletes argued the NCAA’s cap on education-related perks ran afoul of antitrust laws and rejected the organization’s claims that allowing the benefits to flow to athletes would threaten its amateurism model.
A federal appeals court last year sided with the athletes in the legal battle, ruling the NCAA couldn’t limit the benefits tied to education. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said academic benefits are different from professional salaries, and its decision paved the way for colleges to provide more of these perks to Division I players.
The NCAA, which rakes in roughly $1.1 billion annually, has for decades relied on a Supreme Court ruling from 1984 to justify its amateurism framework. While the court in that case found the organization violated the Sherman Act with its plan for television rights for college football games, it also said the NCAA “plays a critical role in the maintenance of a revered tradition of amateurism in college sports” and “needs ample latitude to play that role.”
Read the Supreme Court’s NCAA decision here:
NCAA
The holding is relatively narrow, as the quote notes, applying to academic-related benefits. Kavanaugh’s concurrence is more interesting, and an invitation to further cases, since his opinion is now that the Court has decided antitrust laws apply to the NCAA, the NCAA is most likely engaged in other practices that violate those laws.Report
Yeah. This ain’t the fun one. This is just saying “okay, you guys can start having fun now”.
Après cela, le déluge.Report
Yes
YES
The tiger is out.
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I have not read the decision which makes my comment totally irresponsible but I feel compelled to make it anyway. The rationale in this excerpt is extremely weak in the sense that it doesn’t distinguish between revenue and profit. Very, very few programs are profitable, even if they generate revenue.
Maybe Kavanaugh addresses this elsewhere but this really isn’t dispositive of anything.Report
It’s the kind of thing people say after a few beers.Report
Since the subject matter is college sports there’s a strong case that no one should be allowed to comment on it sober.Report
What does the NCAA say?
They say this:
While I may smile and nod along as I read that, I can’t help but remember that Return of the Jedi still hasn’t turned a profit.Report
My sympathy for the NCAA is limited. But the economic model they have now is based on men’s basketball and football subsidizing everything else. Maybe there’s more cash laying around, and I find the restrictions on endorsements for those with a market for them hard to justify. I’m just unconvinced that this can be done without gutting the stuff that operates at a loss.Report
Maybe it is because I went to a Division III school that had basketball but not football, I’m pretty sure that basketball did not pay for anything else. I do not even think they charged admission to games. I can’t even remember a big push to get people to go to games.Report
It certainly varies by school and program. My alma mater’s basketball team is a premier local sports attraction.Report
I think it’s rare for a school to have both a great basketball and football program.
There’s no financial benefit in it. Like, what do I know about UNC? Are the graduates any good? All I have to work with is the name recognition from basketball, but that reputation is going to open some doors. Adding a great football program wouldn’t make them any more famous though.Report
UNC is academically an excellent school, which is well-known to anyone who needs to know or otherwise cares. So is nearby Duke.
I don’t know what you mean by “rare” or “great.” Off the top of my head I can think of better-than-good football and basketball programs at Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Michigan, Michigan State, Stanford, and Ohio State.Report
Kavanaugh’s concurrence is surprisingly strong and logical. He is basically calling the NCAA out on this amateur bull feces and saying pay the athletes what they deserve.Report
Kavanaugh ends with, “The NCAA is not above the law.” How long before a bipartisan bill in Congress exempts them, at least in part?Report
I don’t think the NCAA has that much of a constituency for a bipartisan push to overturn this decision.Report
A few years ago Congress passed the Save America’s Pastime Act on a bipartisan basis, which ensured minor league ballplayers remained excluded from the federal minimum wage and overtime laws. (They were already excluded as seasonal recreation, but the training regiment had essentially extended throughout the year)
I am not confident that the potential dissolution of college football/basketball is too risky for politicians to ignore. If University of Alabama were to dissolve its recruiting apparatus and offer signees $66,000 per year, while Northwestern University tried to recruit on the grounds that their free tuition, room and board is worth more than that, I guess the market will tell us which school is better at football.Report
It would just sort into 10 or 12 premier money-making programs and everything else collapsing into non-existence or student clubs with players paying to participate.Report
Sort of where students would play sports for recreation, as amateurs?Report
Sure, if you want to minimize the substance you can look at it that way. The real question IMO is whether the case for paying those few who can command it merits eliminating the free rides for the many who can’t.Report
Right, and it calls into question why we have college sports in the first place.
If the NFL and NBA want a training system to feed younger players into their system, maybe they should pay the cost of establishing minor leagues instead of asking the taxpayers and tuition payers to do it via colleges.Report
That’s certainly an understandable angle if you don’t see the point of any of it. I don’t think if will change the minds of those who do.Report
Next you’ll say they should pay for their own stadiums.Report
Isn’t that what it already largely is?Report
You have a handful of elite programs that are truly profitable. But there are plenty that are popular enough and that drive a lot of gross revenue but the net is negligible or negative.Report
One of my alma maters, a large private research university, made a pretty public stand about eliminating their football program or drop to (division III?). They issued a study that concluded that only about a dozen schools were making money off of their programs, so they weren’t doing something wrong. They decided to keep the program because it maintained interactions with alumni donors and served as advertising for the school. And presumably the threat of ending football brought some money in.
I went to a football game once while I attended, something like an 82-4 shellacking from Alabama, who probably paid for the game. Twenty years of student loans didn’t warm me to the hat passed my way.Report
Every study I’ve heard of has come to a similar conclusion. 10-12 of them actually make money. The rest are some level of economic basket case but serve as critical branding and some other functions that make eliminating them hard to stomach.
My undergrad’s football team shows up every 10 or 15 years for a flash in the pan but is generally meh. The basketball team on the other hand arguably has the most intense fan base in the region including when compared to the pro sports franchises. People absolutely attend the school to be part of it. Nevertheless there’s an endless stream of stories bubbling up about financial issues with the athletics department. A good friend of mine worked on the donations and gift side and the stories he would occasionally tell after a few beers were quite eye opening.Report
And it saved the minor leagues for all of 8 years.Report
Fair but a lot of things can change in a few years or less and the tide is turning against the NCAA. I don’t think Congress is that unaware of how bad it would look to reverse the Supremes on this one.Report
They need to institute a salary cap.Report
The NCAA, probably not. Alabama football, OTOH, may have considerable support. North Carolina men’s basketball. If the NCAA announced that it was dissolving next month (July), the Power Five conferences would have an inter-conference arrangement for men’s football worked out before fall practices started. Basketball would take a little longer because they have to figure out how to deal with schools like Gonzaga.Report
Athletic Directors and Football coaches at SEC schools are generally the most well paid people on campus. Sometimes basketball coaches. This tells you all you really need to know about the value placed on the teams by their schools.Report
Vox’s senior correspondent has weighed in on this 9-0 decision:
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Assuming he wasn’t being sarcastic – which is sometimes hard to tell in tweets – the more interesting question is what does this decision tell us about SCOTUS views on whether NCAA Sports are really businesses. That would make he anti-trust shrinkage all the more interesting.Report
Assuming sarcasm on his part, given his history with ThinkProgress and the Center for American Progress, strikes me as a lot shakier ground than “nope, he actually thinks this”.
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