SCOTUS hearing arguments Wednesday!
Here’s one of my favorite parts of the story:
Keep the streak alive, SCOTUS!
Even if the schools prevail in the SC, they will only succeed in delaying the inevitable. Public opinion has turned.
The consternation among school athletic officials is going to be wonderful to watch.
The primary argument the NCAA’s lawyers appear to be using this morning is “our fans don’t want us to pay our players. They like the game BECAUSE they know the players aren’t paid (beyond the scholarship and Pell Grants, which are ok).”
That’s a bullshit argument, of course, and is not finding much sympathy with the conservative justices, whose conservative instincts are to oppose restrictions in earnings. But their conservative instincts also make them “wary of blowing up (destroying) college sports” if they rule in favor of the plaintiffs (players).
The internal conflicts for some of them must be crushing: Do I make the right decision per the law and help poor black kids or do I protect the status quo?
I came in to post about the same thing:
From this AP article:
You would prolly write them a check, Patrick.
That’s how most businesses operate. But then most businesses aren’t illegal monopoly cartels operating to control aspects of state-funded youth education and organized sports.
I think requiring schools to pay their scholarship athletes is a bad idea. Instead, I think schools should have the freedom to do so if it makes sense within their missions and budgets.
That’s a very different thing than allowing athletes to make whatever they can, which I believe in whole heartedly. If boosters or corporations want to give athletes money for their services, something which is legal in every instance except the NCAA rulebook, then they should without ramification.
I think the entire business model of the NCAA and college sports needs to be thrown out; start over and do it at least somewhat equitably this time.
But in this particular instance, I’m not in favor of the schools simply keeping all the revenue that is generated by the athletes.
We could happily speculate all day about how schools and supporters would change their behaviors if the restrictions on athlete pay are completely lifted. Maybe boosters for whom athletics is super important (something I don’t get at all) would shift tons of their donations toward player enticements. Would you rather underpay your coach or your talent?
If that happens, I think schools would still be ok if the stadiums kept filling on Saturday and the tv revenue kept flowing in. Maybe they could use that money better to assist the thousands of other students who don’t care about sports. But if their competitiveness in the big sports slips, I could see them feeling compelled to subsidize said sports. Spending that money may be important to some but I think they can just find other schools in a similar boat to play instead (partly because I don’t care about all that shit that college football/basketball fans care about).
An interesting thing to note in all of this is how fast, somewhat like gay marriage and weed, public opinion has changed, at least in some circles of US culture. Especially the sports media, which still carries some weight with the public (though not nearly as much as it once did). I guess I should note that this movement started well over a decade ago and mainstream sports media has only recently climbed aboard.
The most vigorous opponents – outside of the schools themselves – remain the most ardent fans, who largely fit a certain, um, demographic.
And when the athletes from the non-“revenue-generating sports” - which, in pretty much every case, includes every women’s sport - complain, what do you do then? Especially if the school announces, “Because of ‘unexpected’ additional expenses, we now have to drop pretty much every men’s sport except football, basketball, and the four cheapest ones we can find so we have the NCAA-mandated minimum six men’s sports”?
When that happens “you” admit that your business model is based on exploiting the workers because of their age and you start over, building a business that is not based on exploiting the workers.
If the business owners can’t figure out how to have their business without exploiting the workers, then I guess there really isn’t much demand for their product.
The NCAA is a modern plantation.
Most of the NCAA isn’t about “demand for their product” - otherwise, Divisions II and III, as well as sports other than football, basketball, ice hockey, and maybe lacrosse, wrestling, and volleyball, wouldn’t exist.
I think that the problem is, the NCAA can’t tell the difference between “athletes treating schools only as minor league professional sports organizations” and “athletes legitimately using college football/basketball as a development step towards the NFL/NBA.”
“100% unrestricted” NIL rights won’t work, for one very simple reason; nothing stops a school from paying its players and then claiming, “We’re not paying them to play; we’re just paying for their NIL rights, just as any other individual or business can do”?
That’s what I’m hoping for.
I disagree that this is a problem, let alone that it is the problem.
What do you mean “won’t work”? Are you still trying to cling to the notion of “amatuerism” as something other than “work for the pittance our illegal cartel allows because apparently we have to give y’all something”?
So you think that an athlete should be allowed to play for a college’s football/basketball team without actually having to be a student? The NCAA certainly doesn’t - in fact, that’s pretty much why the “amateurism” rule was created. The coaches aren’t students; why should the players have to be?
“Won’t work” in that the school would be paying the players directly. Yes, that is a problem, if not a number of them, and yes, I am about to say “Title IX.” It is not going away; in fact, with people like Ocasio-Cortez, Warren, and Harris in positions of power, it may end up being strengthened and enforced tougher. Look at the fiasco with the basketball tournament weight rooms. How soon before somebody compares the way men’s and women’s lacrosse are handled, and then notices that there are 119 Division I women’s lacrosse schools to only 74 with men’s lacrosse?
I have already pointed out how the teams that want to get away with paying their football and men’s basketball athletes can do it legally, but I seriously doubt that it’s ever going to happen.
I’m fine with having the student requirement; that’s not controversial, I don’t think. I’m against all economic activity being curtailed and the student becoming a de facto indentured servant or being otherwise unreasonably oppressed.
Someone majoring in Business Administration is free to help their professors and advisors pursue grant money, research projects, etc. in competition with others, even while maintaining a job at the corporation of their choice. They could also endorse products and services willy-nilly, were they persuasive enough to convince others to pay them to do so.
Why shouldn’t an athlete be similarly free?
This “problem” can be easily solved by acknowledging that the entire model of the NCAA is a bad one and starting over. If the goal is simply “all athletes must be students” then the NCAA has strayed so far away as to be seemingly unaware they are still trying to do that.
Title IX requires equal opportunity for participation. It has no mandate over boosters and the financial arrangements they make with players (or will make when the restrictions are killed once and for all).
Did anyone listen to last week’s oral arguments in NCAA v. Alston? I started a thread about this case back when the 9th Circuit ruled, but it generated basically no interest. I was going to start another one about the Supreme Court hearing, but figured that this thread was the place where any discussion of the arguments would be most likely to get attention.
Seth Waxman, the NCAA’s counsel, took a pretty good hammering from a number of justices, both liberal and conservative. It’s always dangerous to predict Supreme Court case outcomes, but if I were a betting man, I’d wager that the decision isn’t going to go great for the NCAA.
Of course, even if they lose this case, the devil will be very much in the details. It’s a complicated issue, and much will turn on exactly how the opinion is written, and the extent to which the court is willing to use the rule of reason to set limits (or not) to what the players may or may not get paid. If you want to hear a good, detailed debate and discussion about the legal issues in play here, I recommend the latest episode of the National Constitution Center’s We The People podcast. If you’re interested in the “rule of reason” that plays such an important role in anti-trust cases, I tried to explain it in my other thread, linked above.
Quite frankly, I think that the NCAA’s “amateurism” defense of its anti-competitive practices is, perhaps, one of the most ridiculous arguments I’ve heard, and if it weren’t for the amounts of money involved here, I’d be stunned that they could make it with a straight face. The funny thing is that this idea of using “amateurism” as part of a pro-competitive argument in an anti-trust case was basically handed to the NCAA in a case they lost (NCAA v. Board of Regents, University of Oklahoma [1984]) by a court that was commenting on the general nature of college sports, but that never actually claimed that the NCAA’s amateur status was the reason behind its legal decision.
There’s actually a really nice amicus brief (PDF) in this case, written by a group of historians, that basically dismantles the whole “amateurism” argument. They point out that “financial favors” have been part of college sports from the earliest intercollegiate sporting events in the United States, and argue that, “While some may consider the notion of amateurism charming or noble, it is a cynical fiction as far as top-tier college sports are concerned” (pp. 7-8). They and other amici also note that the end of amateurism has not exactly killed the public appetite for events like the Olympic Games.
They argue that “amateurism” is just a convenient fig-leaf used by administrators and NCAA executives who don’t want to pay the people who produce the entertainment.
As a non-American, I’d also point to rugby union as another example of a game has thrived as a professional sport, despite administrators who clung to amateurism for decades, arguing that paying the players would threaten the sport.
Leaving aside specific legal issues related to anti-trust law, I find it really hard to ignore the racial dimension in this case. NCAA executives and college administrators constitute a largely white group of people, profiting from the under-compensated labor of players who are disproportionately black. African Americans make up about half of the players in top football and basketball programs, meaning that blacks (about 12.5 percent of the US population) are represented at the most lucrative college sports at about four times their representation in the general population.
Not only that, but studies consistently show that black Americans support paying college athletes at considerably higher rates than white Americans. Moreover, a study published in 2017 found that “racial resentment was among the strongest predictors of white opinion on NCAA compensation policy.” That is, the study found that there was, among whites, a correlation between opposition to paying college athletes and prejudice against African Americans. I have the whole study, if anyone wants to read it.
While the justices didn’t really get into the racial issues in the oral arguments last week, quite a few of them raised the issue of exploitation more generally, and seemed to see amateurism as the sham that it is.
Clarence Thomas asked the NCAA lawyer, Seth Waxman, the following question:
Waxman noted that the NCAA previously has a rule limiting payment to coaches, but it was struck down. Thomas retorted:
Samuel Alito then started hammering away:
Then Elena Kagan:
Kagan asked why there needs to be cooperation among the colleges on the cost of labor. Waxman replied by appealing to amateurism as the thing that differentiates college sports from pro sports:
Kagan then came back at him with evidence from the trial in the lower court:
And by the way, leaving aside actual evidence presented at trial, is there anyone at all in this conversation who really believes that tens of millions of Americans would just stop watching college football if the players started getting paid? Does anyone really believe that all of those stadiums would suddenly be empty every Saturday, or that people would turn off their TVs on Saturday afternoons?
Speaking of Saturdays, one thing that never seems to be brought up in the argument about competition in college sports, much to my surprise, is the scheduling. If college football is really competing with professional football, why isn’t the Texas/Oklahoma game, or the Ohio State/Michigan game, ever scheduled at 1.00 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon? After all, if college football claims to be actually competing with the NFL, why not schedule some games at the same time that the Cowboys are playing the Eagles, or the Packers are suiting up against the Bears?
Anyway, Brett Kavanaugh had a few things to say as well:
After all that, Waxman must have felt a bit like a running back after 40 carries. 
[All oral argument quotes from here.]
I didn’t read the entire post, but this part jumped out at me.
If I’m running a business that competes with another, that doesn’t mean going toe-to-toe with them where they are the strongest. I’m going to look for areas where they are weak, find customers or markets that my competitor is not serving. Sports fans with free time on Saturday are a market not served by the NFL, just the sort of customers that a competing football league would hope to reach.
And personally, I think the NCAA are a bunch of massive hypocrites. If their guiding purpose is school spirit and amateurism, then let’s really embrace it. That means giving out event tickets free to students, no selling the broadcast rights to the games, no profiting off the images of the athletes, no licensing or endorsement deals with sporting goods companies, no logos on the team uniforms…