National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston [pdf]

The 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.

From &quot;Law &amp; Crime&quot; [1]:<p>&gt; 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.<p>&gt; 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.”<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lawandcrime.com&#x2F;supreme-court&#x2F;unanimous-supreme-court-sides-with-college-athletes-over-ncaa-heres-what-you-need-to-know&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lawandcrime.com&#x2F;supreme-court&#x2F;unanimous-supreme-cour...</a>

Alternate headline: &quot;Supreme Court unanimously sides with former college players in dispute with NCAA about compensation&quot; (from ESPN).<p>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.

Kavanaugh hits the nail in the head in his concurring opinion.<p>&gt; 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.

I think sports is a big blind spot for most HN users, so I would like to offer an informal Q&amp;A with me here in this thread. I am a former top-level division 1 football player that got a technical degree and now work in the IT&#x2F;software space.<p>I like to do these every once in a while because there is so much incorrect information and bad assumptions about high level college athletes that I feel the need to combat this when the opportunity presents itself. I haven&#x27;t read the posted SC opinion yet because I&#x27;m at work and currently eating a burrito. Don&#x27;t be afraid to ask probing questions, the worst that will happen is I will choose not to answer.

&quot;I deleted n pages of someone&#x27;s rules today&quot;<p>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.

For more about the egregious ways in which the NCAA treats student-athletes, this is a great book:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;B00LFZ8SF8&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;B00LFZ8SF8&#x2F;</a>

I think the NCAA should create an investment pool backed by individual students&#x27; contributions to revenue. So, you&#x27;re a star at Alabama. Based on your play time, jersey sales, you get a share of Alabama&#x27;s share of total revenue into the pool. It grows and after 5 years you are eligible to withdraw that share. It could be used as a buffer in case of career ending injuries or liquidated for profit with incentives to perhaps see out your college career.

tl;dr in 2 quotes from the decision. Wild shit that the NCAA got this far<p>&gt; The NCAA does not contest that its re-straints affect interstate trade and commerce and are thus subject to the Sherman Act.<p>&gt; With this much agreed it is unclear exactly what the NCAA seeks. To the extent it means to propose a sort of judicially ordained immunity from the terms of the Sherman Act for its restraints of trade—that we should overlook its restrictions because they happen to fall at the intersection of higher education, sports, and money—we cannot agree.