By a 9-0 margin, the Supreme Court Inflicts Mortal Wounds to the NCAA
Yesterday, the Supreme Court, by a gob-smacking 9-0 margin, ruled that the NCAA’s limits on education-related expense reimbursements to “student-athletes” violates anti-trust law. The justices ruled that the NCAA is essentially an industry cartel which is illegally fixing wages. Wow. This is a ding-dong the witch is dead moment. Or if the witch isn’t dead, she’s rapidly melting as we watch with a mixture of horror and celebration.
Five conservative justices and four liberal justices – who otherwise agree on absolutely nothing – stated baldly that the NCAA is engaged in an illegal enterprise which is victimizing young people (of whom large percentages are disadvantaged Black and Brown men and women) for the benefit of Colleges, coaches, agents, TV networks, streaming platforms, advertisers, shoe companies, and a whole host of others.
I did a quick search online this morning for arguments in favor of keeping the status quo. All of them amount the same thing: bad things will happen if we tear down the current structure. Think about that. That’s the same argument used to defend slavery. “If we can’t use slaves to pick our cotton, all of Southern agriculture will become unprofitable and we won’t have enough money to pay for music lessons and cotillions for fine young ladies of breeding.” We stole the labor of African Americans for 400 years, isn’t that enough?
To all those folks who have an indelible emotional bond with the entity that provided your secondary education, who are worried about the second order effects of blowing up the NCAA, let me clear things up for you: IT DOESN’T MATTER. If something is both morally wrong and ILLEGAL, it must be ended, the consequences be damned. The consequences are entirely irrelevant. To put it another way, there is no reason why YOUR CONCERNS should be paid for by our country’s most talented young athletes! WE ARE SCREWING THEM. We’ve been screwing them for generations.
Will this lead to the end of so called “minor sports” on college campuses like golf or lawn bowling or whatever that were subsidized by men’s football? Sure, maybe. So frigging what? Is there a law or a constitutional amendment that amateur women’s soccer be supported by screwing highly talented football and basketball players? Is it THEIR PROBLEM and THEIR BURDEN to support women’s soccer? Hogwash.
This “need” to have college students playing all kinds of organized sports is no more important than a gazillion other things we might also like to see and NONE of those needs EVER should have a higher priority than the freedom of EVERY man or women to be paid what a free market for their labor will bear. THAT is what Supreme court just said with beautiful clarity and simplicity. If it walks and talks like a duck (an illegal price-fixing cartel), it’s a goddamn duck and no bullshit about school spirit and how wonderful it is that a future #1 draft pick in the NBA got a “free degree” in basket weaving changes it one iota.
Will this lead to smaller, poorer schools struggling to compete? Yes! So what?! Is is part of the Democratic or Republican platform that we must at all costs provide subsidies so that tiny Lafayette College can have a competitive football team? Rubbish. We have created a massive hyper-complex Frankenstein over the last century whereby amateur athletics are inextricably bound to secondary education. The US is the only country in the world where this is true. And the linchpin of the system was taking advantage of young men and women by dramatically underpaying them. That linchpin has been neatly and completely eliminated by the Justices and so the whole thing will, someway, somehow, fall apart and die. Now, hard choices await. Hard choices that have been pushed off for far too long.
Despite what Texas football fans think, God didn’t create college football and talented black (and Brown and Asian and White) athletes should get paid market value. Everything else is BS.