I have a lot of thoughts about some of the arguments here, so I’ll try my best to organize them.
1. “Nobody is forced to play in the NCAA. They knew what they signed up for”. While it’s technically true that nobody is compelled under threat of penalty to compete at the NCAA level, they certainly do have a monopoly on athletic competition for college aged individuals. The fact that the athletes knew the terms is a completely irrelevant defense for unfair practices, which is why judges of all political backgrounds are consistently making rulings that the NCAA is violating anti-trust laws, which is fairly remarkable in the current climate.
2. “They were getting a free education. Asking for anything else is just greedy.” The fact that so many players were known to be getting paid under the table under the old rules plus all the NIL money being thrown around now shows that there’s definitely a market for paying more than a scholarship, so it again comes back to the anti-trust rulings.
There’s also the fact that just because something is “valued” at a certain amount doesn’t mean it has the same usefulness to everyone. To use a slightly silly but helpful analogy, imagine you work at Toyota and instead of paying you money, they decide to give everyone a free car built to NASCAR specs. That might be “worth” $400K or so, with the potential to earn a lot more if you win races with it, but it wouldn’t affect your position in life nearly the same as getting paid in money. Unless you’re a professional level driver, have a pit crew, etc., it would actually be quite worthless to you.
Same kind of concept for how most colleges handled “free education”. We rag on UNC for how blatant they made it, but it’s one of the worst kept secrets in the industry that colleges will do anything to keep their star players eligible in the revenue sports. Things like lower admission standards for athletes, funneling them to easy classes/majors to maintain eligibility, “tutors” who do their work, etc. Lots of players in those situations aren’t getting much if any of the value they could theoretically get from a scholarship, and that’s mostly on the schools and speaks to how much money they stand to make out of the arrangement.
3. “It’s the schools that create all the value and following, not the players”. I don’t think you can so easily separate this. While I don’t disagree that the big programs are more valuable than any single player at a moment in time, it’s still a mutually beneficial relationship in the long run. The programs ultimately have the value that they do because of their reputation for consistently having good players. If Kentucky basketball or Alabama football were to start fielding DIII rosters, you can’t convince me that fan interest, TV coverage, etc. wouldn’t wane after a few years even with the brand in place.
Besides, nobody but a few radicals who don’t have much voice in actual policy making say that all of the money should go to the players. The estimates are that the House settlement will have players getting about 22% of the revenue, which is actually still a really good deal for the schools compared to the CBAs in pro leagues that assign anywhere from about 45% (MLB estimates) to 50% (most other leagues) of total revenue to the players.
4. Speaking of CBAs, the only way this is going to change is either through letting players unionize and collectively bargain the rules or to hope Congress passes an anti-trust exemption. The NCAA would desperately prefer the latter, which is why they’re lobbying so hard for the SCORE act, but it currently appears stalled with opposition coming from parts of both parties. Any attempt to impose limits on compensation outside those two mechanisms would appear to be blatantly illegal though. It’s time to find forward thinking solutions instead of trying to go back to a past that no longer exists.
