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“The Supreme Court on Monday… unanimously ruled that the National Collegiate Athletic Association cannot prohibit its member schools from providing athletes with certain forms of education-related benefits, such as paid post-graduate internships, scholarships for graduate school, or free laptops or musical instruments.” SCOTUSblog
Both sides support the decision and additionally call for student athletes to be paid:
“The NCAA’s only remaining justification for protecting [its] monopoly power, Gorsuch writes, is the protection of amateurism in sports. However, Gorsuch points out that this amateurism is curiously targeted. The NCAA makes billions of dollars every year, he notes from the district court’s trial record, and its executives earn millions each year in compensation. That makes the restrictions on athlete compensation look pretty manipulative, if not arbitrary…
“The writing may be on the wall for the NCAA and its selective commitment to amateurism. Still, this decision doesn’t unleash salary wars in college sports — at least not yet. The Supreme Court is for now just limiting and refining the NCAA’s ability to regulate non-monetary compensation offered by schools. That alone will undermine its monopoly power, and states may end up doing the rest.”
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
“The president of the NCAA is paid nearly $4 million a year, the conference commissioners make as much as $5 million and top NCAA coaches more than $10 million. It might be possible to defend the importance of amateur competition if university-level coaches were paid like associate professors of history at those institutions (average salary: $69,710 in 2020). It is not, however, possible to defend a system in which everybody involved is allowed to make as much money as they possibly can except for the players who are actually putting their bodies on the line…
“A music student can perform a paying concert, a journalism student is allowed to sell a story, and a computer science student can be part of a tech start-up. So why shouldn’t a basketball player be able to sell autographs to willing fans?”
Scott Lemieux, NBC News Think
“The Supreme Court’s decision is indeed historic, but Kavanaugh is correct: It does not go nearly far enough. If the NCAA has violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, then it should not just have to allow colleges to offer more education-related benefits to student athletes — it should have to allow colleges to pay their money-making sports stars.”
Tyler O’Neil, PJ Media
“The fact that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh played such a significant role in the court’s decision is notable because it reflects a growing cross-political consensus that the NCAA’s treatment of athletes is deeply exploitative. Clarence Thomas, another justice hardly known for his sensitivity, noted in oral arguments that it was ‘odd that the coaches’ salaries have ballooned,’ despite the amateur nature of college athletics…
“This is not to say that imminent change is on the horizon. It has taken decades for the cause of student athletes to get this far, and the league has benefited greatly from both inertia and the way these exploitative arrangements have brought in substantial wealth—the better to bankroll a massive litigation and lobbying operation. But with lawmakers growing increasingly sympathetic to their pleas, the addition of a unanimous Supreme Court ruling has perhaps put us on the verge of compensating college athletes, something that should have happened a very long time ago.”
Alex Shephard, New Republic
Other opinions below.
“The bigger question remains how to keep college sports from becoming the type of competitive big business that distorts the notion of a student-athlete and harms the academic missions of universities… As various reports have shown through the years, including one by USA Today in 2018, many schools run deficits in their sports budgets that have to be made up through student fees or cuts elsewhere on campus. Imagine what would happen to expenses if schools had to offer huge compensation packages to lure players…
“It may be too late for NCAA officials to argue with a straight face that college amateurism is pure or that athletes, who also risk serious injury, should give up all rights to compensation for the greater glory of their schools. However, while the court’s narrow ruling this week is a cautious step forward for athletes, a full-fledged pay-to-play system would not be healthy for academics. The ultimate solution may be to create a system of athletics quite different from the one with which Americans, and millions of proud alumni, are accustomed.”
Editorial Board, Deseret News
“In his legal analysis, [Gorsuch] drops pointers to guide lower court judges reviewing antitrust cases. ‘Antitrust courts must give wide berth to business judgments before finding liability’ and fashioning a remedy, writes the Justice. Judges must be ‘mindful, too, of their limitations—as generalists, as lawyers, and as outsiders trying to understand intricate business relationships.’ Judges ‘make for poor ‘central planners’ and should never aspire to the role,’ he emphasizes…
“In between the lines, the Court seems to be coaching lower court judges charged with adjudicating government antitrust lawsuits against Big Tech companies, such as one by the Federal Trade Commission seeking to break up Facebook. More suits are likely during the Biden Presidency. Giant tech companies may deserve more antitrust scrutiny, but the Court is directing judges to approach the cases with humility and to do no harm to consumers.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Whenever one has argued for college athletes to be paid, those who defend the current system have responded with some variation of, ‘Okay, how would you fix it?’ This was a reasonable question. Do you pay some athletes but not all of them? Do colleges have to dig into their non-athletic funds? Do players get traded from one school to another in the middle of the school year? Do they even bother going to school at all?… [But] What do you have that’s better? is not a defense of a corrupt model; it is a way to maintain your place in it…
“What the Supreme Court and Kavanaugh did on Monday was flip the focus: Now it’s up to the NCAA and administrators and university presidents to come up with a plan to save their sports — or else.”
Will Leitch, New York Magazine
“This may be the latest sign the United States is undergoing a society-wide reset on work and what it’s worth, both financially and emotionally. As salaries and workplace conditions for many stagnated over the past several decades, we were told by pundits and self-appointed gurus that work wasn’t simply about pay, but a place to obtain a sense of accomplishment and emotional satisfaction. Yet CEOs continued to receive one record-breaking payday after another — which must have been, well, emotionally satisfying…
“Much as artists are told they should work for ‘exposure’ that rarely pays off, the same occurs with college athletes. Surveys show that almost two-thirds of male Division I NCAA players believe they will play professional sports. The reality? The percentage that ends up playing for a NBA, NHL or NFL team is in the low single digits…
“Almost all of us, whether restaurant chef, officer manager or student basketball player, no matter how much we love and identify with our work, also want to be paid fairly and labor under better conditions. Thanks to the Supreme Court, the student workers of the NCAA came one step closer Monday to achieving that goal.”
Helaine Olen, Washington Post
Hilarious photos of dogs wearing wigs.
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