At the New York Times in Supreme Court Backs Payments to Student-Athletes in N.C.A.A. Case, Adam Liptak and Alan Blinder write that:
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled ... that the N.C.A.A. could not bar relatively modest payments to student-athletes ... [in] a college sports system that generates huge sums for schools but provides little or no compensation to the players.
In a concurring opinion to the Court's unanimous 9-0 decision, Justice Kavanaugh said it best (National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston):
Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate. And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.
The regrettable exploitation of college student-athletes has been a topic at LawPundit for the last 10 years, as we have loudly challenged the notion that colleges and universities can forcibly impose an "obey or not play" "amateur status" on their student-athletes to subsequently deny them various kinds of compensation for their efforts.
See some of our postings about sports and the NCAA generally.
We quote here from a previous posting of ours as follows:
[C]ollege athletes are being exploited to the hilt [while] coaches ... command princely salaries so high that the highest paid government employee in most every state is a head college sports coach. So writes Matthew Michaels in Business Insider, “The highest-paid public employee in most states is a college football or basketball coach, according to a new report from ESPN.”)
The NCAA has now begun to see the writing on the wall, not only because of the Supreme Court decision cited above, but also because of impending State laws impacting player compensation. Alan Blinder has the story at the New York Times in College Athletes May Earn Money From Their Fame, N.C.A.A. Rules. As Blinder writes:National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston
The N.C.A.A. agreed ... to allow college athletes across the country to capitalize off their fame for the first time. The decision will allow students from coast to coast to strike endorsement deals, profit off their social media accounts, sell autographs and otherwise make money from their names, images and likenesses, potentially directing millions of dollars to college athletes every year....The [Division I Board of Directors] acted less than 12 hours before state laws designed to challenge the N.C.A.A.’s generations-old rules were scheduled to begin taking effect from Alabama to Oregon.