The NCAA still won't address its major problem
Another half-measure points the conference in the right direction, but it doesn't acknowledge the simple fact: college athletes are employees.
Dear readers,
Since we started the newsletter back in 2020, we’ve been following the complex legal and political controversy over the NCAA’s “amateurism” model, which prohibits athletes from being paid for their labor. Well, there’s been a major development in the NCAA’s response to the controversy, so for this week’s newsletter, we’re diving deep into that story. We hope you enjoy it.
-Calder and Ian
There’s a scene in the Coen brothers’ Academy Award-winning film O Brother, Where Art Thou where Ulysses Everett McGill — an escaped convict, played by George Clooney — finds himself stuck in the hay loft of a barn, surrounded by the local sheriff’s department with torches and dogs, staring down imminent capture. As the sheriff prepares to set the building on fire to smoke him and his fellow escapees out, McGill peers out of the barn and mutters in deadpan, “Damn — we’re in a tight spot.”
In 2024, NCAA president Charlie Baker finds himself in a situation that’s pretty similar to the one McGill faced in the bar. In recent years, the NCAA’s amateurism model — which allows universities, conferences, and the NCAA to rake in billions of dollars annually on the backs of its unpaid student laborers — has been under assault in the courts, in Congress, at the National Labor Relations Board, in the labor movement, and in the press. The consensus across these arenas is that the NCAA’s amateurism model is a self-service (and probably illegal) farce, and that the governing body needs to move quickly to amend it or else face serious legal jeopardy.
In early December, Baker finally admitted that he, like McGill, is in a rather tight spot. That acknowledgment took the form of a letter, written by Baker and directed to the 362 member school of the NCAA’s Division I, containing the rough outlines of a plan to overhaul the NCAA’s compensation model.
Baker’s proposal was twofold: First, to allow all Division I schools to sign “name, image, and likeness” (NIL) deals with their athletes, thereby permitting schools to pay students via sponsorship deals. (Under changes to the NCAA’s rules made back in 2021, athletes can currently sign sponsorship deals with outside businesses, but not with the schools themselves.) Secondly, Baker proposed the creation of a new subdivision within the NCAA, made up of schools with the highest-earning athletic departments, whose members would be required to pay their athletes at least $30,000 a year through a trust fund. The new subdivision would be optional — member schools would have to opt into it — but as a reward for joining, the NCAA would grant new members greater autonomy to set their own rules around roster side, playoff structure, and the like — something that big-named sports school have been clamoring about for years.
Looked at in one way, Baker’s proposal is indeed “revolutionary,” as some commentators hastened to call it. For the first time ever, the NCAA is admitting that its amateurism model is both unsustainable and fundamentally incoherent — and, by extension, that athletes deserve to be paid.
But seen in another light, Baker’s proposal is both reactive and essentially reactionary. For one thing, Baker is only rolling this plan out under serious legal and political duress, as the proverbial sheriffs surround his barn with dogs, torches, and, sooner or later, pitchforks. The time for the NCAA to get ahead of the issue passed about a decade ago.
And while Baker’s plan is certainly an improvement over the NCAA’s current model, it remains a raw deal for athletes. According to some savvy number crunching by the Washington Post, the wealthiest schools would be paying, at most, about 9.8 percent of their revenues to athletes — hardly an equitable share of the pie. Athletes stand to make more through NIL deals with the schools, but those deals are hardly commensurate with a salary. The same is true of the annual payment via trust fund. Moreover, Baker's proposal does nothing to address the proliferation of shadowy “donor collectives,” which widen existing economic inequalities between players.
Taken as a whole, Baker’s proposal is a bizarre half-measure that effectively codifies college athletes’ ambiguous labor status: not “amateurs” in the old sense of the word, but also not full employees — which, of course, is what they actually are. The NCAA still refuses to acknowledge the heart of the problem they’ve created for themselves.
The principle underlying all the criticisms of the NCAA is that college sports are not, in an economic sense, unique. They represent a labor market like any other, where workers sell their labor to employers in a regulated market. Employees ought to be able to compete with one another for the best wages, and employers ought not to be able to collude with each other to artificially suppress those wages. Yet this is exactly what the NCAA exists to do. Trying to solve college sports’ labor problems within the structure of the NCAA is like building a house on a foundation of sand.
The good news is that Baker’s proposal is only a starting point, and any agreement that the NCAA ultimately comes to will still be subject to antitrust scrutiny in the courts. In a practical sense, moreover, it marks a step forward: In the short term, the goal should be to get as much money as possible into athletes’ pockets. But, in the grand sweep of things, we’re predicting that Baker’s plan will be remembered as a short-lived solution, a rickety escape hatch that, unlike McGill’s daring escape, doesn’t pan out.
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