They Did It
The NCAA is finally going to pay players. How's it going to work?
Dear readers,
Over the course of our 166 (!) issues, there’s been no issue that has preoccupied us more than the relationship between the NCAA and its athletes. This week, the organization reached an historic, $2.8 billion settlement that, if approved by a judge, will pave the way for schools to begin to pay their athletes directly. That’s the topic of our Southpaw Memorial Day edition this week.
Before we get to it, though, we’d like to send a quick note about the newsletter in general. As you may know if you are a regular reader, the two of us have day jobs writing about politics, and we’re not sure if you’ve heard, but there is an election coming up. We’re even busier than we are usually, so it’s been hard to carve out time to write Southpaw. We’re still committed to delivering the product to you, but it might be on a slightly less regular basis — through November, we’ll just write where we can. We were eager to spend at least some of our long weekend talking about this landmark decision, though. Thank you, as always, for your continued support.
-Ian and Calder
On Thursday, the NCAA’s amateurism business model died. A $2.8 billion settlement in a class-action antitrust lawsuit has essentially made it possible for the NCAA to begin to pay players — and, if everything goes according to plan, to pay players back pay for the money they’ve been denied.
The NCAA, notably, has not given up the formal designation of “amateur” yet. Even as they begin to pay their players, they refuse to classify them as employees, so that they can’t collectively bargain and won’t be guaranteed benefits. But if we had to guess based on the way that this case is moving, that designation isn’t long for this world, either. It’s only a matter of time before college athletes are treated, essentially, like professionals who also have to attend class (sometimes).
Since we began Southpaw in 2020, we’ve been hoping this day would come. And in the midst of the NIL-age — in which players own their name, image and likeness and therefore can be paid for endorsements — it seemed like it was only a matter of time before the amateurism model bucked under the weight of its own contradictions. With this decision, the house of cards has not totally collapsed, but its foundation has cracked down the middle.
It is a huge win for the college athletes who have generated billions of dollars in revenue for their schools without seeing a single penny for themselves. The details of the settlement haven’t been fully worked out, though the payments will occur through a revenue sharing program. The implications for the future of college sports are large and complex and will depend in large part on how exactly the payment program is implemented.
The lingering uncertainly about the details of the plan is not a reason to oppose it, though. The media coverage of the settlement has largely focused on the gripes of schools from smaller conferences, who are concerned that they might have to pay more than their fair share of revenue to athletes. Beyond that, the coverage has included all kinds hand-wringing about what this agreement will “do” to the future of college sports.
It is in some ways a reasonable fear, but it’s also misplaced. We’re at the dawn of a new era, and it’s one that will have manifest problems of its own. Those problems, though, are largely of the NCAA’s own making. If the NCAA had proactively taken steps to introduce a payment model — instead of waiting for the courts to essentially force that change upon them — many of the problems that they’re now facing could have been avoided. Moreover, the financial challenges that the NCAA now faces are not essentially different than the ones that colleges and universities face in other parts of their financial dealings, like paying adjunct and graduate students. People complaining that a school might not be able to support an athletics program if it has to pay players are ironically just complaining about the mismatch between a capitalist economic system based on the profit motive and an educational system based on principles other than profit.
Importantly, this change is part of a larger transformation in higher ed — some of it good, some of it not so good. Over the past few years, college and universities have been forced to re-think how they operate. Admissions preference based on race is out the window, thanks to an arch-conservative Supreme Court. Some colleges are nixing that preference based on legacy as well, based on new considerations about fairness and equity. Colleges are being forced to grapple with the consequences of their massive price tags, which have sent a significant chunk of recent generations into crushing debt.
Amidst all of this change, though, athletics have stayed largely the same. Even if you’re not in line to get a football scholarship to Georgia with dreams of playing in the NFL, becoming really good at a sport (basically any sport) remains the surest bet for gaming the college admissions process.
This new era might scramble how many sports teams (and thus recruited athletes) there are on campuses around the country (though we would argue that if these schools want to keep supporting smaller athletic teams, they can just do so for a little more money). That’s a bad thing for a slice of the population — like the “executive at a consulting firm for athletic recruiting” that The New York Times quoted as saying the words that came to mind when he heard the decision were “trepidation” and “confusion.” But it might not be such a bad thing for the kids or the schools themselves. It’s not like college sports will stop existing; they’ll just look different, and if a school or two jettisons its squash team because it decides the cost is too much, then so be it.
If you’re worried about the downstream effects of this settlement, that makes sense. There’s a lot we don’t know, and if the NCAA has the opportunity to screw something up, they’ll always make the most of it. The decision to pay players itself, though, is one of the biggest wins for athletes that we’ve seen since we began Southpaw. Athletes won the war, now we just need to make sure that they get the rebuild right as well.