Effect of SCOTUS ruling on NCAA will take years to see
On Monday, the Supreme Court made a monumental decision by unanimously ruling that the NCAA legally cannot prevent student-athletes from being paid in the NCAA v. Alston case. This decision is only the beginning of a model that’s starting to crumble pressure mounts for the NCAA to change their compensation restrictiveness on student-athletes.
Lawyers for the lead plaintiff in the case, Shawne Alston, who was a running back for the West Virginia Mountaineers, originally brought the case in 2014.
The primary opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, and laid out the court’s rationale for siding with a California district court’s decision that the NCAA could not limit “educational benefits” to athletes. But it was Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion that went further, explaining that the NCAA business model couldn’t work anywhere else in the country and opening the door to further degradation of the NCAA.
“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,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. “And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The N.C.A.A. is not above the law.”
Recognized leaders in college sports issues were not surprised by this ruling.
“My immediate reaction was, I was not surprised,” Amy Perko, who played basketball for Wake Forest from 1983-1987 and is chief executive officer for the Knight Commission said. “But the major takeaway was that the status quo is over and this will be another major evolution in college sports.”
Richard Lapchick, the director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida viewed this decision as one step closer to a world where college athletes are compensated.
“I think it’s really opening a door because it didn’t really affect the payments under NIL as much,” Lapstick said. “But I think it opens the door for the Supreme Court and legislation at the federal level to mandate that college student athletes will get paid.”
This decision may well be the first step toward the end of the NCAA as we know it. But we’re not quite there yet. The decision is only covers benefits related to education, and does not extend to more general benefits like a cash salary. However, Kavanaugh’s broad language opens the door for more opportunities to confront the NCAA on their policies that prevent student-athletes from making money off the field.
“People, me included, have been arguing for increased benefits for student athletes for decades, but it’s never, it’s always been at the conference level at the NCAA level. The fact that it’s now at the federal level will hasten it,” Lapchick said. “But you know how long it takes to get a case to the Supreme Court. This is not something that happens by a quick turnaround.”
So there’s still work to do. It only provides an opportunity for favorable litigation for student-athletes against the NCAA but they still control how student-athletes are compensated. But Sam Ehrlich, a sports law professor at Boise State University, thinks the NCAA legal defense has weakened and will open a new legal vortex for athletes to attack..
“They stripped out a lot of the really strong legal defenses for the NCAA,” Ehrlich said. “At the same time they also really changed the conversation and just how these types of cases are supposed to be here. So I think the next steps are going to be more litigation. You already have litigation challenging the proposed name image and likeness restrictions, but really I think the NCAA here is in a crossroads.”
What’s next for the battle between the NCAA and the student-athlete? Lapchick believes the NCAA will try to restrict how much the athletes will be able to benefit.
“I think they’re [student-athletes] gonna push the federal legislation. And I think that the NCAA is gonna feel a hand has been pushed to move up its agenda to get things done,” Lapchick said. The last thing the NCAA wants is federal intervention, whether it’s the Supreme Court or Congress. So they’ve historically done things to try to avoid that. So I’m guessing that they’re going to move that back on top of the agenda and get it done the way the NCAA hopes it will do, which will be, from my point of view, to minimize the costs to support student athletes and minimize that impact on the multibillion dollar industry and college sports.”
Next month, student-athletes in at least seven states — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Nevada and New Mexico — will be able to cash in through off the field endorsements.