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National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston [pdf]

Scaevolus 5y ago
Alternate headline: "Supreme Court unanimously sides with former college players in dispute with NCAA about compensation" (from ESPN). Note that this is a narrow ruling about the NCAA limiting educational compensation and what scholarships can encompass-- but some justices gave indications that they disagree with the NCAA compensation restrictions at large.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  The oral arguments stage made it pretty clear that none of the justices were buying the NCAA lawyers' arguments in general. It really makes me feel that the only reason this judgment didn't explicitly open the field for giving student athletes a salary was that the justices wanted to give schools some time to adapt instead of completely blowing up the current system all at once.
- jfb 5y ago
  Kavanaugh's concurrence is 100% an invitation for a broader restraint-of-trade suit, and honestly, it is long overdue. The NCAA is dead, they've got to settle, but there isn't going to be any real interest in half measures. As someone who detests the Plantation League, this is long, long, long overdue.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
Kavanaugh hits the nail in the head in his concurring opinion. > In my view, that argument is circular and unpersuasive. The NCAA couches its arguments for not paying student athletes in innocuous labels. But the labels cannot disguise the reality: The NCAA’s business model would be flatly il- legal in almost any other industry in America. All of the restaurants in a region cannot come together to cut cooks’ wages on the theory that “customers prefer” to eat food from low-paid cooks. Law firms cannot conspire to cabin lawyers’ salaries in the name of providing legal services out of a “love of the law.” Hospitals cannot agree to cap nurses’ income in order to create a “purer” form of helping the sick. News organizations cannot join forces to curtail pay to reporters to preserve a “tradition” of public-minded journalism. Movie studios cannot collude to slash benefits to camera crews to kindle a “spirit of amateurism” in Hollywood. Price-fixing labor is price-fixing labor. And price-fixing labor is ordinarily a textbook antitrust problem because it extinguishes the free market in which individuals can oth- erwise obtain fair compensation for their work.
- bretpiatt 5y ago
  What's even worse with NCAA compensation is that it is limited to a scholarship and the value of that scholarship is tied to the cost of a given college or university. If an athlete is given a scholarship to an in-state public university their compensation might be $25,000 per year versus another student attending a higher cost private school who could be getting paid $75,000 per year effectively. You then have the value of the different degrees to the market (which is separate from the cost) so it is very possible that certain student athletes are obtaining a degree worth hundreds of thousands of future dollars in the market versus some who get 4 years of room and board to play sports, make the university money, and then maybe they do not even end up with a degree by the time their eligibility expires (see data on student athlete graduation rates).
  - smithza 5y ago
    And this is sidetracking the point that college-athletes being recruited with aspirations for professional sports view the college as a means to the pro-level job; college courses and the degree are not viewed as benefits but necessary side-effects. Is this true for all sports and all athletes? No, not for fencing or handball, but for football, basketball, and other potential high-earners.
- derbOac 5y ago
  So, I really disagree with this opinion, although I see this as a "reasonable people can disagree" sort of thing. The problem with the analogy is that restaurants aren't primarily functioning as educational institutions with a restaurant business on the side. Hospital nurses aren't providing nursing care as a side activity. Camera crews are not secondary to the mission of a movie studio. With universities, the sports teams are at least ostensibly in theory, student extracurricular activities secondary to the primary mission of the university. Let's say a university had a student dining center, and agreed to let people work in the center in exchange for free tuition. Would that be a violation of antitrust? I think not. I admit universities are currently full of practices where nonprofit endeavors are hijacked for for-profit engorgement in a tail-wagging-the-dog sort of phenomenon. Sports are another example of many. But I don't think antitrust is really the appropriate concept to introduce -- or if it is, it has far greater implications than people realize. What's maybe slipping under the radar is that by this argument, any nonprofit organization that tries to establish rules pertaining to scope of professional activities is operating as an inappropriate monopoly. Where does the argument end? Isn't the American Medical Association an illegal monopoly under this argument, as it conspires to control how people practice professionally? I doubt the Supreme Court would follow its reasoning to its logical conclusion, which raises the question about what's different with college sports. Why single it out?
wyldfire 5y ago
From "Law & Crime" [1]: > Essentially, this is a classic violation of antitrust law. What the NCAA is arguing, however, is that it should be allowed an exemption to that law. The Court wasn’t willing to play ball on that one. > Justice Gorsuch made short work of the argument that the NCAA is entitled to an exemption on the grounds that it is a “joint venture.” Reasoning that “student-athletes have nowhere else to sell their labor,” the justice wrote, “[e]ven if the NCAA is a joint venture, then, it is hardly of the sort that would warrant quick-look approval for all its myriad rules and restrictions.” [1] https://lawandcrime.com/supreme-court/unanimous-supreme-court-sides-with-college-athletes-over-ncaa-heres-what-you-need-to-know/ https://lawandcrime.com/supreme-court/unanimous-supreme-cour...
topspin 5y ago
"I deleted n pages of someone's rules today" Does this mean players can just do the straightforward thing and negotiate lucrative contracts with schools and we can forego all the backdoor, indirect compensation and self-inflicted corruption that goes on now? If so then these institutions can just be what they are in a straightforward way; football teams that also happen to fund a legacy educational branch.
- compiler-guy 5y ago
  The ruling today was quite narrow, so players cannot do the straightforward thing at the moment. There were very strong hints that the NCAA needs to change its rules around compensation completely, so it seems likely that they eventually will be able to do that. But it isn't the case now.
fiftyfifty 5y ago
The solution in my opinion is to do away with college athletic scholarships and preferred admission for athletes. Let school's field their sports teams from their normal student bodies and ensure that those teams are truly amateur and the participants really are "student-athletes". Let the NBA and the NFL field their own semi-professional minor leagues like baseball does. If these schools have to start paying their football and basketball players (and lets be perfectly clear, that's what this is about), it will be the absolute death of virtually every other men's sport at the college level, and will likely only leave enough women's sports to offset the football team due to Title IX. I won't even get into the ridiculous hypocrisy of our institutions of higher learning pouring billions of dollars into a sport that is proven to cause brain damage, while cutting other sports that don't. That is not at all what college athletics should be about, it should be about extracurricular opportunities for real students. I think the Division 3 model (no sports scholarships/no backdoor admissions) has been much more successful and has provided many more opportunities for students (men and women) to compete in a wider variety of sports. I say this as someone who was a college athlete on scholarship years ago and still coaches high school.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > it will be the absolute death of virtually every other men's sport at the college level Why's that?
  - chadash 5y ago
    In the current system, schools need to have an equivalent number of sports teams (and slots) for men and women, with the same number of scholarships (the law governing this is called Title IX). Generally speaking, women's sports don't bring in money for schools, whereas football at a competitive school will bring in money in the form of TV deals and even donations from alumni. So essentially, the football and basketball teams subsidize the rest of the athletic department. If you had to pay the athletes in these sports, then there'd be less money to go around for other teams that don't generate revenue. But at a minimum, you'd still need a few women's teams because of Title IX. EDIT: to clarify, I personally think it's ridiculous that star college athletes don't get paid given how much time those athletes put in and how much money they bring in for schools, but I also think that at least at the schools with huge athletic programs it'll have some effect on other sports.
sib 5y ago
For more about the egregious ways in which the NCAA treats student-athletes, this is a great book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LFZ8SF8/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LFZ8SF8/
RNCTech 5y ago
I think the NCAA should create an investment pool backed by individual students' contributions to revenue. So, you're a star at Alabama. Based on your play time, jersey sales, you get a share of Alabama's share of total revenue into the pool. It grows and after 5 years you are eligible to withdraw that share. It could be used as a buffer in case of career ending injuries or liquidated for profit with incentives to perhaps see out your college career.
creyes 5y ago
tl;dr in 2 quotes from the decision. Wild shit that the NCAA got this far > The NCAA does not contest that its re-straints affect interstate trade and commerce and are thus subject to the Sherman Act. > With this much agreed it is unclear exactly what the NCAA seeks. To the extent it means to propose a sort of judicially ordained immunity from the terms of the Sherman Act for its restraints of trade—that we should overlook its restrictions because they happen to fall at the intersection of higher education, sports, and money—we cannot agree.
jalgos_eminator 5y ago
I think sports is a big blind spot for most HN users, so I would like to offer an informal Q&A with me here in this thread. I am a former top-level division 1 football player that got a technical degree and now work in the IT/software space. I like to do these every once in a while because there is so much incorrect information and bad assumptions about high level college athletes that I feel the need to combat this when the opportunity presents itself. I haven't read the posted SC opinion yet because I'm at work and currently eating a burrito. Don't be afraid to ask probing questions, the worst that will happen is I will choose not to answer.
- dan_quixote 5y ago
  How did you manage the technical degree and full-time athlete duties? Did they occur at the same time?
  - jalgos_eminator 5y ago
    Yes, I got my degree in 5 years and was on the team for all 5 of those years. It was tough. Lots of scheduling conflicts, because practice/meeting/lifting times are set in stone and you have to schedule your academics around them. I didn't find the workload too bad, but I basically didn't have time to do anything else other than football and school. In-season you scale back classes to the minimum number of credit-hours because football takes about 50 hours per week (minimum, 60 hours when you are travelling that week). I took 5 years though, so was able to spread the credit-hours out over an extra year so I wasn't taking too many classes each term.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    There was a starter on the football team in my graduating class at umich cs. The only explanation of how he found the time I can think of is he had tutors do most of the work for him.
    - jalgos_eminator 5y ago
      I think its unfair to assume that about him. There were a decent number of athletes in engineering degrees when I was in school and they absolutely worked their asses off, myself included. Although there were special athletic academic tutors, there weren't any available that could tutor for engineering subjects so I doubt any athletes were getting assignments done for them. Regular tutors wouldn't have played along with that game. Also, the professors (at least most of mine) were pretty skeptical of athletics, so I was on a short leash for what I could get away with (missing classes, moving exam dates, asking for extra time on projects, etc). If they sniffed that I was cheating, they would have brought the hammer down without thinking twice. That's just my experience at my school though.

Alternate headline: "Supreme Court unanimously sides with former college players in dispute with NCAA about compensation" (from ESPN). Note that this is a narrow ruling about the NCAA limiting educational compensation and what scholarships can encompass-- but some justices gave indications that they disagree with the NCAA compensation restrictions at large.

crooked-v 5y ago
The oral arguments stage made it pretty clear that none of the justices were buying the NCAA lawyers' arguments in general. It really makes me feel that the only reason this judgment didn't explicitly open the field for giving student athletes a salary was that the justices wanted to give schools some time to adapt instead of completely blowing up the current system all at once.
jfb 5y ago
Kavanaugh's concurrence is 100% an invitation for a broader restraint-of-trade suit, and honestly, it is long overdue. The NCAA is dead, they've got to settle, but there isn't going to be any real interest in half measures. As someone who detests the Plantation League, this is long, long, long overdue.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

Kavanaugh hits the nail in the head in his concurring opinion. > In my view, that argument is circular and unpersuasive. The NCAA couches its arguments for not paying student athletes in innocuous labels. But the labels cannot disguise the reality: The NCAA’s business model would be flatly il- legal in almost any other industry in America. All of the restaurants in a region cannot come together to cut cooks’ wages on the theory that “customers prefer” to eat food from low-paid cooks. Law firms cannot conspire to cabin lawyers’ salaries in the name of providing legal services out of a “love of the law.” Hospitals cannot agree to cap nurses’ income in order to create a “purer” form of helping the sick. News organizations cannot join forces to curtail pay to reporters to preserve a “tradition” of public-minded journalism. Movie studios cannot collude to slash benefits to camera crews to kindle a “spirit of amateurism” in Hollywood. Price-fixing labor is price-fixing labor. And price-fixing labor is ordinarily a textbook antitrust problem because it extinguishes the free market in which individuals can oth- erwise obtain fair compensation for their work.

bretpiatt 5y ago
What's even worse with NCAA compensation is that it is limited to a scholarship and the value of that scholarship is tied to the cost of a given college or university. If an athlete is given a scholarship to an in-state public university their compensation might be $25,000 per year versus another student attending a higher cost private school who could be getting paid $75,000 per year effectively. You then have the value of the different degrees to the market (which is separate from the cost) so it is very possible that certain student athletes are obtaining a degree worth hundreds of thousands of future dollars in the market versus some who get 4 years of room and board to play sports, make the university money, and then maybe they do not even end up with a degree by the time their eligibility expires (see data on student athlete graduation rates).
- smithza 5y ago
  And this is sidetracking the point that college-athletes being recruited with aspirations for professional sports view the college as a means to the pro-level job; college courses and the degree are not viewed as benefits but necessary side-effects. Is this true for all sports and all athletes? No, not for fencing or handball, but for football, basketball, and other potential high-earners.
derbOac 5y ago
So, I really disagree with this opinion, although I see this as a "reasonable people can disagree" sort of thing. The problem with the analogy is that restaurants aren't primarily functioning as educational institutions with a restaurant business on the side. Hospital nurses aren't providing nursing care as a side activity. Camera crews are not secondary to the mission of a movie studio. With universities, the sports teams are at least ostensibly in theory, student extracurricular activities secondary to the primary mission of the university. Let's say a university had a student dining center, and agreed to let people work in the center in exchange for free tuition. Would that be a violation of antitrust? I think not. I admit universities are currently full of practices where nonprofit endeavors are hijacked for for-profit engorgement in a tail-wagging-the-dog sort of phenomenon. Sports are another example of many. But I don't think antitrust is really the appropriate concept to introduce -- or if it is, it has far greater implications than people realize. What's maybe slipping under the radar is that by this argument, any nonprofit organization that tries to establish rules pertaining to scope of professional activities is operating as an inappropriate monopoly. Where does the argument end? Isn't the American Medical Association an illegal monopoly under this argument, as it conspires to control how people practice professionally? I doubt the Supreme Court would follow its reasoning to its logical conclusion, which raises the question about what's different with college sports. Why single it out?

wyldfire 5y ago

From "Law & Crime" [1]: > Essentially, this is a classic violation of antitrust law. What the NCAA is arguing, however, is that it should be allowed an exemption to that law. The Court wasn’t willing to play ball on that one. > Justice Gorsuch made short work of the argument that the NCAA is entitled to an exemption on the grounds that it is a “joint venture.” Reasoning that “student-athletes have nowhere else to sell their labor,” the justice wrote, “[e]ven if the NCAA is a joint venture, then, it is hardly of the sort that would warrant quick-look approval for all its myriad rules and restrictions.” [1] https://lawandcrime.com/supreme-court/unanimous-supreme-court-sides-with-college-athletes-over-ncaa-heres-what-you-need-to-know/ https://lawandcrime.com/supreme-court/unanimous-supreme-cour...

topspin 5y ago

"I deleted n pages of someone's rules today" Does this mean players can just do the straightforward thing and negotiate lucrative contracts with schools and we can forego all the backdoor, indirect compensation and self-inflicted corruption that goes on now? If so then these institutions can just be what they are in a straightforward way; football teams that also happen to fund a legacy educational branch.

compiler-guy 5y ago
The ruling today was quite narrow, so players cannot do the straightforward thing at the moment. There were very strong hints that the NCAA needs to change its rules around compensation completely, so it seems likely that they eventually will be able to do that. But it isn't the case now.

fiftyfifty 5y ago

The solution in my opinion is to do away with college athletic scholarships and preferred admission for athletes. Let school's field their sports teams from their normal student bodies and ensure that those teams are truly amateur and the participants really are "student-athletes". Let the NBA and the NFL field their own semi-professional minor leagues like baseball does. If these schools have to start paying their football and basketball players (and lets be perfectly clear, that's what this is about), it will be the absolute death of virtually every other men's sport at the college level, and will likely only leave enough women's sports to offset the football team due to Title IX. I won't even get into the ridiculous hypocrisy of our institutions of higher learning pouring billions of dollars into a sport that is proven to cause brain damage, while cutting other sports that don't. That is not at all what college athletics should be about, it should be about extracurricular opportunities for real students. I think the Division 3 model (no sports scholarships/no backdoor admissions) has been much more successful and has provided many more opportunities for students (men and women) to compete in a wider variety of sports. I say this as someone who was a college athlete on scholarship years ago and still coaches high school.

chrisseaton 5y ago
> it will be the absolute death of virtually every other men's sport at the college level Why's that?
- chadash 5y ago
  In the current system, schools need to have an equivalent number of sports teams (and slots) for men and women, with the same number of scholarships (the law governing this is called Title IX). Generally speaking, women's sports don't bring in money for schools, whereas football at a competitive school will bring in money in the form of TV deals and even donations from alumni. So essentially, the football and basketball teams subsidize the rest of the athletic department. If you had to pay the athletes in these sports, then there'd be less money to go around for other teams that don't generate revenue. But at a minimum, you'd still need a few women's teams because of Title IX. EDIT: to clarify, I personally think it's ridiculous that star college athletes don't get paid given how much time those athletes put in and how much money they bring in for schools, but I also think that at least at the schools with huge athletic programs it'll have some effect on other sports.

sib 5y ago

For more about the egregious ways in which the NCAA treats student-athletes, this is a great book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LFZ8SF8/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LFZ8SF8/

RNCTech 5y ago

I think the NCAA should create an investment pool backed by individual students' contributions to revenue. So, you're a star at Alabama. Based on your play time, jersey sales, you get a share of Alabama's share of total revenue into the pool. It grows and after 5 years you are eligible to withdraw that share. It could be used as a buffer in case of career ending injuries or liquidated for profit with incentives to perhaps see out your college career.

creyes 5y ago

tl;dr in 2 quotes from the decision. Wild shit that the NCAA got this far > The NCAA does not contest that its re-straints affect interstate trade and commerce and are thus subject to the Sherman Act. > With this much agreed it is unclear exactly what the NCAA seeks. To the extent it means to propose a sort of judicially ordained immunity from the terms of the Sherman Act for its restraints of trade—that we should overlook its restrictions because they happen to fall at the intersection of higher education, sports, and money—we cannot agree.

jalgos_eminator 5y ago

I think sports is a big blind spot for most HN users, so I would like to offer an informal Q&A with me here in this thread. I am a former top-level division 1 football player that got a technical degree and now work in the IT/software space. I like to do these every once in a while because there is so much incorrect information and bad assumptions about high level college athletes that I feel the need to combat this when the opportunity presents itself. I haven't read the posted SC opinion yet because I'm at work and currently eating a burrito. Don't be afraid to ask probing questions, the worst that will happen is I will choose not to answer.

dan_quixote 5y ago
How did you manage the technical degree and full-time athlete duties? Did they occur at the same time?
- jalgos_eminator 5y ago
  Yes, I got my degree in 5 years and was on the team for all 5 of those years. It was tough. Lots of scheduling conflicts, because practice/meeting/lifting times are set in stone and you have to schedule your academics around them. I didn't find the workload too bad, but I basically didn't have time to do anything else other than football and school. In-season you scale back classes to the minimum number of credit-hours because football takes about 50 hours per week (minimum, 60 hours when you are travelling that week). I took 5 years though, so was able to spread the credit-hours out over an extra year so I wasn't taking too many classes each term.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  There was a starter on the football team in my graduating class at umich cs. The only explanation of how he found the time I can think of is he had tutors do most of the work for him.
  - jalgos_eminator 5y ago
    I think its unfair to assume that about him. There were a decent number of athletes in engineering degrees when I was in school and they absolutely worked their asses off, myself included. Although there were special athletic academic tutors, there weren't any available that could tutor for engineering subjects so I doubt any athletes were getting assignments done for them. Regular tutors wouldn't have played along with that game. Also, the professors (at least most of mine) were pretty skeptical of athletics, so I was on a short leash for what I could get away with (missing classes, moving exam dates, asking for extra time on projects, etc). If they sniffed that I was cheating, they would have brought the hammer down without thinking twice. That's just my experience at my school though.