Adam Minter
For decades, the National Collegiate Athletic Association fought proposals that would’ve allowed schools to pay athletes. It went to court; it went to Congress. Whenever possible, it extolled the moral and financial benefits of amateurism. Then, last week, the NCAA abruptly changed its mind. Charlie Baker, the association’s president, released a proposal that would enable schools to pay athletes. It’s a profound and radical shift.
But it won’t be made for the benefit of athletes. It’s an attempt to keep the association relevant after its long-standing opposition to paying athletes made it anything but. The disconnect between the NCAA and member schools has become so wide that personnel from some of the association’s highest-profile and wealthiest schools have openly mused for years about breaking away and managing their own affairs. If that were to happen — and it could — it would spell the end of the NCAA. Survival and relevance require reform.
The NCAA was formed in 1906 to reform the often deadly game of college football. Quick success in overhauling the rules gave the nascent association credibility to expand into rulemaking for other college sports. From the start, those rules embraced amateurism; athletes were expected to play for the joy of the game, not money. The NCAA, however, did not play by the same rules. Over the decades, its power was enhanced by the millions of dollars it earned through its total control of college football television rights.
That wealth led to the slow but steady erosion of the NCAA’s standing in American sports. In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA’s control of televised football violated antitrust law. Freed up to sell their own football broadcasts, schools began to generate far more money from televised football than the NCAA could’ve ever provided to them.
Schools built stadiums and practice facilities and funded spiraling coaching salaries (coaches at elite football schools averaged $6.2 million in compensation in 2023). The NCAA’s dogmatic embrace of amateurism meant that they could not pay athletes. Rather than find a compromise that preserves some element of amateurism while ensuring students can profit, too, the organization spent more than $300 million on legal expenses between 2015 and 2022 — much of which went to fighting lawsuits that would’ve given athletes the right to profit from their name, image and likeness, or NIL.
What a waste. In 2021, the NCAA abruptly backed down in the face of court rulings and state legislation and issued rules allowing student-athletes to profit from their NIL rights. It was a victory for the economic interests of athletes, but the abrupt shift and lack of planning or foresight, after decades of stonewalling, has created chaos. Players are signing bad or even fraudulent deals. Schools are openly using NIL as a recruitment tool despite explicit NCAA rules against doing so. And nobody — not the schools, the coaches, or the students — seems overly concerned that they’ll be assisted, punished, or ostracized by the increasingly irrelevant and reactive NCAA.
In theory, a strong NCAA that had spent the last decade seeking compromise and frameworks for compensating college athletes would be well-positioned to bring order. Instead, it’s busy lobbying Congress for a comprehensive college-sports bill to fix what it believes it can’t. Meanwhile, college football’s elite conferences are amplifying long-standing calls for additional autonomy from the NCAA so that they — and not the organization — can set their own rules for amateurism, NIL, and other forms of player compensation.
A total split would be catastrophic — for the NCAA. If it loses the ability to regulate the most prominent college sport, it would be further diminished as an arbiter of American sports and culture. Meanwhile, the association is facing another front in its battle to remain relevant: multiple lawsuits currently threaten the NCAA’s control over how or if athletes are compensated. Losing any of these will only serve to diminish further the organization in the eyes of its members and the public.
Baker’s proposal is an attempt at a course correction. Under it, the NCAA would create a new subdivision among the more than 360 Division I schools and allow them to set aside a minimum of $30,000 per year per athlete in a trust fund. Those schools that can afford to join this subdivision (Baker estimates around 100 of the NCAA’s 1,100 members would do it) could then set their own rules on NIL, transfers, scholarships, and other issues. That’s a long way from the NCAA of the mid-20th century, which collected and distributed televised football revenue and was feared as an enforcer. But it’s probably the best Baker can do.
It’s a progressive and proactive approach to a problem mainly of the association’s making. If it were to pass, it would benefit the nation’s elite college-football players. But for now, the primary beneficiary is intended to be the NCAA itself. After years of obstructing change, the association is showing that it’s at least willing to compromise. That’s a reform worth applauding. But it won’t return the NCAA to its central place in college sports.
Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of sports. He is the author, most recently, of “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale.”
