The Fair Pay to Play Act Has Been Signed. Now the NCAA Must Address a Question to Which It’s Never Had a Good Answer.
https://www.theringer.com/2019/10/1/208 ... vin-newsom
While opponents of SB 206 have been fervent in exclaiming how the bill will lead to the decay of college sports (and, gasp, all of society!) as we know it, it’s actually more limited in scope than previous attempts to blow up the NCAA’s amateurism model. The bill isn’t seeking to designate student-athletes as employees or force colleges and universities to pay them via salaries or a trust. It isn’t trying to reconfigure the much-debated value of an athletic scholarship. It is merely set to bar institutions from stripping any athlete’s scholarship or eligibility over getting paid to sign autographs, appear in commercials, endorse products, and the like. It’s aiming to adopt what’s been referred to as “the Olympic model.”
[...]
The biggest hurdle in the fight to do away with college sports amateurism is that the boiler-plate argument against it has always sounded reasonable. I don’t see why schools should have to pay their players, says the man hosting the talk radio show, the man calling into the radio show, your mom, the friend-of-a-friend who attended your tailgate, and Mark Emmert, the NCAA president who gets paid more than $2 million annually to parrot this idea. Don’t they already get scholarships?
[...]
In the debate over NIL rights, however, the situation is flipped. Even if you see the play-for-scholarship exchange as fair, it still requires extensive and hypocritical mental gymnastics to contend that the NCAA should be able to prevent its athletes from partaking in other fair exchanges. This money wouldn’t even come from the schools—we’re talking about outside parties paying players for additional services off the field. Any other college student with a few thousand Instagram followers can get paid for posting a picture with a product; why can’t a student-athlete sell a song or monetize his popular YouTube channel just because he’s an athlete?
The NCAA has never had a particularly good answer for this, because its motivation for outlawing players from profiting off their names, images, and likenesses has always been cynical.
[...]
I’ve heard three primary arguments as to why student-athletes shouldn’t be able to collect money off their names, images, and likenesses. The first is that it would tip the competitive balance of major college sports, especially football and men’s basketball, in favor of deep-pocketed schools whose boosters would shell out colossal piles of cash for prized athletes to sign autographs or appear in ads. For one thing, this isn’t the government’s problem. I believe the government has a legitimate interest in ensuring that its citizens’ rights aren’t trampled by multibillion-dollar corporations, such as the NCAA. I don’t believe the government has a comparable interest in ensuring that two college sports programs have an equal shot at landing a five-star recruit.
[...]
The second argument is that this bill would undermine Title IX, because men’s football and women’s volleyball players, for example, would likely bring in disproportionate levels of pay via endorsement deals. This also doesn’t hold water. Since the money wouldn’t come from the schools, the colleges and universities wouldn’t be funding men’s and women’s athletics differently than they are now, meaning that Title IX would be unaffected.
The third argument—the one preferred and pushed by Emmert—is that very few athletes would benefit from the ability to market themselves. Even if this is true, why should the NCAA oppose a rule that would be good for a few people and bad for nobody? (I guess it would go against the NCAA’s typical strategy of having rules that help a few people and hurt a lot of people.)
[...]
In and of itself, the California bill doesn’t change a lot. It will make college athletics more sensible in one state beginning four years from now. Yet it proves that the NCAA will treat even its least defensible stances as if Moses carried them down Sinai, when in reality the association’s rules were put in place by greedy bureaucrats for the purpose of hoarding ever-increasing stacks of cash. If the NCAA gives way on name, image, and likeness rights and college sports continue existing in roughly the same fashion that they always have, something else will be made clear: This is all just posturing. Treat the NCAA like a toddler with a paper cut, and remember that the sheer volume of complaints does not reflect the severity of its situation.
