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For 115 years, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has been tightening its grip on what became the multibillion-dollar college-sports industry, with the lucrative annual men’s basketball tournament as its flagship
.In the next few months, however, the NCAA stands to lose control of its empire’s future over an issue its member schools long hoped to avoid: athlete compensation.College athletes have historically been classified as “amateurs,” even as they helped generate billions for their colleges and universities and made millionaires of their coaches.
NCAA rules have long capped athletes’ compensation at little more than tuition, room and board.But public sentiment that once supported the existing model has reversed, and long-silent athletes have become loud critics of the system.
Numerous players marked the start of this year’s NCAA tournament by tweeting “#NotNCAAProperty
.”The tension has created a scramble to define the future of college athletics. State and federal politicians in both parties have proposed dozens of bills that would let college athletes earn money from their name, image and likeness—a step that is forbidden under current NCAA policy. A handful of state laws have already passed, including one in Florida that takes effect July 1. The NCAA itself has called for federal legislation to override a chaotic patchwork of state oversight. Now the NCAA faces a week like no other.
The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in a case related to college-athlete compensation on Wednesday, three days before basketball’s men’s Final Four begins. A ruling is expected by the end of June.“I genuinely believe that this year will be the most pivotal year in college sports history since its founding,” NCAA President Mark Emmert said.The landscape could soon look much different, with college athletes winning economic rights that would further blur the line between them and paid professionals.
As soon as this summer, college athletes might be able to accept money to endorse a product on Instagram, teach sports lessons or video-record a greeting for a fan.
Salaries for athletes are off the table for now, but some proposals take a big step in that direction, requiring schools to share some athletic revenues with them. That would radically change college athletics’ century-old notion of amateurism.
Athletes and their advocates argue that they risk injury to help generate huge sums for their universities, all while under stricter limits than other college students.Critics fear that even a modest change, such as allowing athletes to endorse products, could set off bidding wars for recruits, further divide the wealthiest and poorest athletic departments and siphon revenue that would otherwise help support the dozen or so other teams that a typical athletic department funds outside of football and men’s basketball.
They also argue that college sports help give many athletes a chance at an education they might not otherwise have.The roots of college sports’ pre-eminent governing body date to 1906, when several dozen colleges founded what became the NCAA to curb deaths from dangerous plays in football. Today it oversees 24 men’s and women’s sports at more than 1,000 schools. Nearly 80% of the NCAA’s roughly $1 billion annual budget comes from the sale of TV and marketing-rights fees, led by the men’s basketball tournament.
Most of that money is redistributed to NCAA-member schools.The NCAA acts as the sheriff of college sports, punishing teams that violate its rules governing things from the number of football practices before the first game (no more than 25) to the modes of transportation that can be used during an athlete recruiting visit (no limousines).The NCAA also organizes national championships, and has drawn sharp criticism for the inferior marketing, amenities and Covid 19 testing for the women’s basketball tournament compared with the men’s.
The issue intensified the pressure on Mr. Emmert and prompted a letter of deep concern from 36 Congressmen, a constituency he needs for the NCAA’s preferred vision of player compensation to prevail in Congress. The NCAA’s rule-making process can make effecting big changes nearly impossible. A proposal must survive a winding path—the NCAA has more than 150 committees, three times as many as the U.S. Congress—and gain support from school representatives from across the country with widely varying budgets and goals.
“The association that all of us are part of has failed to articulate a clear vision for the future of college athletics,” said Jack Swarbrick, director of athletics at Notre Dame. “And we have found ourselves constantly responding to others’ visions of what that should be, and playing defense.”Public opinion on athlete compensation is shifting.
Between 2013 and 2017, the share of Americans who said scholarships were sufficient compensation for college athletes dropped from 71% to 60%, according to Seton Hall University, which regularly polls the public on sports topics. Two years later, 60% believed college athletes should be allowed to profit from the use of their name, image or likeness while 32% said they shouldn’t.
This year's poll showed a majority still support that right, 56%, with opposition falling to 25%. The share of people who were undecided rose to 19% from 8%.Other forces have driven the change. The value of live sports broadcasts has exploded, driving college-athletics revenues.
The public has grown increasingly aware of the risk of long-term damage from concussions suffered playing football.Increased attention on racial-justice issues emphasized the poor optics of restricting the earnings of largely Black football and men’s basketball players while mostly white head coaches take home, in many cases, their respective state’s highest public salary.When the pandemic and lockdowns sent some college students home to study remotely, many of the athletes remained on campus to play games. Some are now holed up in Indianapolis hotel rooms for the basketball tournament.
“We can only leave our rooms to go to practice or to the game,” Iowa basketball player Jordan Bohannon said from Indianapolis before the NCAA slightly loosened the rules. He and his teammates limited their social contacts this season and underwent tests for Covid-19 daily—more often than many front-line healthcare workers.In 2019, California lawmakers voted 112-0 to give college athletes in the state the right to earn money from their athletic fame. Mr. Emmert pushed back, writing to Gov. Gavin Newsom that the bill would remove the “essential element of fairness and equal treatment that forms the bedrock of college sports.”
Then, last December, the Supreme Court announced[URL]https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-to-consider-ncaa-antitrust-case-on-college-athlete-compensation-11608129891?mod[/URL]=article_inline] [/url]it would hear arguments in Alston v. NCAA, a case brought by Shawne Alston, a former West Virginia football player, and other athletes that questioned whether the association engaged in anticompetitive practices by capping educational benefits athletes could receive.
The class action is the latest in a string of athlete suits[URL]https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ncaas-other-march-madness-spring-brings-a-race-to-reshape-athlete-endorsement-rules-11583769190?mod[/URL]=article_inline] [/url]alleging that NCAA rules violate federal antitrust law. To fend off these challenges, the NCAA spent $33 million on legal fees in 2019, up from $14 million five years earlier.In April 2020, prodded in part by the California law, the NCAA Board of Governors approved areas for “modernizing” the name-image-likeness rules.
The changes would allow athletes to be paid by third parties for endorsements and public appearances but would forbid schools from paying athletes directly. Proposals outlining the changes were to be considered at a January 2021 NCAA convention.Days before the convention, the Justice Department’s antitrust division warned the NCAA in a letter not to adopt new policies that could violate antitrust law.
After the Supreme Court agreed to consider the breadth of the association’s authority to adopt restrictions on athlete compensation in the name of amateurism, the NCAA halted its plan.The court could reinforce broad authority for the NCAA, which would give the association greater leverage as it negotiates with state and federal lawmakers, or find it has unreasonably limited college athletes’ compensation. In recent weeks, college athletes received support from the Justice Department, which filed an amicus brief in support of Mr. Alston.
“Regardless of how this shakes out, one thing seems clear: College athletes will be better off in six months than they are today,” said Gabe Feldman, professor of sports law at Tulane University.Mr. Emmert’s $2.7 million annual compensation and the NCAA staff of about 450 full-time employees suggest he’s comparable to the commissioner of a pro sports league.
He says he’s much more like the United Nations secretary-general, with the richest conferences known as the Power Five—Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and Southeastern—in the role of the U.N. Security Council.“We’ve got big countries, we’ve got little countries, we’ve got countries with nuclear weapons, countries without them,” Mr. Emmert said.
In 2014 the NCAA’s big countries—the Power Five—secured from the NCAA’s Board of Governors permission to bypass the Byzantine membership-wide legislation process and enact many of their own rules.
The group, nudged by a court ruling, began allowing schools to fill the gap between an athletic scholarship and a school’s reported full cost of attendance, typically several thousand dollars, to help athletes pay for things like groceries, laundry and plane tickets home.
The big conferences had been accruing power since 1984, when a U.S. Supreme Court decision shifted control of college football broadcasts to schools from the NCAA. Over the next few decades, the number of televised football games mushroomed. Top athletic conferences expanded and negotiated blockbuster TV deals
.A decade ago the Pacific-10 Conference added Colorado and Utah, rebranded as the Pac-12 and signed a 12-year broadcast-rights contract worth $3 billion—more than quadruple its previous deal. Other conferences followed suit, fueling an increase in the annual revenue flowing to college athletic departments. In 2014, top-division football conferences launched a four-team national playoff they sold to ESPN for nearly $6 billion over 12 years.
Yet as coaches’ salaries soared past $1 million, NCAA rules governing athletes mostly remained as they were in the 1950s.At the 2014 men’s basketball Final Four, Connecticut guard Shabazz Napier said he sometimes went to bed hungry while the university sold jerseys bearing his number.
After a national backlash, the NCAA quickly lifted its limit on the number of meals that schools could provide to athletes. Mr. Napier, who went on to play six seasons in the NBA, declined to comment.
Schools proposed about 100 or so rules changes each year, said Amy Huchthausen, commissioner of the Division-I America East Conference, and, “they were about recruiting calendars and when to start the soccer season.
”When it came to the issue of player compensation, “No one wanted to tackle it,” she said.
Defenders of the traditional model of college sports point out that athletes already receive a free college education.Under liberalized rules, athletes are “going to compete with us when we’re going out to attract national brands for sponsors and ticket sales for people to support our programs,” said North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham.
He predicted that a local restaurant that usually pays the athletic department $50,000 to sponsor the weekly radio show about Tar Heel basketball, for instance, would redirect a portion of its spending to athletes.
Boosters could exploit liberalized rules by bribing high school athletes to commit to their favored team, turning recruiting into an exercise “riddled with inducements and inappropriate offers,” Southeastern Conference Commissioner Greg Sankey said.
Kendall Spencer, a former long jumper at the University of New Mexico, predicted that in the absence of a nationwide law, top athletes would gravitate to schools in states where they could make the most money.
That would erode the competitive equity he sees as a hallmark of college sports.
“When I line up against the athlete from Alabama or Stanford or Berkeley, I want to know that there’s as level of a playing field as there can be,” said Mr. Spencer, who is now a lawyer who competes professionally in long jump.
Former Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence, the anticipated No. 1 pick in the 2021 National Football League draft, is potentially worth more than $2 million annually in social-media value alone. That’s according to an estimate by Opendorse, a digital platform that connects athletes with sponsors or fans who want to pay them for endorsements or in-person appearances
.Of the 50 most-followed NCAA athletes on social media, 23 compete outside the sports of football and men’s basketball, including 19 female athletes, said Blake Lawrence, co-founder of Opendorse, a former linebacker at Nebraska and no relation to Trevor Lawrence.Even athletes with more-modest followings could, under new rules, earn money in ways now prohibited. Louisville softball player Celene Funke said she has turned down offers in her native Carmel, Ind., to give private coaching to children.
If every one of the 500,000 NCAA athletes held a one-day sports camp for children at $50 apiece, and drew 100 attendees, “it’s a $2.5 billion market,” Blake Lawrence said.Rule changes could create more questions. How would companies secure group-licensing agreements to feature entire teams in a videogame or a pack of sports cards? Unlike professionals, college athletes have no recognized players’ union through which to collectively bargain over working conditions, player-movement rules or compensation structure.
Mr. Swarbrick, formerly a practicing lawyer, said the Supreme Court won’t detail what the NCAA’s financial rules for athletes should be, but could decide the scope of the association’s rule-making authority.“We just need some clarity about where those limits are, where those lines are,” he said. “Because it’s not productive for anybody right now.”
.In the next few months, however, the NCAA stands to lose control of its empire’s future over an issue its member schools long hoped to avoid: athlete compensation.College athletes have historically been classified as “amateurs,” even as they helped generate billions for their colleges and universities and made millionaires of their coaches.
NCAA rules have long capped athletes’ compensation at little more than tuition, room and board.But public sentiment that once supported the existing model has reversed, and long-silent athletes have become loud critics of the system.
Numerous players marked the start of this year’s NCAA tournament by tweeting “#NotNCAAProperty
.”The tension has created a scramble to define the future of college athletics. State and federal politicians in both parties have proposed dozens of bills that would let college athletes earn money from their name, image and likeness—a step that is forbidden under current NCAA policy. A handful of state laws have already passed, including one in Florida that takes effect July 1. The NCAA itself has called for federal legislation to override a chaotic patchwork of state oversight. Now the NCAA faces a week like no other.
The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in a case related to college-athlete compensation on Wednesday, three days before basketball’s men’s Final Four begins. A ruling is expected by the end of June.“I genuinely believe that this year will be the most pivotal year in college sports history since its founding,” NCAA President Mark Emmert said.The landscape could soon look much different, with college athletes winning economic rights that would further blur the line between them and paid professionals.
As soon as this summer, college athletes might be able to accept money to endorse a product on Instagram, teach sports lessons or video-record a greeting for a fan.
Salaries for athletes are off the table for now, but some proposals take a big step in that direction, requiring schools to share some athletic revenues with them. That would radically change college athletics’ century-old notion of amateurism.
Athletes and their advocates argue that they risk injury to help generate huge sums for their universities, all while under stricter limits than other college students.Critics fear that even a modest change, such as allowing athletes to endorse products, could set off bidding wars for recruits, further divide the wealthiest and poorest athletic departments and siphon revenue that would otherwise help support the dozen or so other teams that a typical athletic department funds outside of football and men’s basketball.
They also argue that college sports help give many athletes a chance at an education they might not otherwise have.The roots of college sports’ pre-eminent governing body date to 1906, when several dozen colleges founded what became the NCAA to curb deaths from dangerous plays in football. Today it oversees 24 men’s and women’s sports at more than 1,000 schools. Nearly 80% of the NCAA’s roughly $1 billion annual budget comes from the sale of TV and marketing-rights fees, led by the men’s basketball tournament.
Most of that money is redistributed to NCAA-member schools.The NCAA acts as the sheriff of college sports, punishing teams that violate its rules governing things from the number of football practices before the first game (no more than 25) to the modes of transportation that can be used during an athlete recruiting visit (no limousines).The NCAA also organizes national championships, and has drawn sharp criticism for the inferior marketing, amenities and Covid 19 testing for the women’s basketball tournament compared with the men’s.
The issue intensified the pressure on Mr. Emmert and prompted a letter of deep concern from 36 Congressmen, a constituency he needs for the NCAA’s preferred vision of player compensation to prevail in Congress. The NCAA’s rule-making process can make effecting big changes nearly impossible. A proposal must survive a winding path—the NCAA has more than 150 committees, three times as many as the U.S. Congress—and gain support from school representatives from across the country with widely varying budgets and goals.
“The association that all of us are part of has failed to articulate a clear vision for the future of college athletics,” said Jack Swarbrick, director of athletics at Notre Dame. “And we have found ourselves constantly responding to others’ visions of what that should be, and playing defense.”Public opinion on athlete compensation is shifting.
Between 2013 and 2017, the share of Americans who said scholarships were sufficient compensation for college athletes dropped from 71% to 60%, according to Seton Hall University, which regularly polls the public on sports topics. Two years later, 60% believed college athletes should be allowed to profit from the use of their name, image or likeness while 32% said they shouldn’t.
This year's poll showed a majority still support that right, 56%, with opposition falling to 25%. The share of people who were undecided rose to 19% from 8%.Other forces have driven the change. The value of live sports broadcasts has exploded, driving college-athletics revenues.
The public has grown increasingly aware of the risk of long-term damage from concussions suffered playing football.Increased attention on racial-justice issues emphasized the poor optics of restricting the earnings of largely Black football and men’s basketball players while mostly white head coaches take home, in many cases, their respective state’s highest public salary.When the pandemic and lockdowns sent some college students home to study remotely, many of the athletes remained on campus to play games. Some are now holed up in Indianapolis hotel rooms for the basketball tournament.
“We can only leave our rooms to go to practice or to the game,” Iowa basketball player Jordan Bohannon said from Indianapolis before the NCAA slightly loosened the rules. He and his teammates limited their social contacts this season and underwent tests for Covid-19 daily—more often than many front-line healthcare workers.In 2019, California lawmakers voted 112-0 to give college athletes in the state the right to earn money from their athletic fame. Mr. Emmert pushed back, writing to Gov. Gavin Newsom that the bill would remove the “essential element of fairness and equal treatment that forms the bedrock of college sports.”
Then, last December, the Supreme Court announced[URL]https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-to-consider-ncaa-antitrust-case-on-college-athlete-compensation-11608129891?mod[/URL]=article_inline] [/url]it would hear arguments in Alston v. NCAA, a case brought by Shawne Alston, a former West Virginia football player, and other athletes that questioned whether the association engaged in anticompetitive practices by capping educational benefits athletes could receive.
The class action is the latest in a string of athlete suits[URL]https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ncaas-other-march-madness-spring-brings-a-race-to-reshape-athlete-endorsement-rules-11583769190?mod[/URL]=article_inline] [/url]alleging that NCAA rules violate federal antitrust law. To fend off these challenges, the NCAA spent $33 million on legal fees in 2019, up from $14 million five years earlier.In April 2020, prodded in part by the California law, the NCAA Board of Governors approved areas for “modernizing” the name-image-likeness rules.
The changes would allow athletes to be paid by third parties for endorsements and public appearances but would forbid schools from paying athletes directly. Proposals outlining the changes were to be considered at a January 2021 NCAA convention.Days before the convention, the Justice Department’s antitrust division warned the NCAA in a letter not to adopt new policies that could violate antitrust law.
After the Supreme Court agreed to consider the breadth of the association’s authority to adopt restrictions on athlete compensation in the name of amateurism, the NCAA halted its plan.The court could reinforce broad authority for the NCAA, which would give the association greater leverage as it negotiates with state and federal lawmakers, or find it has unreasonably limited college athletes’ compensation. In recent weeks, college athletes received support from the Justice Department, which filed an amicus brief in support of Mr. Alston.
“Regardless of how this shakes out, one thing seems clear: College athletes will be better off in six months than they are today,” said Gabe Feldman, professor of sports law at Tulane University.Mr. Emmert’s $2.7 million annual compensation and the NCAA staff of about 450 full-time employees suggest he’s comparable to the commissioner of a pro sports league.
He says he’s much more like the United Nations secretary-general, with the richest conferences known as the Power Five—Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and Southeastern—in the role of the U.N. Security Council.“We’ve got big countries, we’ve got little countries, we’ve got countries with nuclear weapons, countries without them,” Mr. Emmert said.
In 2014 the NCAA’s big countries—the Power Five—secured from the NCAA’s Board of Governors permission to bypass the Byzantine membership-wide legislation process and enact many of their own rules.
The group, nudged by a court ruling, began allowing schools to fill the gap between an athletic scholarship and a school’s reported full cost of attendance, typically several thousand dollars, to help athletes pay for things like groceries, laundry and plane tickets home.
The big conferences had been accruing power since 1984, when a U.S. Supreme Court decision shifted control of college football broadcasts to schools from the NCAA. Over the next few decades, the number of televised football games mushroomed. Top athletic conferences expanded and negotiated blockbuster TV deals
.A decade ago the Pacific-10 Conference added Colorado and Utah, rebranded as the Pac-12 and signed a 12-year broadcast-rights contract worth $3 billion—more than quadruple its previous deal. Other conferences followed suit, fueling an increase in the annual revenue flowing to college athletic departments. In 2014, top-division football conferences launched a four-team national playoff they sold to ESPN for nearly $6 billion over 12 years.
Yet as coaches’ salaries soared past $1 million, NCAA rules governing athletes mostly remained as they were in the 1950s.At the 2014 men’s basketball Final Four, Connecticut guard Shabazz Napier said he sometimes went to bed hungry while the university sold jerseys bearing his number.
After a national backlash, the NCAA quickly lifted its limit on the number of meals that schools could provide to athletes. Mr. Napier, who went on to play six seasons in the NBA, declined to comment.
Schools proposed about 100 or so rules changes each year, said Amy Huchthausen, commissioner of the Division-I America East Conference, and, “they were about recruiting calendars and when to start the soccer season.
”When it came to the issue of player compensation, “No one wanted to tackle it,” she said.
Defenders of the traditional model of college sports point out that athletes already receive a free college education.Under liberalized rules, athletes are “going to compete with us when we’re going out to attract national brands for sponsors and ticket sales for people to support our programs,” said North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham.
He predicted that a local restaurant that usually pays the athletic department $50,000 to sponsor the weekly radio show about Tar Heel basketball, for instance, would redirect a portion of its spending to athletes.
Boosters could exploit liberalized rules by bribing high school athletes to commit to their favored team, turning recruiting into an exercise “riddled with inducements and inappropriate offers,” Southeastern Conference Commissioner Greg Sankey said.
Kendall Spencer, a former long jumper at the University of New Mexico, predicted that in the absence of a nationwide law, top athletes would gravitate to schools in states where they could make the most money.
That would erode the competitive equity he sees as a hallmark of college sports.
“When I line up against the athlete from Alabama or Stanford or Berkeley, I want to know that there’s as level of a playing field as there can be,” said Mr. Spencer, who is now a lawyer who competes professionally in long jump.
Former Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence, the anticipated No. 1 pick in the 2021 National Football League draft, is potentially worth more than $2 million annually in social-media value alone. That’s according to an estimate by Opendorse, a digital platform that connects athletes with sponsors or fans who want to pay them for endorsements or in-person appearances
.Of the 50 most-followed NCAA athletes on social media, 23 compete outside the sports of football and men’s basketball, including 19 female athletes, said Blake Lawrence, co-founder of Opendorse, a former linebacker at Nebraska and no relation to Trevor Lawrence.Even athletes with more-modest followings could, under new rules, earn money in ways now prohibited. Louisville softball player Celene Funke said she has turned down offers in her native Carmel, Ind., to give private coaching to children.
If every one of the 500,000 NCAA athletes held a one-day sports camp for children at $50 apiece, and drew 100 attendees, “it’s a $2.5 billion market,” Blake Lawrence said.Rule changes could create more questions. How would companies secure group-licensing agreements to feature entire teams in a videogame or a pack of sports cards? Unlike professionals, college athletes have no recognized players’ union through which to collectively bargain over working conditions, player-movement rules or compensation structure.
Mr. Swarbrick, formerly a practicing lawyer, said the Supreme Court won’t detail what the NCAA’s financial rules for athletes should be, but could decide the scope of the association’s rule-making authority.“We just need some clarity about where those limits are, where those lines are,” he said. “Because it’s not productive for anybody right now.”
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