Michael McEwen / Contributing Writer
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) can no longer prevent college athletes from receiving some form of compensation for their exploits.
The decision was announced on Monday, June 21 in a case that officially began on March 31, but calls for student-athlete compensation have risen since 2019.
Collegiate athletes have been required by the NCAA — who governs as many as 460,000 student athletes– to compete as amateurs, preventing them from receiving educational or monetary benefits for the entirety of its 115 year history. However, NCAA and sports media revenues from competitions have risen dramatically without any compensation for athletes.
While the scope of this ruling relates only to ‘educational related benefits – such as study abroad, paid internships, laptops or paid injury leave – the unanimous decision and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s final statement increases the likelihood of a challenge to the lack of monetary pay for athletes in relation to revenue they generated for their institutions.
“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 in his final statement on the case.
Universities profit from student athletes with their likeness in commercials and social media, ticket and merchandise sales, TV viewership, and other forms of advertising but were forbidden by the NCAA from offering them more benefits.
Now, It is now up to Division I basketball and football programs to decide what additional educational benefits they will offer their players as other individual athletic conferences can decide their own limits.
One of the major catalysts of the case was the announcement of EA Sports College Football, a football-based video game developed by Electronic Arts which is set to release in 2023.
Since the game’s announcement on February 2, it’s not clear if student athletes would receive payment for their likeness in the game. Some colleges, most notably the University of Notre Dame, have announced that they won’t participate in the game until there’s a ruling that allows for compensation for student athletes.
The ruling marks a resounding victory for student athletes and labor activists who have called the NCAA’s business structure into question for decades. It also presents the NCAA with an unclear future.
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