The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the NCAA violates antitrust law with its strict rulings concerning student-athlete compensation.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for the ruling, stressing throughout the decision does not encompass all of the NCAA compensation rules:
The decision doesn’t open up a world of unlimited pay for college athletes, an issue that wasn’t before the court.Instead, the justices said the NCAA must allow colleges to recruit athletes by offering them additional compensation and benefits, as long as they are tied to education.That means schools could offer compensation beyond the cost of attending college, such as scholarships for graduate or vocational schools, internships, computer equipment and study-abroad programs—and limited cash awards for athletes who do well in the classroom.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh took it a step further in his concurring opinion. Kavanaugh has a problem with the rest of the NCAA compensation rules “raise serious questions under the antitrust laws.” He wrote:
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 illegal 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” for 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,” continued Kavanaugh. “And price-fixing labor is ordinarily a textbook antitrust problem because it extinguishes the free market in which individuals can otherwise obtain fair compensation for their work.”
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