Why the NCAA’s mounting court losses will only matter so much

The NCAA, keeping with a theme in recent years, lost a big court case. On Friday, a federal judge in California sided with a group of players who argued the NCAA’s scholarship rules broke the law. Specifically, the players said the NCAA violated antitrust laws by banning colleges from offering more than scholarship money and cost-of-attendance to athletes.

The Alston v. NCAA verdict won’t mean the sea change a lot of people have wanted forever. The judge ruled the NCAA does violate antitrust law, but her ruling does not require the NCAA to allow players to be paid. All it does is lift an NCAA limit on how many education-related benefits schools can give players, meaning conferences and schools could offer things like laptops and science equipment in excess of what they could offer before. We’ll see what other kinds of things schools might decide are related to education.

Emphasis goes on chip away. These cases haven’t totally eroded the NCAA’s control, because all of the verdicts against the organization come with caveats.

In 2014, the NCAA lost the case brought by former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon, who’d argued it was an antitrust violation for the NCAA and its schools to make huge money on things like TV deals and video games without paying football and men’s basketball players (the ones who generate the biggest TV deals and went in the video games).

But the O’Bannon ruling didn’t force the NCAA to do much, and it didn’t force the schools to do anything. The only thing it demanded of the NCAA was that the national governing body drop rules preventing schools from offering cost-of-attendance payments. Now they’re the norm.

In 2018, the NCAA won* a case brought by former USC running backs coach Todd McNair, who’d been fighting a blackball show-cause penalty he got from the Reggie Bush case. McNair argued the NCAA got it wrong when it panned him for compliance violations, and also that the NCAA had unfairly targeted him on drummed-up charges.

But McNair did convince a California state judge that the NCAA’s show-causes are an antitrust violation, overly restricting someone’s chance to find work in college sports. One of the NCAA’s harshest tools of justice is now invalid in America’s most populous state, and who knows what other courts might decide down the line.

*The McNair case against the NCAA is a zombie and not actually over. He just got a new trial, so the NCAA might have more trouble on that front, nearly eight years after McNair sued.

And now, in 2019, a federal court has dialed back NCAA limitations on what colleges can offer players along with their scholarships. The same judge who ruled on O’Bannon’s case ruled on this one, and again, she dealt the NCAA a loss, but not one that made it allow player pay. The NCAA has indicated it might appeal. If it doesn’t, it has three months to make changes to its rulebook allowing more education-related benefits for players.

Maybe schools and conferences will change their policies. Maybe they won’t.

In the Alston case, the NCAA argued that a) letting players be paid would make people less interested in college sports, and b) players couldn’t integrate into their campus communities if they were paid. (Weirdly, the same point is never made about other students who get on-campus jobs.)

It was bizarre when Wisconsin’s chancellor said — at trial, under oath — that her school might stop fielding sports teams if players were allowed to be paid.

As satisfying as it might be to watch poor arguments from the NCAA and its universities get Dikembe Mutombo’d in court, the NCAA’s losses so far only move the needle a bit.

That’s because the NCAA is the schools. NCAA president Mark Emmert isn’t entirely a puppet, but his main purpose is to help enforce things universities want. The NCAA’s biggest rule-making authority lies with a giant nesting doll set of committees, and the people on those committees are from schools and conferences.

The overwhelming majority of college administrators don’t want to let players be paid, because they either truly believe NCAA amateurism is the right thing, don’t want the complication of installing a new system, or would rather not see revenues shared in a way that could leave less money to go into their own six-figure salaries.

The schools could make some changes without a judge’s order, because of public pressure. Letting players collect endorsement checks or other outside money that doesn’t come from colleges themselves is the most obvious candidate.

But if you’re hoping for an overhaul of the whole NCAA economic model, you’re probably relying on the courts to make it happen. So far, they haven’t.