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Artical #6
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Opinion | Paying Students to Play Would Ruin College Sports (Published 2019)

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A handful of programs would pay top dollar for a select few athletes, while other schools would get caught up in a bidding war they couldn’t afford.

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C-Oct. 1, 2019
R-Agrees with claim
A-Spencer Bokat-Lindell It is also a Newspaper so it is
A-No spelling or grammar errors
P-Yes it talks about how its great that athletes are getting paid now.

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College athletics is less a nonprofit enterprise than an industry exploiting its workers, writes Brian Rosenberg, the president of Macalester College, in The New York Times. He points out that universities with top teams can rake in nearly $20 million a year from Nike or Adidas sponsorships, while the athletes themselves, whose talent is what attracts such sponsorships in the first place, walk away with nothing. He writes:

College basketball players are worth a lot of money, but they aren't legally allowed to make it. So the schools, coaches, agents and shoe companies make the money instead - all in the name of "amateurism."

Katelyn Ohashi, a former University of California, Los Angeles, gymnast, has criticized the unfairness of N.C.A.A. rules that prevented her from making any money from a video of a perfect floor routine that went viral earlier this year. She told Mr. Newsom:

Here's the fame, but then there's no compensation, and it's so crazy. People are like, "Oh, you must be so rich." And I'm like, "You must not know the N.C.A.A." ... When my routine went viral, [N.C.A.A. President] Mark Emmert called me to congratulate me, and I'm like, "You should be thanking me."

In fact, according to an analysis cited in The Economist, if players were paid in proportion to the amount of revenue they generated for their colleges, "the top 10 percent of football and 16 percent of basketball players would be paid around $400,000 and $250,000 a year respectively." While the N.C.A.A.'s desire to keep so-called professionalism out of college sports may have made sense before they became such a big business, the author writes, it's clearly an illusion that no longer holds:

The two most lucrative college sports, American football and basketball, are highly competitive. Many universities are willing to bend over backward to enroll talented players. And the argument that university athletics remains amateur would hardly earn passing marks in even an introductory college course.

Removing the N.C.A.A. restrictions on endorsements would create a winner-take-all dynamic within and among universities, writes Cody J. McDavis, a former Division I basketball player. The best players at the best schools would reap all the benefits, Mr. McDavis says, while less popular sports and athletes would suffer. He writes:

Major brands like Nike would pay top football and basketball talent at the biggest schools, while student-athletes in other sports or at smaller programs would be ignored. Currently, corporate funds go to athletic departments and are generally distributed among all sports; with third-party payments, those funds could instead mostly go directly to a few student-athletes, starving the rest.

The N.C.A.A., for its part, has said the California law "would erase the critical distinction between college and professional athletes." Even The Los Angeles Times editorial board, which came out in favor of the law, acknowledges that some change to the spirit of college athletics would be inevitable. They write:

The measure would inevitably eat away at the distinction between professional and college sports. Celebrated collegians could make money not only by endorsing sneakers and sports drinks, but also by autographing jerseys, pitching workout videos and putting their name on baseball bats and hockey sticks. In short, they could profit from the fame that their work as an athlete brings.

As those on opposing sides of California's law debate how the fruits of the college sports economy ought to be distributed, others assert that the solution is simply to decommercialize the activity altogether.

Jonathan R. Cole, a professor at Columbia and author of "Toward a More Perfect University," suggests in The Atlantic that the emphasis placed on campus athletics is " totally out of control." In 41 states, he writes, the highest-paid public employee is not a professor or neurosurgeon, but rather a college football or basketball coach. For students, meanwhile, the difficulty of keeping up with both coursework and demanding athletic schedules has created an incentive for academic fraud. Taken together, a picture emerges of college sports as a pseudoprofessional industry that encroaches upon the mission of higher education. He writes:

For the highly selective colleges and universities, the leaders ought to roll back the percentage of recruited athletes. ... The highly selective colleges ought to withdraw from the N.C.A.A. and form their own league since they are not trying to build national championship programs. ... Finally, university leaders should consider forming special institutions located in different geographic areas that are devoted almost entirely to athletics and bodily-kinesthetic intelligence.

One school that has provided something of a model on this front is Spelman, a historically black college for women. In 2011, Spelman learned that its N.C.A.A. division was losing three members. Rather than find another conference in which to compete at great expense, the school decided to withdraw from the N.C.A.A. and eliminate its athletics department in favor of a fitness program for all students. Beverly Daniel Tatum, then Spelman's president, wrote in The Times in 2013:

Whether it's diabetes, high blood pressure or heart disease, black women are more likely to suffer from these ailments - and die from them - at young ages. All are linked to obesity and lack of physical activity. ... We decided that it was more important to support our entire campus with a wellness initiative than 80 student athletes with N.C.A.A. funding.

California's changes aren't scheduled to take effect until 2023, leaving the N.C.A.A. ample time to mount court challenges to the law, which the organization has suggested violates the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. If the law is upheld, the N.C.A.A. will have to decide whether to penalize the schools with fines, which may or may not be legally enforceable, or even expel them.

For now, California is betting that the outsize importance of its universities within the world of college sports will make those threats impossible to carry out. "I don't necessarily take it to heart," Newsom said.
It's the one-month birthday of this newsletter! Do you have a topic you'd like us to cover? Is there anything you want to see more or less of? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com to tell us what you think so we can make it even better for you.
Jemele Hill makes the case for black athletes to leave white colleges for historically black ones. [The Atlantic]

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Opinion | Should College Athletes Be Allowed to Get Paid? (Published 2019)

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College athletics is less a nonprofit enterprise than an industry exploiting its workers, writes Brian Rosenberg, the president of Macalester College, in The New York Times. He points out that universities with top teams can rake in nearly $20 million a year from Nike or Adidas sponsorships, while the athletes themselves, whose talent is what attracts such sponsorships in the first place, walk away with nothing.

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C-Jul 18, 2011
R-Agree with claim
A-Michael Wilbon

A-No spelling or grammar error
P-It also talks about how they how they wanted to get paid.

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Michael Wilbon, Pardon the Interruption co-hostJul 18, 2011, 03:00 AM ET

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Michael Wilbon is a featured columnist for ESPN.com and ESPNChicago.com. He is the longtime co-host of "Pardon the Interruption" on ESPN and appears on the "NBA Sunday Countdown" pregame show on ABC, in addition to ESPN. You can follow him on Twitter: @RealMikeWilbon

I used to argue vehemently against paying college athletes. Tuition, room, board and books were compensation enough. And even if, increasingly, it wasn't enough and virtually every kid who accepted a scholarship was in the red before Christmas of his freshman year, the notion of pay-for-play was at best a logistical nightmare. Where exactly would the money come from? How could you pay college football players but not baseball players or members of the women's field hockey team? And how in the world would you pay men in a way that wouldn't violate Title IX?

So you know what caused me to do a 180 on the issue? That $11 billion deal -- OK, it's $10.8 billion to be exact -- between the NCAA and CBS/Turner Sports for March Madness between 2011 and 2024. We're talking $11 billion for three weekends of television per year. On top of that, there's a new four-year deal with ESPN that pays the BCS $500 million. So, if those two deals were worth, say, a combined $10 billion instead of $11.3 billion, would the games not be televised? Would the quality of the broadcasts or the coverage or the staging of the events be somehow diminished? What if people in the business of money took $1.3 billion off the top, invested it, sheltered it and made it available to provide a stipend to college athletes, how could anybody stand on principal and argue against paying the people who make the events possible in the first place?

Let me declare up front I wouldn't be the slightest bit interested in distributing the funds equitably or even paying every college athlete. I'm interested in seeing the people who produce the revenue share a teeny, tiny slice of it. That's right, football and men's basketball players get paid; lacrosse, field hockey, softball, baseball, soccer players get nothing. You know what that's called? Capitalism. Not everything is equal, not everything is fair. The most distinguished professor at the University of Alabama won't make $5.9 million in his entire tenure in Tuscaloosa; Nick Saban will make that this year. So I don't want to hear that it's "unfair" to pay the quarterback of Alabama more than all the sociology students in the undergraduate college.

Using the inability to distribute the funds equally as an impediment is an excuse, a rather intellectually lazy one at that. Nothing about the way hundreds of millions of dollars is distributed is equitable or even fair. The BCS' new deal with ESPN was based, in part, on paying more money to schools/conferences with regard to what has been called "population centers." Of the $174 million distributed from five bowl games, 83.4 percent went to six conferences in 2011. In question right now is whether the BCS even conducts its business dealings in a manner consistent with principles expressed in federal anti-trust laws. So, the equitable-application excuse for not paying athletes doesn't hold water; at the very least there's a level of hypocrisy here that ought to make the opponents of paying athletes uncomfortable.

Don't get me wrong, paying players out of individual athletic department budgets is beyond impractical; it's probably not feasible. Because so many athletic departments run at a deficit, it's difficult to make the case that schools should pay regular salaries to athletes, even football players who produce more income than anybody. But it's another thing entirely for the students who play for revenue-producing teams (at UConn and the University of Tennessee, this would include the women's basketball teams) to be somehow compensated from the lucrative television/radio/Internet rights fees they make wholly possible.

It's commendable that the NCAA has paid millions into a fund for in-need athletes to cover clothing purchases, emergency travel and medical expenses. There's also a special assistance fund and a student-athlete opportunity fund. Why can't hundreds of millions of dollars be directed into those, and in turn make money much more accessible to athletes for the kinds of regular day-to-day expenses regular college students pay by working jobs that are off-limits to intercollegiate athletes?

In the meantime, if they cannot be paid outright, surely the scholarship athletes should be able to engage in entrepreneurial pursuits that currently leads to costly NCAA investigations that have proven to be mostly a waste of time since, one, such activities historically haven't been checked and, two, the kids who commit the "infractions" aren't effectively punished. Their revelations, short of Heisman Trophy winners having to return their statues, wind up penalizing only the kids and coaches who remain on the team and in the vast majority of cases have done nothing to merit a penalty themselves.

If somebody is willing to give A.J. Green $750 or $1,000 or even $2,500 for his Georgia Bulldogs jersey, fine, good. If one of his teammates, a tackle, can fetch only $50 for his jersey, then it'll be a good marketing lesson for both of them. It's called supply and demand, and if both men are fortunate enough to reach the NFL it'll be a lesson worth learning because that dynamic will exist their entire careers. If a soccer player can't get a dime for his jersey, well, there's a realization in that, too.

The question from the opponents of paying college athletes inevitably comes back, "What would stop a star player from agreeing to shake hands at a local car dealership for $50,000?" The answer is, nothing. If a car dealer wants to strike that deal then good for the player in question. If a music student goes out in the summer and earns 50 grand, who objects? Who even knows? The student-musician is no less a college student because he struck a lucrative deal. Neither is the student-journalist who spends his nights writing freelance stories and picking up as much money along the way as he can.

If the student as athlete can find a way, he/she should be able to endorse products, to have paid-speaking gigs, to sell memorabilia, as Allen Sack, the author and professor at the college of business at the University of New Haven has suggested in recent years. The best college athletes in the two revenue-producing sports have always been worth much more than tuition, room, board and books. The best football and basketball players in the Big Ten have produced to the degree that a television network has become the model for every conference in America, a network worth at least tens of millions of dollars to the member institutions. Yet, no player can benefit from that work. The players have become employees of the universities and conferences as much as students -- employees with no compensation, which not only violates common decency but perhaps even the law.
Michael Wilbon is a featured columnist for ESPN.com and ESPNChicago.com. He is the longtime co-host of "Pardon the Interruption" on ESPN and appears on the "NBA Sunday Countdown" pregame show on ABC in addition to ESPN. Wilbon joined ESPN.com after three decades with The Washington Post, where he earned a reputation as one of the nation's most respected sports journalists.

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You don't have to pay all of the players all of the same. But not giving athletes a cut of the billion-dollar deals they've helped happen? That's incredibly wrong.

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Article #3
C-SEPTEMBER 16, 20
R-Agree with claim
A-Ted Tatos
A-No spelling or grammar error
P-talks about how athletes should get paid.

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California Senator Nancy Skinner's Senate Bill 206 would permit athletes to earn outside compensation from the use of their own name, image, and likeness (NIL)-and it unanimously flew through both houses of the state legislature. SB206, which now awaits Governor Gavin Newsom's signature, has drawn sharp warnings from the NCAA, as the bill threatens its ability to exploit college athletes participating under its model of "amateurism."

Given the NCAA's threats, one might assume that the bill's passage would result in some cataclysmic event, threatening the very existence of college sports. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The act would merely allow athletes to enjoy (almost) the same rights over their own identities that every student at their school enjoys, unencumbered by NCAA cartel restrictions. Even these rights are limited, as athletes could not enter into an agreement that conflicts with a team's existing contracts.

The prospect of returning even a portion of NIL rights to college athletes has prompted howls of dismay from the NCAA and its acolytes. On June 17, 2019, NCAA President Mark Emmert sent a letter requesting that the State Senate postpone consideration of the bill. More recently, the NCAA informed Governor Newsom that it regarded the bill as "unconstitutional," signaling an intention to rely on the Constitution's Commerce Clause to raise a legal challenge. The letter also claimed that SB206 would upend the "level playing field" that the NCAA claims it has supported in college athletics.

Those familiar with the O'Bannon v. NCAA case may be hard pressed to stifle their laughter upon seeing the NCAA trot out such risible, well-refuted claims. During the O'Bannon trial, plaintiffs' counsel presented a quote from NCAA special advisor Wally Renfro, a 40-year veteran of the institution, who in an email titled "Financial Underpinnings of Athletics," referred to Division I membership as " the haves, the have-nots, and the forget-about-its." Indeed, so wide is the disparity that the "Power Five" conference football programs routinely make "guarantee game" payments to smaller teams. For example, Tulane received $1.94 million for playing SEC powerhouse Auburn earlier this year. In her O'Bannon ruling, District Judge Claudia Wilken, citing academic consensus on the matter, rejected the NCAA's competitive balance justification, opining that:
The NCAA does not do anything to rein in spending by the high-revenue schools or minimize existing disparities in revenue and recruiting ... the major conferences-and the highest revenue schools-typically receive the greatest payouts, which hinders, rather than promotes, competitive balance.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Judge Wilken's ruling on this point. In the subsequent Alston v. NCAA case, the NCAA, perhaps sensing a lost cause, did not even request that the court reconsider its competitive balance justification for its restraint on athlete compensation.

Some athletes can already be paid in cash for their athletic talents. NCAA athletes competing in the Olympics receive cash payment for medaling in their sport. As CBS's Dennis Dodd pointed out in 2018, University of Texas swimmer Joseph Schooling received $753,000 as payment for his gold medal from his native Singapore. He still won six medals at the NCAA championships. Kyler Murray received a $4.7 million bonus from the Oakland Athletics, yet remained eligible to quarterback the Oklahoma Sooners. As long as this was not football money, the NCAA concluded that he was eligible to keep playing, though his college baseball career was over.

Clearly the NCAA's real concern lies with the prospect that college athletes in the major revenue sports of basketball and football might receive something more than table scraps for the extraordinary sums they garner for their schools. Those arguing that athletes receive an "education" in exchange for their 40-plus hours per week of labor and the millions they bring to the school may want to revisit the long-standing academic fraud case at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the most respected public universities in the nation.

Nonetheless, the NCAA's "level playing field" canard does signal at least an attempt, serious or not, to lean on Ninth Circuit precedent set in the 1992 NCAA v. Miller case, which involved NCAA sanctions against then-coach Jerry Tarkanian and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. There, the NCAA challenged various provisions of Nevada statute NRS 398 that set forth the state's guidelines for the imposition of NCAA sanctions upon any college or university in the state. The district court found that the Nevada statute was "significantly burdensome on the NCAA's objective of maintaining a 'level playing field' within intercollegiate athletics." The Ninth Circuit affirmed, concluding that the practical effect of the regulation would have been to control conduct beyond the state's boundaries.

However, this finding has little relevance for the California State Senate Bill. State and federal legislators have begun to chip away at the NCAA cartel's economic control over college athletes. South Carolina lawmakers recently announced plans to file a bill similar to SB206. North Carolina Representative Mark Walker has introduced H.R. 1804, the Student-Athlete Equity Act, which has been referred to the House Ways and Means Committee. Representative Walker's bill proposes to "prohibit qualified amateur sports organizations from prohibiting or substantially restricting the use of an athletes name, image, or likeness." Senator Chris Murphy has also taken up the cause of fair compensation for college athletes, a position highlighted in his recently-released " Madness, Inc" commentary. Vermont Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders recently tweeted " College athletes are workers. Pay them." So too has fellow candidate Andrew Yang. It should be clear then that SB206 is not a lone voice calling for change, but rather part of a growing legislative chorus calling for an end to the exploitation of college athletes.

Moreover, the California bill does not prevent any other state's colleges and universities from participating in the NCAA cartel's collusive restrictions. Nor does it prevent California's own schools from continuing to collude with other NCAA members to limit athlete compensation in other areas. The bill simply says that California universities cannot participate in cartel restrictions only with regard to NIL rights. In raising a Commerce Clause challenge on this issue, the NCAA would offer the absurd argument that SB206's removal of a restraint on trade should be subordinate to a cartel's nationwide imposition of that same restraint, a position at clear odds with the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Any claim that the bill would "burden" interstate commerce is suspect for at least two other reasons. First, the bill does not impose additional regulations. Rather it deregulates, freeing college athletes from the economic restraints imposed upon their own identities by the NCAA, an economic cartel that has lost the last two antitrust cases it has faced. Second, the benefits to athletes are not local. Colleges and universities in California, like any other state, recruit nationally and internationally. As such, the NIL benefits would not be restricted by any state boundary. Further, any third party may compensate athletes competing for California schools in exchange for their NIL rights, not just California companies or individuals.

The NCAA may also claim that the bill would give California schools a recruiting advantage over out-of-state competitors, particularly for players with the ability to monetize their NIL rights. However, California schools, including both USC and Stanford, have voiced their opposition to the bill. The sheer prospect of having to share their collusively-extracted gains with the labor that generated them apparently overwhelms any perceived recruiting advantage.

The financial stakes offer some insight into why California schools oppose the bill. In 2016, UCLA signed a 15-year, $280 million apparel contract with Under Armour (see other schools' contracts here). Apparel contracts can have implications beyond the athletic department. Documents from the UNC-Chapel Hill show that the school's Nike contract included $2 million used by the chancellor to protect non-tenure track positions in the College of Arts & Sciences, School of Nursing, and School of Education. These details underscore the immense value schools extract from the success of their athletic programs, success that is built upon the work of college athletes, whose NIL rights the schools have colluded to appropriate.

Finally, the NCAA will likely attempt to revisit the Ninth Circuit's decision in O'Bannon, which held that payments to athletes should be "tethered to education." This provided the support for providing college athletes with an approximately $2,500 to $5,000 "cost-of-attendance" (COA) stipend, a move the NCAA fought. While these COA payments provide a small measure of relief, particularly given evidence that 86 percent of college athletes live below the poverty line, consider this: During this year's PAC-12 basketball tournament, Commissioner Larry Scott, whose $4.8 million annual salary exceeds that of the Big Ten and SEC Commissioners combined, stayed in a 3,300 square-foot, $7,500 per night suite at the Aria Las Vegas. A few months earlier, during the Alston v. NCAA trial, Scott pontificated about the "purity" of the college game, the same "purity" that pays his salary and lifestyle. This of course, does not even begin to address the racial component of this injustice, a topic that journalist Patrick Hruby explored in his excellent 2016 article " Four Years A Student-Athlete: The Racial Injustice of Big-Time College Sports."

Allowing NIL payments would offer additional education-related benefits. First, for many athletes with uncertain pro futures debating early entry into the professional ranks, NIL payments would allow them to stay in school and finish their degrees without being compelled by financial considerations to make a risky bet. Basketball agents acknowledged this reality in a letter sent to the NCAA this past weekend, explaining that "Every year, men's basketball student-athletes continue to make poor decisions on whether to remain in the NBA Draft or return to school." Former Georgetown guard L.J Peak, in Sam Vecenie's 2017 Vice article, explained how financial considerations led him to leave early and enter his name into the NBA draft, despite expecting to be a second-round pick at best. Allowing NIL payments would benefit fans as well, who often complain about early entry's effect on roster turnover, a point that addresses the NCAA's "consumer demand" defense for amateurism.

Second, it would relieve many athletes, on whose success their families often depend, from significant stress. In 2015, the University of Mississippi's Laremy Tunsil, one of the top football players in arguably the nation's top college football conference, the SEC, was forced to ask coaches for assistance with his mother's $305 power and water bill. One might wonder if this sum would have covered even a single room service delivery at Larry Scott's Aria suite. Meanwhile, in the O'Bannon antitrust trial, the NCAA paid one of its economic experts, who argued against compensating athletes for their NIL rights, $2300 per hour. Two hours of this expert's time in 2013 cost more than an entire year's COA stipend for an out-of-state football player at Alabama in 2015.

While not every athlete could parlay their NIL into a contract with Nike or Coca-Cola, a large number would likely sign smaller endorsement deals with local businesses. The name of an athlete on a little-known product, or perhaps a local doctor's office or car dealership, can yield financial benefits that can make the difference between struggling financially and being able to remain in school and perhaps help her/his family.

Despite its chest-thumping, the NCAA argues against SB206 from a position of legal, economic, and moral weakness. Public opinion, which the NCAA has attempted to sway with its widely-mocked propaganda campaigns, has begun to turn against "amateurism." Terren Klein, CEO of College Pulse, recently told CNBC's Make It, "The majority of students are in favor of paying student-athletes and give overwhelming support for allowing student-athletes to profit off their name and image." And before one casually dismisses college students' opinions on the matter, the University of Alabama apparently finds their participation important enough to track fourth-quarter early student departures from football games.

The NCAA's threats of a sports apocalypse if athletes were allowed to regain their own identities only expose it as a decrepit and morally bankrupt institution struggling to maintain its economic stranglehold over the lives of young athletes. Thanks to legislators such as Nancy Skinner, Chris Murphy, and others who have taken up the fight for economic justice, the NCAA's grip has begun to loosen.
The author has not been involved in any NCAA-related antitrust litigation and has received no compensation from any party in such litigation. He was not paid for writing this piece.

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College Athletes Should Be Able to Earn Money From Their Likeness

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California Senator Nancy Skinner's Senate Bill 206 would permit athletes to earn outside compensation from the use of their own name, image, and likeness (NIL)-and it unanimously flew through both houses of the state legislature.

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Article #4
C-Sept. 30, 2019,
R-agree with claim
A-David K. Li
A-no spelling or grammar error
P-talks how governor sign the bill for college athletes should be paid

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Calling the forced amateurism of student-athletes "a bankrupt model," California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a first-in-the-nation bill Monday that clears the way for college players to be paid from endorsement deals.

The legislation allows student-athletes to sign endorsement deals and prohibits the governing body of college sports, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and the schools from banning those compensated athletes.

NCAA rules strictly prohibit athletes from profiting in any way from their sports, and the law would still bar schools from directly paying athletes.

The new regulation is scheduled to start in 2023.

"Colleges reap billions from student athletes but block them from earning a single dollar. That's a bankrupt model," Newsom tweeted after signing the bill.

The NCAA acknowledged in a statement Monday that its current regulations on amateurism will need to change, but said California's new law won't help.

"As a membership organization, the NCAA agrees changes are needed to continue to support student-athletes but improvement needs to happen on a national level through the NCAA's rules-making process," the governing body said.

"Unfortunately this new law already is creating confusion for current and future student-athletes, coaches, administrators and campuses and not just in California."

Newsom signed the bill while appearing on NBA icon LeBron James' HBO show, "The Shop: Uninterrupted."

The governor predicted it would prompt dozens of other states to pass similar legislation and force the NCAA's hand.

"It's going to change college sports for the better by having now the interests finally of the athletes on par with the interests of the institutions," Newsom said. "Now we're re-balancing that power arrangement.

James, who went pro straight out of high school, urged the NCAA to come to the bargaining table and find a way to compensate athletes who generate millions of dollars, especially in football and basketball.

"NCAA, you got the next move," James wrote on Instagram. "We can solve this for everyone!"

Newsom's signature on Monday served as one more step toward the end of free labor in college sports, according to University of Chicago economics professor Allen Sanderson.

"The NCAA's 100-year model is not going to survive another 10 years, there's just too much money involved," Sanderson, who specialized in sports economics, told NBC News.

"How it's going to exactly play out, I don't know. It's a like a fumble on the ground and who is going to recover it. I'm just pretty sure that the NCAA is not going to end up with the ball."

While the NCAA is the governing body of college sports, membership is voluntary. So conceivably, if schools are forced out of competition by the NCAA, they could simply opt out to form their own new leagues.

Lisa Masteralexis, who teaches sports management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said the upcoming battle on this issue could embolden high-revenue, so-called "Power 5" leagues - the Big Ten, Southeastern, Pacific-12, Big 12 and Atlantic Coast Conferences - to create their own athlete compensation packages.

And if they did so, those big-money schools and leagues could break away on their own, bumping the NCAA from the business of big-time college sports altogether.

"The power conferences have leverage," Masteralexis told NBC News shortly after Newsom signed the bill. "If you look at the Power 5 conferences, they have enough money and media attention, some with their own TV networks, they can drive the bus."

Legislation signed Monday by Newsom seemed to fall in line with the public's general view of compensating college athletes.

A Morning Consult poll published this past spring showed that Americans oppose direct school-to-athlete pay, 45 percent to 32 percent.

But when asked if student-athletes should be able to sign deals with brands, respondents said yes by 47 percent to 35 percent. And asked if college athletes should be allowed to profit off their names or images on video games and other products, respondents again said yes by 52 percent to 31 percent.

The Golden State is home to dozens of schools that play top-flight Division I sports, including Pacific-12 Conference institutions such as the University of Southern California, Stanford University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley.

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Calif. governor signs bill allowing college athletes to sign endorsements

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Calling the forced amateurism of student-athletes "a bankrupt model," California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a first-in-the-nation bill Monday that clears the way for college players to be paid from endorsement deals. The legislation allows student-athletes to sign endorsement deals and prohibits the governing body of college sports, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and the schools from banning those compensated athletes.

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C-JEFF COCKRELL
R-agree with claim
A-APR 04, 2018
A-no spelling or grammar error
P-have an opinion if college athletes should be paid

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In the United States, college athletics have long been a lucrative business. As of 2017, there were more than two dozen schools that generated upwards of $100 million in annual revenue through their athletic programs. Among 127 of the 131 schools in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivison, the average revenues from football alone exceed $30 million. The NCAA itself-a large portion of whose revenues come from its recently completed men's basketball tournament-raked in more than $1 billion in 2017.

But while some, including many coaches, are making small fortunes off of college sports, compensation for one group is meticulously limited: that of the athletes themselves. To be eligible to play NCAA sports, players must maintain amateur status, which means they can't be paid for participating. This prohibition includes indirect payment, such as money from endorsements, though they may receive compensation of a sort via scholarships to live and study at their respective schools.

The NCAA says that "maintaining amateurism is crucial to preserving an academic environment in which acquiring a quality education is the first priority." However, the growing imbalance between how much money college athletic departments generate and how fully they can compensate their players has led to questions of fairness.

Do the NCAA's rules restricting player compensation benefit schools at the expense of players? To find out, Chicago Booth's Initiative on Global Markets polled the members of its Economic Experts Panel, who answered with a resounding 'yes.' Among respondents, 92 percent agreed that "NCAA Division I schools coordinate compensation for men's basketball and football players (precluding actual pay and limiting non-monetary benefits), providing rents to member schools (which may be shared with others) at the expense of those players." The remaining 8 percent of respondents registered no opinion.

Some respondents noted that though the statement may be true, the NCAA's rules could still be justified.

"There may be socially appropriate reasons for the practice described," wrote Stanford's Darrell Duffie.

Austan Goolsbee, Chicago Booth
"A top NBA coach gets $7 million-$8 million per year, and a top player makes four times that. A top college coach gets $6 million, but the players get nothing."
Response: Strongly agree

Michael Greenstone, University of Chicago
"Only hesitation in complete agreement is that there is lots of redistribution across sports and even within basketball/football players."
Response: Agree

Robert Hall, Stanford
"Wrong question. Should be 'Are the NCAA's limitations on contracting with athletes socially harmful?'"
Response: Agree

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In the United States, college athletics have long been a lucrative business. As of 2017, there were more than two dozen schools that generated upwards of $100 million in annual revenue through their athletic programs. Among 127 of the 131 schools in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivison, the average revenues from football alone exceed $30 million.

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C-Oct 9, 2019

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C-Sep 28, 2017

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