College sports have exploded since the landmark Ed O’Bannon v NCAA decision in 2015, which now allows NCAA student athletes to earn NIL money for themselves. This came into reality by 2020, and since then it’s been the NCAA trying to self-regulate NIL payments to athletes, followed by student athletes challenging these new rules in court– and often winning.

A well-written recent ESPN article by Dan Murphy titled “Texas senator aims to help NCAA regulate athlete payments”, indicates that Capitol Hill lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are ready to give the NCAA what it wants.

What’s at stake is big money. According to this ESPN article, “the Big Ten and SEC each raked in more than $850 million in their most recent fiscal year, leaving even their power conference peers in the ACC ($706 million) and Big 12 ($511 million) significantly behind.”

The core issue is collective bargaining rights for NCAA student athletes. The NCAA (& US lawmakers) are against it, while most student athletes don’t understand its revolutionary implications. To have collective bargaining rights, means you must be an employee that earns for an employer. Athletes that play big-time NCAA sports do just that, yet the NCAA insists their student athletes aren’t employees.

When such an impasse is reached in bourgeois politics, this is when its lawmakers & courts get involved, by crafting legislation into laws that don’t violate basic rights as defined by the judiciary– in theory at least. This is always a biased process, colored by class & personal interests.

It is worth recalling the only American institution which is exempt from federal antitrust laws is Major League Baseball (MLB). In 1922, the US Supreme Court made one of its more reactionary rulings which still stands, in Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National League, ruling that baseball was a “purely state affair” and not interstate commerce. The court concluded that profiting from local “human effort and skill” in the sport did not constitute interstate commerce. The court found that transporting teams to play in other states was a “mere incident, not the essential thing”.

What was at issue was the ‘reserve clause’, which kept MLB players bound to their club for life. The owners of MLB were granted anti-trust exemption by a business-friendly government, which kept players salaries artificially suppressed. It wasn’t until MLBPA legal representative Marvin Miller (pic below) challenged this in court in the 1970’s that free agency came to MLB, and eventually all the major sports leagues.

These same issues are in play today with the NCAA’s leading universities acting as owners to keep NIL athletes from forming a union and having collective bargaining rights. The NCAA doesn’t consider it’s money-earning athletes to be employees, even though they can be (and are) paid by universities & alumni boosters to make money for them. These athletes clearly work for the NCAA, and if that isn’t the definition of an employee, then what is? The courts have taken this legal position on every NCAA attempt to control NIL-athletes ability to earn, etc, as the courts don’t buy the NCAA’s argument that NIL athletes aren’t employees.

At this point, Congress has been asked to step into the fray, in the form of Ted Cruz (R-TX). Texas is a HUGE football state, and the University of Texas just joined the SEC, making the final four of the 2024-25 CFP. It’s the huge money at stake, in terms of TV revenue for football that is driving all this. Football generates over three times the revenue for the NCAA that basketball does.

NCAA hoops is booming too, particularly on the women’s side, as they finally have regular network TV broadcasts, largely catalyzed by the popularity of Caitlin Clark at the University of Iowa, etc. It’s the Big 10 & SEC that have expanded into super-conferences, who are taking the lion’s share of this revenue, and demanding more in the future. There is a perception among those in-the-know that the NCAA may become a two-tiered system– with elite schools competing for national titles in all the major sports, but especially football– and then all the rest just existing on the fringes. Some would argue that has happened already.

Ted Cruz has been brought in (& bought by) the NCAA to make sure no collective bargaining rights are appropriated to NCAA athletes. And so Congress has been entrusted to work out a system which favors the NCAA in its further exploitation of student athletes. No unionization means not having to pay insurance, health care costs, even pensions, etc, to student-athletes who have earned for the NCAA. Attempts at denying these employee-athletes their right to bargain collectively, and thus be a united fist against the NCAA, violate anti-trust laws and will be open to strong legal challenges in the courts.

This is a revolutionary issue for young student athletes, as this goes down to high school now. The window for elite athletic competition is small and it’s a young man’s/woman’s game. Young athletes need to learn their history and speak to each other on these issues. Today, all sports are designed to bring prestige & money to a NCAA university. Sports has tremendous value. Volleyball, skiing, gymnastics, etc, are now broadcast regularly on the major networks as weekend sports programming. If they don’t have football, then just about any other sport will do.

Regular TV has gone to total garbage, with AI now taking over. Reality TV is now largely sports-competition based, in case you haven’t noticed. That makes sports programming more coveted than ever. The NCAA is attempting to cap it’s cost/university. Right now each university is allowed to spend $20.5M/year in NIL money to its athletes. Of course, for Texas, Alabama, Ohio State & Michigan, that isn’t enough, so alumni boosters kick in another $5-10M annually to give them the competitive edge they insist on having. For all intents & purposes, these university presidents, athletic directors and conference commissioners are the NCAA.

So what we have is a closed loop between the bourgeois politics of Ted Cruz and the NCAA. What has been left out of this political discussion are the athletes voices. This NIL & transfer portal era in the NCAA has become a Wild West of unethical recruiting, broken promises on agreed-to deals, and endless transfers & lawsuits from aggrieved student athletes. What it has done to the product on the playing field is obvious. There are no more programs at these universities– football, hoops, baseball, etc. They are now rotating sports factories designed to make maximum financial profit every year. This applies to the NIL athletes too.

And what we have are a bunch of kids who don’t fully realize the bigger game they are part of. They want to compete at the highest level, and they also want to get paid & go pro. Their competitive nature inherently directs them away from turning to others for help in obtaining their rights as employees of the NCAA. That is the barrier these young men & women must overcome to help themselves. By uniting and joining with others, you become stronger and help yourself in turn.

Final thoughts: Football & men’s basketball are the only profitable NCAA sports. The House Settlement, (named after ASU swimmer Grant House) which allows NIL revenue-sharing with student-athletes (along with back pay for former athletes dating back to 2016), has received preliminary approval from a federal judge. As with every other capitalist institution & setup, there are vast inequalities in this NCAA-NIL system. Of the $20.5M annually currently allowed (set to increase in the future), 90% of it will go towards football ($~15M) & men’s hoops (~$3M). The vast majority of NCAA student athletes don’t have NIL deals, and have been completely unrepresented in the process.

What this will create is a two-tiered layer of athletics across the NCAA and on every campus. The vast majority will be regular student athletes, with an elite layer of NIL-athletes for whom this professionalized system was created. Yes, stars are important to winning and they grab the TV ratings, but in football & hoops you need a TEAM to win. When all the programs become stratified in the manner I’ve described, you don’t have teams anymore– just a bunch of guys with the same-colored jersey. Thus, the competition becomes less compelling on every level.

NIL money for student athletes has the potential to revolutionize athletics for the better, but as anyone can see, it is instead being used by the NCAA & its power conferences to increase their monopoly power over college sports, while enriching only an elite class of athletes. This mirrors how real-world capitalism deals with any social inequality issue– it promotes a thin layer of union bureaucrats, blacks, women, gays, etc, to create the illusion of fairness & equality for all. The logic of identity politics is: Because OJ Simpson became rich & famous, all blacks should be happy– and so on.

Unless student athletes unite and appoint their own legal & media representatives in this fight, then most of them will be excluded from any benefits or compensation. Deion Sanders, head football coach at the University of Colorado has the clout to get his players (including his own son) top NIL deals. LeBron James can get his son a lucrative NIL deal at USC for a year, until he goes pro. These are the people being enriched by NIL money, and it’s an advantage most student athletes don’t have.

Also note that these NIL expenditures didn’t get the Trojans into the NCAA Tournament, or the Buffaloes into the CFP. It turns out you need a group players who are willing to sacrifice for the greater good (along with top talent) to win. NIL deals distort that paradigm. How can a coach create a consistent winning culture & team camaraderie when top players transfer every year? At this point, sports are all about entertainment, with winning & excellence being secondary– especially in the NCAA.

The professionalization of college & high school sports is a modern reality. The idea of sports is that it is fair to all and merit-based, meaning those who are the most-talented & work the hardest will excel above the rest. The reality is that if you don’t have money-backed competitive advantages working for you, you will get crushed by those who do.

Sports academies offer specialized professional training and top competition for aspiring young talent, but they are expensive and out-of-reach for most working class families. College sports is becoming more bourgeois at its roots, because you need these such advantages to compete for NIL deals at top NCAA universities.

On football:

When the NCAA kingpins who rule the Big 10 (now 18 schools) decided it would be a good idea to bring UCLA, USC, etc, into their conference because it benefits Michigan & Ohio State football, that doesn’t work out so well for the other sports whose west-coast athletes now have to fly to Rutgers & Maryland for conference competition. This is one example of the nefarious & destructive influence of football in college athletics.

In many ways football needs to be it’s own entity– apart from universities & education– because it is so powerful it can swallow up any school. It can absorb any evil such as organized crime & gambling in the NFL. The Universities of Michigan, Penn State, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Texas, USC, Alabama, etc, are beholden to football. The power it has over alumni is incalculable.

Football often defines that institution, and in this era of branding & NIL rights, that is more powerful than ever. Football is the PR department for the University of Miami Hurricanes and has been since Howard Schnellenberger. The same goes for FSU under Bobby Bowden, and the Florida Gators under Steve Spurrier & Urban Meyer. UCF in Orlando has become a top-25 football program out of nowhere due to massive financial inputs from the university, alumni & boosters.

The problem of the NCAA & NIL rights can’t be divorced from football. It is an addicting game, but it has a tremendous cost which is largely overlooked. Football ruins the lives of people who don’t even play, but instead bet compulsively on it. Lots of them are former high school/college players who never made it any further, yet somehow believe they have some special insight into the game. They don’t. It’s a physical, punishing game that grinds its participants into retirement. CTE, Parkinson’s, etc, are just a few of the long-term brain afflictions that await football greats when they retire.

These realities need to be widely discussed and accounted for when collective bargaining issues such at NCAA NIL rights are at stake. It’s the athletes who are competing in field hockey, soccer, wrestling, etc, that are being excluded from these discussions. It’s the university athletic directors, presidents & power conference commissioners (based on football), that are running the NCAA in their own interests. The NCAA student athletes need to come together under the banner of collective bargaining to have any voice in their future.

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