Crumbling Edifice

The student-athletes-don't-get-paid edifice continues to crumble. Courts are becoming more and more skeptical about the distinction between college sports and professional sports. From the NY Times:

PHILADELPHIA — Steven Katz, a lawyer representing the N.C.A.A., had barely cleared his throat Wednesday while appearing before a three-judge panel for a federal appeals court when he was peppered with questions. As Katz was asserting that the case before the court — the former Villanova defensive back Trey Johnson argues he and other Division I athletes should be considered employees and thus entitled to be paid a minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act — would set off a cascade of inequities between men’s and women’s collegiate sports, Judge Theodore A. McKee cut him off. “Don’t we already have that?” he asked, referring to the highly publicized disparities between the Division I men’s and women’s basketball tournaments two years ago. “The women’s weight room was basically a closet with dumbbells, and the men’s weight room looked like the spa at the Four Seasons.”

A few beats later, Judge L. Felipe Restrepo, noting that the service academies pay their athletes — without any problems from the N.C.A.A. — wondered about athletes raking in significant endorsement contracts: “How are they not employees of the universities given the regimes they report to?” The third judge, David J. Porter, eventually picked away at how the big business of college sports might be considered. “There’s arguably a market for world-class musicians to get scholarships, for people who have perfect SAT scores and 4.0 averages,” Porter said. “They get scholarships. How are those people different than student-athletes?” ...

The hearing was merely a procedural step — the N.C.A.A. telling the appellate judges that a U.S. District judge had erred when he did not throw out the suit — in a case that has broad implications. It is only one of several working their way through the judicial system that threatens to upend the collegiate-sports model. The three judges are expected to rule within the next few months whether the case can proceed, but what stood out in Wednesday’s hearing was how more and more judges are being less and less sentimental about an enterprise that is amateur in name only...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/17/sports/ncaa-federal-court-athletes.html.

All of which suggests that UCLA's move to the Big Ten could simply turn out to be a temporary net revenue gain.