Breakfast Club: Should We End the NCAA?
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The age of collegiate amateurism may be ending. (Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
Supreme Court debates NCAA amateurism
As March Madness wraps up, the Supreme Court is deliberating the fate of collegiate sports. Last Wednesday, justices heard arguments in a case testing whether NCAA limits on student-athlete compensation violate anti-trust laws.
College sports are a massive industry. In the 2015-16 academic year, Division I basketball and football generated $4.3 billion in revenue. Despite the numbers, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the US inter-collegiate governing body, enforces a strict set of rules limiting player compensation.
Anti-trust law dictates that competitors can't collude to fix prices on a product (or hold down wages). But the NCAA argues that their "product" is different from professional sports because athletes are amateurs. The allure of American collegiate sports, argues the NCAA, is that athletes aren't pa…
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