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Supreme Court decision opens the door for new challenges to NCAA’s ‘amateur model’

Monday’s Supreme Court decision against the NCAA is a narrow and technical antitrust ruling that invalidates NCAA rules limiting education-related benefits for athletes, like laptops and graduate scholarships.

In itself, the decision in the Alston case isn’t much, dragging the NCAA kicking and screaming another step forward on a continuum of relaxed regulations that also included cost of attendance and other minor benefits.

But written between the lines of the decision, and then in giant neon letters tacked onto a concurring opinion, it’s the beginning of the end for the NCAA as we know it.

If the unanimous opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch didn’t make clear enough that the so-called “amateur model” doesn’t hold up to antitrust scrutiny, Justice Brett Kavanaugh added a concurring opinion expressly and deliberately to make that exact point.

The Alston ruling is a calligraphed and gold-leafed invitation for anyone and everyone to take on the rest of the inequitable, exploitative NCAA system that generates billions of dollars for everyone but the athletes themselves. If that sounds like over-the-top rhetoric, too bad: that assessment is now enshrined in the highest of law.

“The Court’s decision marks an important and overdue course correction,” Kavanaugh wrote, adding: “The NCAA’s remaining compensation rules also raise serious questions under the antitrust laws.”

Kavanaugh breaks those questions down in detail, and then drops the hammer, mentioning, among other postcards in college sports, the “packed gyms in Storrs and Durham.”

“Those traditions alone cannot justify the NCAA’s decision to build a massive money-raising enterprise on the backs of student athletes who are not fairly compensated,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate. And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.”

If Gorsuch’s opinion hints the Supreme Court would be willing to entertain new and more expansive challenges to the NCAA, the Kavanaugh concurrence not only invites them, but maps out how to attack the NCAA in a way the Supreme Court will accept.

It’s open legal season on the NCAA.

Mark Emmert, the NCAA and NIL

NCAA president Mark Emmert’s legal strategy -- to appeal Alston instead of dealing with the consequences, while Quixotically pursuing an antitrust exemption from Congress -- has turned what was once a minor district court loss that would have very little impact on the day-to-day operations of the NCAA into a catastrophic defeat that threatens the entire operation.

And under different leadership, you might think that the NCAA would now move forward with long-overdue reforms and modernizations with an eye to defusing the kind of legal challenges that would damp the fuse Kavanaugh lit with his concurrence.

Alas, this is an organization that had literal years to prepare for the onslaught of name, image and likeness state laws that take effect in less than 10 days and has done absolutely nothing.

The NCAA stalled, prevaricated and peacocked, making a big PR splash by publicly committing to NIL reform last April, and has since been spinning its wheels and begging Congress for help.

And now the people who run the NCAA -- both in Indianapolis and at the schools that make up its membership -- are supposed to figure out how to dig into their own pockets to make sure athletes get a chunk of the loot before the courts figure it out for them? Good luck with that.

In the short term, not much is going to change. Emmert -- who just got a baffling contract extension from a board of directors that includes N.C. State chancellor Randy Woodson -- should be kicked immediately to the transfer portal. A group of commissioners including the ACC’s Jim Phillips went behind his back this week to propose bare-bones NIL rules since the NCAA leadership seems incapable of reacting to any of this. The Emmertorer has no clothes.

New leaders in ACC could change NCAA

But in the weeks and months and years to come, there’s going to be a steady stream of lawsuits using the logic laid out in the Kavanaugh concurrence to attack every pillar of the so-called “amateur model” that ensures everyone but the athletes shares in the spoils of a billion-dollar industry.

If the NCAA can find a leader with the vision to head off those challenges before they happen by pushing the kind of reforms the NCAA has fought for decades, it might be able to preserve the best aspects of the current system in a way that benefits everyone -- fans, coaches and administrators, and especially athletes.

There’s a new generation of administrators and athletic directors not quite yet in power who see things differently than their predecessors; locally, Phillips is one and incoming Duke athletic director Nina King is another. The sooner the keys are handed over to people like them, the healthier college sports are going to be in the long run.

But if the current bunch stays in charge, the NCAA is in for a long decade of getting knocked around in court by lawyers brandishing Monday’s decision like a lacrosse stick.

Alston isn’t the end. It’s the means to the end.