Couch: Kavanaugh's Last Word Leaves NCAA Good As Dead

You’ve got to give the NCAA credit. They ran this scam much longer than anyone would have imagined. They sold it so well.

Remember? Amateur sports were about purity and not being tainted by the evils of money. Ha! That way, our education system -- Haha! -- pulled in billions of dollars in revenue from football and basketball, got so tainted and greedy and dirty and didn’t have to share any of it with these pure, virginal athletes.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t exactly bury amateur sports or kill off the NCAA, but just about. The path is clear now. The justices ruled unanimously that the NCAA can’t limit college athletes’ compensation to tuition, room, board and scholarships.

They didn’t rule that athletes could be paid, but only that they can get more benefits if those benefits are “education-related,’’ like a computer or an internship. But that’s clearly just step one in this dance. Amateurism and the NCAA are now dead on arrival in future lawsuits.

The NCAA is “not above the law,’’ Justice Brett Kavanaugh said. “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.”

The NCAA said that that is just Kavanaugh’s opinion. Yes, the opinion of an antitrust law expert sitting on the US Supreme Court.

Somehow amateurism became the model, the founding principle of righteousness for an industry that went wild over greed. No one made college presidents agree to have their football games on national TV. No one made them take the shoe money. No one made college football add a tournament and a conference championship game and more regular season games at the same time that football players were suffering brain injuries.

The governing bodies of amateur sports became overly professional in the way that loan sharks are professional. To think that they believed they should be the ones making money on athletes’ images for their rest of their lives with the athletes getting nothing.

That’s the next ruling coming down, that the athletes own their own names and images after all.

But while the scam grew and grew and the revenues exploded, colleges kept pushing the amateur ideal because they didn’t want to share with the “student-athletes,’’ a term invented to make this sound noble somehow.

From here on, they should be referred to as “labor.’’ 

So this is an obituary of the NCAA amateurism con. Olympic sports gave up the sham years ago, after we used to basically accuse the Russians of paying their hockey players, the Red Army, as if paying labor is dirty.

I don’t know how this will all work out. No one does. The NCAA is worried that boosters and donors will no longer bother giving money to the schools when they could cut out the middleman and give it to the athletes. Probably true.

Universities have mismanaged and squandered their billions, too, and now are worried that they’ll have to pay the labor themselves, even though the money is gone.

I’m just guessing, but I don’t think it’s going to work out that way. The money will now come from boosters and alumni who have been prevented from giving before. I think they’ll find a way to cover the costs, and more.

It has worked out pretty well for Olympics sports. The US Olympic Committee now helps athletes figure out how to make money on their names and images, while the NCAA fights that in the courts.

And loses.

Maybe this will require schools to be more responsible with their money, our tax money. Athletes will surely form unions now. And they’ll find other ways to make money through social media.

I can’t say strongly enough, though, how stupid the NCAA’s legal strategy was. They actually went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to keep athletes from getting computers and internships? I mean, how could the NCAA set up rules to limit the amount of educational help college students are getting?

It’s really because the NCAA itself is “education-related’’ at best. And they got too greedy.

But if the NCAA had just given in and let the athletes have computers, then that would have been a good way to get more money to the athletes without having to cross the threshold into paying them. This will only lead to more suits, which the NCAA will lose, and force the issue of athletes being paid.

From here, there is nothing left for the NCAA to do, other than putting on a fun NCAA Tournament in basketball and running lawyers to courtrooms. They can still be an enforcement arm, I guess, but mostly they were only enforcing rules set up to make sure that labor wouldn’t get a cut.

The NCAA and universities did this to themselves, pushed a phony amateur ideal and then professionalized their sports to make billions. That con is over now.

It was a good run.