The closely watched case, which comes during the men’s and women’s Division I basketball tournaments, stems from the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s appeal of lower-court rulings in favor of former West Virginia University running back Shawne Alston and other ex-Division I college athletes. They won a U.S. District Court decision in 2019 that the NCAA’s rules violated antitrust law by depressing their compensation without sufficient justification.
That ruling was upheld last May on appeal by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Those decisions, if they survive Supreme Court review, would allow college athletes to receive increased benefits and compensation connected to education, such as laptop computers or musical instruments, or be guaranteed access to paid-for graduate school. Those rulings, however, didn’t go as far as the athletes wanted because judges declined to dismantle NCAA restrictions on compensation that aren’t connected to education-related benefits.
The NCAA has previously argued that its purpose of preserving the amateur status of student athletes gives it “ample latitude to govern college sports,” including by restricting competitive bidding for the talents of high-school athletes. The organization has said giving that process free rein would effectively blur the distinction between professional athletes and student athletes. The “popularity of college sports stems in part from the fact that these athletes are indeed students, who must not be paid unlimited cash sums unrelated to education,” NCAA Chief Legal Officer Donald Remy said in the context of the 2019 lower-court ruling.
College athletes and their advocates argue that they risk injury to help generate huge sums for their universities, all while under stricter limits—and heavier time demands—than other college students. Increased attention to racial-justice issues has emphasized the poor optics of restricting the earnings of largely Black football and men’s basketball players while mostly white head coaches earn, in many cases, the highest public salaries in their respective states.
The Justice Department has urged the Supreme Court to side with college athletes, arguing in a brief earlier this month that the NCAA’s interests in amateurism didn’t exclude its rules from the same kind of antitrust scrutiny that applies to other organizations.
Skepticism regarding the current NCAA model has come from both ends of the political spectrum, including in Congress. Conservative, free-market-espousing Republicans have pledged their support for athletes’ compensation, and so have liberal Democrats, who see it as a civil-rights or labor issue.
Beyond its impact on college sports, the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case could test U.S. antitrust law during a national debate on whether courts and lawmakers should do more to protect competition.
The NCAA case raises questions about how antitrust law should apply in labor markets, where the primary concern is whether business practices diminish wages, and could give the court a chance to say more about how antitrust law applies to joint ventures and to organizations that set industry standards for selling products and services.
“This is an interesting case for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with college athletics,” said Randy Stutz, a lawyer with the American Antitrust Institute, an organization that pushes for stronger antitrust enforcement.