NCAA v. Alston and the end of college sports

I was a varsity athlete my freshman year in college: I ran cross-country for Vanderbilt, up to and including the SEC conference meet in Tallahassee FL in 1973. After I transferred to UT-Knoxville, I ran in local track and 10K competitions, but didn’t bother to go out for varsity sports at UT, since so many of their athletes were on athletic scholarships. I did compete against Olympic steeplechase star Doug Brown once in the mile, but he finished over 20 seconds ahead of me—it was never even close, and I’m sure he was just loping.

Since high school, I lost interest in vicarious participation in sports, college and pro. So the NCAA v. Alston SCOTUS decision that allows “student-athletes” to market their images and otherwise receive outside compensation didn’t bother me. It’s only a matter of time before colleges are allowed to pay their players, which upends the college sports business model. As Kevin Drum says:

“If a dozen universities basically run pro programs that are farm teams for the NFL while the rest are essentially relegated to Division II, that's the end of big-time college athletics.”

As a commenter on the blog thread below notes, a hotshot math whiz at Caltech or MIT can already make big bucks doing quant work for Wall Street on the side. How is a student athlete any different?

For years, The Chronicle of Higher Education published the top five salaries at ca. 300 American universities. With rare exception, at universities with medical schools, those employees were surgeons, while at universities without medical schools, they were the athletic directors and their staffs. That’s looking to change, and I think it will be a good thing. Maybe pro football and basketball can develop non-university farm teams like pro baseball, instead of exploiting college students and perpetuating the myth of the student-athlete.

https://jabberwocking.com/college-athletics-is-now-doomed/