'Boat has hit the iceberg' for the NCAA after NIL lawsuit ruling

The NCAA‘s amateur model is crumbling before our eyes. The free market for college athletes is taking shape. 

Friday’s momentous news –  the preliminary injunction against the NCAA that will prevent the association from prohibiting athletes from negotiating NIL compensation with collectives and boosters – shouldn’t even be considered momentous.

It should be considered as obvious as it is overdue.

But this is a landmark ruling, one that is in effect until the lawsuit goes to trial. And it’s consequential largely because an entire industry has been conditioned for decades to believe that it’s against NCAA rules for athletes to be able to gauge the true value of their labor like any other American. 

Now, Judge Clifton L. Corker, with Friday’s ruling in the NIL lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Tennessee and Virginia, is signaling that the NCAA’s suppression of a free market – at least as it pertains to NIL – is on the wrong side of the law.

“Without the give and take of a free market, student-athletes simply have no knowledge of their true NIL value,” Corker wrote in his decision. “It is this suppression of negotiating leverage and the consequential lack of knowledge that harms student-athletes.”

The court ordered that the NCAA and “all persons in active concert or participation with the NCAA” are restrained from enforcing the interim NIL policy, NCAA bylaws or any other authority that prohibits athletes from negotiating NIL compensation.

God forbid a college athlete – like the rest of us – can gauge what he/she is worth on the open market before they make important decisions related to their future. 

‘We’ve been under this veil of NCAA propaganda for decades’

It’s another loss for the NCAA, and a Texas-sized one. 

But athletes shouldn’t have been in an ecosystem where news like this even needs to be celebrated. This needs to be – and will be – the new normal.

It is a step in the right direction. However, the athletes’ free market needs to expand further.

“Every other American has access to be able to gauge the value of their labor,” Jason Stahl, founder of the College Football Players Association, told On3 on Friday. “It’s only because we’ve been under this veil of NCAA propaganda for decades that somehow we think about college athletes in a different manner.”

Stahl added that for decades players’ labor has been “illegally devalued through a non-capitalist economic system. What I want to see is what is the true, full value of their labor is – we still don’t know that, even with this decision. We want to say, ‘What’s next?’ This is a step in the right direction. 

“But we all know what needs to come – true revenue sharing, true negotiation at the table about more games played, health and safety protections.”

Athletes deserve a say in free market

What this decision does represent is the continued demise of the NCAA’s amateurism model.

“The boat has hit the iceberg,” one prominent administrative source told On3 on Friday.

Another source said if you thought we were already seeing the “Wild Wild West” ensue across the landscape, just wait to see what takes hold now that athletes are permitted to negotiate NIL deals.

Here is what will take hold: another much-needed step toward the formation of a long-overdue free market for the athletes.

Athletes also need the ability to gauge how large of a slice of the enormous broadcast rights pies they deserve. They need to be empowered to collectively bargain with schools, leagues or the College Football Playoff on any number of issues related to compensation, health and welfare matters and much more.

The fact that 10 FBS commissioners engaged in a nearly nine-hour College Football Playoff meeting Wednesday and broached the possibility of already expanding the newly expanded 12-team tournament to 14 teams – without a peep of input from athletes – tells you how far we still need to go.

But it’s coming.

And considering the pace of change in 2024 alone, it’s coming fast. 

“At what point does the NCAA admit defeat?” Mit Winter, a college sports attorney at Kennyhertz Perry, said. “When do schools start leaving to create their own leagues?”

‘We have to start normalizing what is happening’

It underscores the need for the industry’s two super conferences, the SEC and Big Ten, to use their “joint advisory group” to firmly take the wheel from the NCAA and craft a new financial model that won’t attract a mountain of antitrust lawsuits. 

Friday’s news is just the latest indication that the NCAA’s resistance to wholesale change, resistance to creating a revenue-sharing model that incorporates collective bargaining, is a failed strategy.

The NCAA is the roadblock standing in the way of the creation of a completely free market for athletes. And what is barrelling through that roadblock is a new model buttressed by the law. 

It bears repeating: Because of the preliminary injunction, the NCAA cannot enforce its own NIL policy or prohibit athletes from negotiating NIL deals with third parties until the case is settled or goes to trial.

The model is no longer poised to shift. A new model is taking hold – one that always should have been in effect. And the courts are the catalyst.

It is only the beginning, as a true revenue-sharing component awaits in the on-deck circle.

Corker had telegraphed his skepticism regarding the NCAA’s position earlier this month. In his Feb. 6 opinion, when he denied the temporary restraining order in the case, Corker wrote, “Considering the evidence currently before the court, plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim under the Sherman Act.”

Time will tell how the case plays out. In the meantime, we are now witnessing, in real-time, the NCAA’s amateur model crumbling. And we’re seeing the college athlete free market take shape – a change as obvious as it is overdue.

As Stahl said, “We have to start normalizing what is happening.”