The justices will consider whether limits on payments to student-athletes violate antitrust laws.
WASHINGTON — Entering the debate over whether student-athletes may share in the proceeds of what can be enormously lucrative college sports franchises, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on Wednesday in the first case in decades to consider how federal antitrust laws apply to the N.C.A.A.
Lawyers for the lead plaintiff in the case, Shawne Alston, a former West Virginia University running back, said that he and the other athletes had been exploited.
“Despite the massive revenues generated by these sports and the ever-growing demands on student-athletes,” their Supreme Court brief said, “the N.C.A.A.’s members continue to restrict the type and amount of compensation and benefits — including education-related benefits — that schools may offer in competing for recruits.”
Last year, a federal appeals court ruled that the N.C.A.A. was not free to limit benefits tied to education for Division I football and basketball players. The decision allowed payments for things like musical instruments, scientific equipment, postgraduate scholarships, tutoring, study abroad, academic awards and internships. It did not permit the outright payment of salaries.
The court rejected the N.C.A.A.’s argument that compensating athletes would alienate sports fans who prize students’ amateur status. “Uncapping certain education-related benefits would preserve consumer demand for college athletics just as well as the challenged rules do,” Chief Judge Sidney R. Thomas wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco.
“Such benefits are easily distinguishable from professional salaries,” he wrote, as they are linked to education and could be provided in kind rather than in cash. “The record furnishes ample support,” Judge Thomas added, “that the provision of education-related benefits has not and will not repel college sports fans.”
In urging the Supreme Court to hear an appeal, lawyers for the N.C.A.A. wrote that “the decision will transform student-athletes into professionals, eliminating the pro-competitive distinction between college and professional sports.”
“Consumers will likely come to view N.C.A.A. athletics as just another form of minor league sports,” the group’s petition said.
The association said the distinctions drawn by the appeals court — between education-related payments and others — were either meaningless or easily evaded. Internships, the brief said, posed particular hazards.
“It would be easy for schools to label such internships ‘related to education,’ even if a star athlete was given, say, a six-month ‘internship’ at a sneaker company or auto dealership that paid $500,000,” a brief filed in February said. “But fans, student-athletes and everyone else would recognize the reality: that student-athletes were being paid large sums in cash for their athletic play — with the ‘internships’ a thinly disguised vehicle for funneling them quintessentially professional salaries.”
The Supreme Court last considered how antitrust laws applied to the association in 1984, ruling that its restrictions on television coverage of college football games were unlawful. But the decision, National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, included an influential passage on student-athletes.
“The N.C.A.A. plays a critical role in the maintenance of a revered tradition of amateurism in college sports,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority. “There can be no question but that it needs ample latitude to play that role, or that the preservation of the student-athlete in higher education adds richness and diversity to intercollegiate athletics and is entirely consistent with the goals of” the antitrust laws.
The Biden administration filed a brief supporting the athletes in the new case, National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston, No. 20-512, saying that the Ninth Circuit had struck the right balance.
“Promoting amateurism widens consumer choice, and thereby enhances competition, by maintaining a distinction between college and professional athletics,” the brief said. But “some of the challenged rules did not actually foster consumer demand.”
Besides the coronavirus pandemic, no issue has recently demanded more of the N.C.A.A.’s attention than the rights of student-athletes, especially whether they should be able to profit from their fame. College sports executives have long feared that loosening age-old rules would effectively professionalize students and open a different array of challenges, but they have faced mounting pressure over the past few years from Congress and many of the nation’s statehouses. Most crucially, a Florida law that directly challenges the N.C.A.A.’s policies is scheduled to take effect this summer, and California legislators are considering a proposal to speed up a similar measure there.
Although the N.C.A.A. has vowed to rewrite its rules, it delayed final approval over the winter after the Trump administration’s Justice Department raised misgivings. And Congress has not rushed to give the association the kind of political and legal cover it craves.
“The N.C.A.A. seems to be trying to present themselves as a body that is working for the athletes, that is working to protect the safety and well-being of the athletes, that it’s about, as they want to say, amateurism and doing what’s in the best interest of these individuals,” Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey and a former football player at Stanford University, said recently. “And that is ringing more and more hollow.”
The court’s ruling in the Alston case could shape the association’s approach, in part because it could define the extent of the N.C.A.A.’s authority.
“We’re at a very pivotal point,” Mark Emmert, the association’s president, said as he discussed the case in an interview in mid-March.
Alan Blinder contributed reporting.
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