…There’s a not-so-tiny problem: Any restrictions on how much revenue college athletes receive going forward would be subject to
antitrust challenge.
As
Sportico explained, those restrictions are tantamount to price-fixing in that the NCAA, conferences and schools are competing businesses joining hands to set limits on athlete pay. Unless borne through collective bargaining—more on that below—caps and barriers are fair game for lawsuits. There’s no shortage of plaintiff-side antitrust litigators who could, and almost certainly
would, challenge them. Maybe the limits would withstand litigation, maybe they wouldn’t. It would take years to find out.
But if revenue caps and other
laborrestraints—such as on transferring, NIL collectives or athlete discipline—are bargained with a college players’ union, antitrust concerns will greatly diminish. Under the non-statutory labor exemption, wages, hours and other working conditions are generally exempt from antitrust scrutiny when negotiated by management and labor.
That raises another conundrum. It could be years before there’s a wide-scale college players’ union. Under labor law, unions must be composed of employees…