As Nico Iamaleava’s time at the University of Tennessee came to an abrupt and awkward conclusion, one group of observers very quietly enjoyed the money-fueled chaos: NCAA executives and their supporters. One former athletic director, aware of my support for paying college athletes, smugly texted me, “I guess this is what you wanted? Are you happy?”
No. What I want is a college athletics structure that is at least legal and, ideally, fair. What we have now is no structure at all. The NCAA, tired of decades of losing court battles, essentially abandoned any semblance of leadership and said, “if you don’t like our rules, let’s see how you like it with no rules at all.”
The problem isn’t that schools are paying players. The problem is that there are effectively no rules.
When situations like Nico’s occur, legacy athletic officials attempt to cling to a shred of relevance by claiming their old, self-serving system was “better.” While “better” is subjective, “legal” is not. And the NCAA’s track record in acting legally is abysmal.
Since losing a broadcast rights case against Oklahoma in 1984, the NCAA has repeatedly lost or settled court cases accusing the organization of repeated restraint-of-trade type violations. They were found to have violated the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1984, 1998, 2017, and 2021, and settled additional antitrust lawsuits in 2008, 2016, 2017 and 2024. The only lawsuits in which the NCAA has prevailed have been confined to other issues, such as enforcement actions (NCAA v. Tarkanian) or how large a corporate logo can be on a player’s jersey (Adidas v. NCAA.) When disputes concern how money is distributed between administrators and players/coaches, the NCAA loses. Always.
Faced with reality, the NCAA took their ball and went home, leaving no system in place.
Schools now have no choice but to pay their revenue-producing players a share of those revenues. But they are doing everything possible to avoid classifying those young revenue producers as employees – a sleight-of-hand maneuver that is unlikely to survive in court.
Within days, a California judge is expected to approve a settlement in three cases against the NCAA in which the organization will pay almost $2.8 billion to former, current and future Division I athletes. The deal also creates a system in which schools will begin directly paying scholarship players in all sports, subject to a “revenue share cap,” beginning at $20 million annually. For NCAA member schools, this settlement dovetails nicely with proposed legislation in Congress that would protect the NCAA from antitrust lawsuits, while explicitly declaring that college athletes are not employees.
If you think college athletics is dysfunctional now, wait until you see what it looks like with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in charge.
David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.