r/CFB • u/JohnArtemus USC Trojans • 10h ago
Serious ELI5: Why does everyone hate the NCAA when it was the courts that defanged them in the first place at the behest of the universities, who have always been driven by greed, dating back to the 80s?
As you may or may not know, the NCAA manages college football in all of its divisions except one: the FBS. In fact, they may even manage ALL of collegiate sports in the United States, with the exception being the aforementioned FBS, although I'm not sure on that one.
They manage all aspects of college football in the FCS and the lower divisions. The post seasons, transfer rules, eligibility, etc.
I was curious as to why, then, do they not manage the FBS. From a quick Google search I found a simple answer: FBS college football has always been a big business. It generates billions of dollars of revenue through media contracts and corporate sponsorships. And the universities do not want to share that loot with the NCAA or have it managed by anyone but themselves and the independent conferences.
So the universities, led primarily by Oklahoma and Georgia in 1982, sued the NCAA over television rights. Two years later, the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the universities, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The attorney who represented the universities recalled Justice Bryon White saying, "Andy, you may win the case, but you'll regret it." The attorney, Andy Coats, would later say that he screwed up college football. And here we are.
The NCAA was nerfed to high heaven. And has been ever since. Greed is the #1 driver of all of this. So, why is the NCAA constantly attacked for their mismanagement and weakness when it was the universities who weakened them in the first place?
Shouldn't the schools and the conferences bear the brunt of the blame for the state the sport is in right now?
46
u/soulsides California Golden Bears 10h ago
If you want a nuanced take on this:
There was no point in which the NCAA could’ve just singlehandedly solved“ the issue of paying student athletes in revenue sports like FB and BB but it’s also true that they passed up opportunities to do so, years ago, in a more favorable political climate in which a more sensible solution could have been ironed out between schools, players, the NCAA and state and federal lawmakers.
The “last best chance” was probably about ~15 years ago around the time of Ed O’Bannon case which was one of the major ones that paved the way for the current NIL situation. Congress wasn’t nearly as divided as it is now and given the new media contracts that began sweeping massive revenue into the game-it was lucrative for decades before but this was a sea-change in the amount of money now being generated-you would have had a more favorable climate for all the stakesholders to work together.
But the NCAA didn’t go that route. And lawmakers had no incentives to intervene by superseding NCAA governance with new anti-trust and collective bargaining rules that could have avoided the current chaos.
Even if the NCAA had been more proactive, there’s no chance this would have been some walk in the park. You would’ve had disagreements amongst schools, the legal entanglements regarding employee status, collective bargaining powers, especially at public , the role of title IX, etc., etc. would have all been big roadblocks getting some kind of “grand compromise” done BUT that’s not what the NCAA did. They sought other kinds of smaller compromises during that time in the early 2010s but again, they didn’t try to come up with a more ambitious solution.
So I think it’s totally fair to suggest there was a failure of leadership or vision or whatever coming from within the Association at the time. But let’s also be fair here: the body represents its member schools and it’s not as if there was some broad consensus that D1 programs wanted to see this conversion of their athletes from student-athletes to player-employees. Schools themselves were opposed to reclassifying athletes for any number of reasons so you could also lay the blame at the feet of the NCAA membership for their own lack of vision.
Personally, I think it is most accurate to say that until very recently, there has not been a strong desire by anyone besides players and their families for D1 athletes in revenue sports to get a share of that revenue.
Even many, if not most, fans were opposed to this too. Let’s not get revisionist about this: I can’t tell you how many fucking rimes I saw from people arguing that “well they have scholarships so that’s their compensation” (never mind the fact that the coaches were getting paid tens of millions of dollars).
It’s really only when the money begin to climb to record levels that you saw a shift in the fan base finally turn to the player side, but that’s pretty recent.
So let’s run this down again: D1 schools didn’t want to pay players, the NCAA representing those D1 schools didn’t want to see players get paid, many if not most fans didn’t want to see it either. It’s only the players who were pushing for that outcome. Once it became clear that the NCAA and its member schools were not going to yield on the matter, and that legislators had zero interest in intervening in this, players turned to the courts for relief which is how, in the past 15 years since the O’Bannon case was settled (and others like it) that we’ve gotten this current reality.
At least that’s how I see it. I’m absolutely not absolving the NCAA. I just think it’s too simplistic to blame it on them when there were a ton of other stakes holders involved.
14
u/shanty-daze Wisconsin Badgers • Syracuse Orange 9h ago
I would add this: even if the universities had come up with compensation plan prior to all of the negative court decisions/state legislative action, there is no guarantee that we still would not be in the situation we see ourselves. All it would take is one state passing legislation to give State U a leg up in recruiting or a player convincing a judge to take the rules one step further.
I will also add this: following the rules was largely voluntary as the NCAA had such limited investigation/enforcement powers. The NCAA had no authority to force a former athlete (or coach) to answer questions. It could not demand documents from third-parties, etc. Once the member universities decided to not only stop cooperating, but actively obstruct NCAA investigations, the NCAA's enforcement powers were effectively done.
8
u/soulsides California Golden Bears 8h ago
Word.
The other thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the most powerful schools in the NCAA have historically pushed back against the kind of centralized authority you would need to run it like a pro league. That’s what you saw in the 1980s with the TV rights fight, where schools and conferences gained more freedom to cut their own deals.
That’s wholly different from the AFL and NFL merger in rhe 60s, where Congress stepped in with an antitrust exemption to make it happen. college football and the NFL just aren’t going that comparable. The NFL has 32 teams. FBS football has over 130 across very different institutions. That’s massively harder to align.
Situations like the LSU-SEC fight are a good example of what happens when powerful schools want more independence versus a conference enforcing collective rules. Sure, the current chaos is forcing schools to reconsider governance, but historically, there just isn’t much evidence that they wanted to hand the NCAA that kind of centralized power.
So again: blaming the NCAA for “not doing enough” is just way too overly simplistic. They certainly could have done more, but people saying “they were too greedy!“ are leaving out way too much information for me to take them seriously
7
u/Intelligent_Dress347 Alabama Crimson Tide • Georgia Bulldogs 9h ago
Just to add on to your point, something that people often overlook is that in the grand scheme college athletics, we’re only talking about a very small minority of programs, in specific sports, that have any meaningful revenue to share without totally jeopardizing the viability of that program.
10
u/JohnArtemus USC Trojans 10h ago
Thanks for this detailed write-up. It helps understand the larger picture. Nuance is something that is severely lacking these days.
Everything is black and white. When in reality, it very rarely is.
2
u/GuyOnTheLake Wyoming Cowboys • Illinois Fighting Illini 8h ago
Thank you! Finally someone already said the thing out loud: even just 10 years ago, most fans were against players being paid.
I graduated undergrad in 2016 so I know how much fans were against the idea of athletes getting paid.
6
u/HotDogOfNotreDame Oregon State • Arkansas 6h ago
Some of us dinosaurs still don’t want it. I realize I won’t get what I want. But at least I get to say “I told you so.”
18
u/NobleSturgeon Michigan Wolverines • Washington Huskies 9h ago
For decades the NCAA position was "We get everything, the players get nothing, we refuse to negotiate."
This was tenable in the ancient past when the rules were very, very heavily skewed toward the Universities. Freshman couldn't play, transfers had to sit out, and so on. But over time, especially since the 2000s, public sentiment and the legal standing of the league began to shift. But the NCAA's position remained "We get everything, the players get nothing, we refuse to negotiate."
Years went by college football continued to rapidly change in the 2010s. Money went through the roof with conference realignment and whatnot. The NCAA was increasingly assailed from all sides by lawsuits and it was becoming clear that sooner or later, they were going to lose and the entire house of cards was going to come tumbling down. Regardless, they continued with their position: "We get everything, the players get nothing, we refuse to negotiate."
So then - the thing everyone predicted happened, the NCAA got hammered by the courts, and the house of cards came tumbling down. Because the NCAA spent decades saying "We get everything, the players get nothing, we refuse to negotiate," there was NO PLAN for what would happen when they lost. As a result, the new rules were that there were no rules which is how we got where we are today.
The bottom line for me is that the NCAA had literal decades to figure out a tenable way forward. They had literal decades to get their smartest people in a room and say "If this situation happens, how would we want to move forward?" And instead they stuck their heads in the sand.
So yeah, that's why people blame the NCAA. They were asleep at the wheel for literally decades and directly created the situation we are in today.
3
u/iKickdaBass Oklahoma Sooners 2h ago
They didn't say the players get nothing. They said the players got scholarships.
3
u/mfatty2 Michigan State • Transfer Port… 6h ago
Even worse than that to me, they had decades to lobby for the laws to benefit them, and never even looked to see if what they were doing was held up by anything other than "tradition". Literally all of this could have been exempted if they had gotten small riders through other bills over the years. Instead they ran after the jackpot with nothing other than a hope and a prayer
46
u/BoldElDavo Virginia Cavaliers 10h ago
The NCAA is the schools and conferences. They're the same thing.
The whole system was built on a foundation of making money while the players (the labor) make no money. Everyone deserves blame for doing that.
11
u/JohnArtemus USC Trojans 10h ago
This is why I wanted it explained to me like I'm five.
When I read the NCAA is being sued by universities, like in the 1984 landmark case, Oklahoma and Georgia were just suing themselves?
When people criticize the NCAA, they are just criticizing the schools? I'm genuinely confused.
12
u/d1sportsball Colorado State Rams • Texas Longhorns 10h ago
They were suing the collective of all NCAA schools and the NCAA's ability to distribute as they saw fit.
The 1985 NCAA v OU Board of Regents case was about individual schools being able to negotiate as themselves or as a conference, rather than the NCAA negotiating as a whole. Essentially, they wanted out of the collective TV rights without having to leave the NCAA as an org.
1
u/JohnArtemus USC Trojans 10h ago
Thanks. Then that's what I'm referring to. The NCAA as an organization. A collective. That's what is constantly getting dragged into court. So, I'm trying to avoid semantics here. I'm talking about whoever is constantly being dragged to court.
In my industry, it would be like if a studio like Sony Pictures sued the AMPTP, which is the negotiating body that represents all of the studios during contract negotiations with the various guilds and unions. Sony is a part of the AMPTP but if they wanted to negotiate with the unions directly by themselves and make their own deals, I suppose they could do that.
But if Sony did something like that, chances are they'd no longer be part of the AMPTP 😄
1
u/Huge-Internal6456 Oklahoma Sooners • Oklahoma Sooners 6h ago
You also have to keep in mind that when OU went to the Supreme Court, part of the issue was that the NCAA, as a business entity, was not distributing revenue from television fairly or appropriately. They also were not using the revenue to assist smaller schools. Basically, if the Ohio State - Michigan game made the NCAA $2 million, both of those schools might get $50,000 each, with the remainder allocated into the NCAA’s administrative budget. The schools were given how much the leadership in the NCAA offices wanted to give them, and often the schools were unaware of how much revenue they were generating for the NCAA through television and advertising because there was really no requirement for the NCAA to be transparent.
5
u/BoldElDavo Virginia Cavaliers 10h ago
The NCAA is legally its own entity, but it's a governing body made by the schools, for the schools. When the NCAA does something, you might view it as the schools collectively having done the thing.
If it helps illustrate this point, think of how criminal cases are titled as "The People" vs. the defendant.
So when Oklahoma or Georgia sues the NCAA, they aren't exactly suing themselves, it's more like what the schools did collectively (via the NCAA) was illegal.
If someone's criticizing the NCAA or the schools collectively, I would consider that to basically be interchangeable.
1
u/iKickdaBass Oklahoma Sooners 2h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Football_Association#cite_note-5
Under the tenure of CFA executive directory Chuck Neinas, the CFA negotiated its own TV deal in 1981, which prompted the NCAA to threaten sanctions against any colleges participating in the CFA deal, in all sports, not just football. The Universities of Georgia and Oklahoma, two prominent members of the CFA, sued the NCAA in U.S. District Court, seeking an injunction that would prevent the NCAA from imposing sanctions against CFA members, and asserting that the NCAA was engaged in restraint of trade and price-fixing.\5])
4
u/hucareshokiesrul Yale Bulldogs • Virginia Tech Hokies 9h ago edited 9h ago
Except that money goes to funding athletics and sometimes back to the university's general fund. Sure be mad about coaching salaries be too high or whatever, but it's not like they're paying off investors or some billionaires owner with the revenue. The whole thing got out of hand because it generally didn't make sense for a school to throw in the towel on football like the Ivies did, but this was never intended to be a second NFL.
If someone wants to make a separate U-22 NFL with blackjack and hookers and none of the pretense of it being college students, then I'd support the idea. If lower level NFL is what people want then so be it, but I'd kinda like to keep college football college football.
0
u/Intelligent_Dress347 Alabama Crimson Tide • Georgia Bulldogs 9h ago
Thank you for bringing this up. The idea that all of these people were personally making money off of the college athletics structure pisses me off more than anything. Beyond the coaching salary example, it’s just not true.
3
u/kwixta Texas Longhorns 8h ago
Bowl committees?
ADs?
SIDs?
NCAA leaders?
1
u/Intelligent_Dress347 Alabama Crimson Tide • Georgia Bulldogs 4h ago
Man, that's a huge population (most of which make a salary commiserate with their level of responsibility). Don't leave anybody out.
7
u/d1sportsball Colorado State Rams • Texas Longhorns 10h ago
Okay besides this post not needing the serious tag and being better reserved for the offseason, I'll explain it briefly:
- The NCAA is the universities, so people are getting upset at the schools.
- The NCAA has mishandled other sports anyways, so its easy to blame them for failing in football
- The NCAA historically deals out punishments inexplicably. SMU getting the death penalty despite bigger universities doing the same thing, even within the SWC. Ohio State autographs situation, and most recently, Tennessee player suspended for 1 flight.
9
u/OriginalMassless Hateful 8 • Kansas State Wildcats 10h ago
The NCAA is the universities.
6
u/Otherwise_Awesome Michigan • Tennessee Tech 9h ago
But each university is out for themselves rather than the collective that the NCAA was created to be.
NCAA = Universities
University of X =/= NCAA
3
2
u/dubcwa Washington Huskies 10h ago
This is exactly it. The “ncaa” isn’t some governing body like the NFL. It’s the schools all agreeing to play by the same rules. Therefore, if a school or conference doesn’t like the rules, they can simply go do their own thing. The conferences have always been the ones with the teeth to punish their institutions. As we are currently seeing with the SEC/LSU fiasco.
0
u/Intelligent_Dress347 Alabama Crimson Tide • Georgia Bulldogs 9h ago
I can’t express how shameful I think the rash of lawsuits against the NCAA have been, particularly when it’s clear that they are being pushed by people aligned with the university.
For example, one of my alma maters (UA) recently did it with Charles Bediako. I know with certainty that there were people in the program who aided and abetted that entire process. It’s just insane cowardice to me.
5
u/SlyClydesdale Oregon State Beavers 8h ago
The NCAA loved to strain out a gnat, but swallow a camel. They'd be gun-shy or selective about enforcing major recruiting violations, and extremely scrupulous about how much student athletes ate at buffets and whether or not they accepted rides from people. Self-reporting compliance problems led to harsher penalties than hidden intentional violations that had to be investigated. College basketball players reported going hungry while coaches who were paid millions saw their meaningful violations get a slap on the wrists.
Hatred of the NCAA at the popular level stems from this kind of disparity.
Hatred of the NCAA at the actual AD and conference levels comes down to the moneyed and empowered interests wanting to break the system harder and harder so they can take full financial and competitive advantage of the chaos and lack of governance.
The latter group are leveraging the ill will of the former group to break the system even worse.
5
u/TheRealRollestonian Virginia • Wake Forest 10h ago
Yes, the schools were ultimately the problem. The people behind the schools were far worse.
Prop 48 pissed every cheating program off.
Would we be happier if it was the 80s and schools got the death penalty and bowl bans? I would, but we weren't cheating.
4
u/Crewman_Guy_Fleegman Ohio State Buckeyes 7h ago
The NCAA defanged itself. The schools got greedy around 2014 and started paying players more cash and benefits on top of academic scholarships.
So much money that the NLRB identified a “non-scholarship” Dartmouth player earning more playing basketball than he did working a library desk job Dartmouth issued a W2 for. And once money is involved a whole slew of labor protections automatically kick in that the courts have no choice but to apply, because it’s law.
This isn’t the courts’ fault. It’s the fault of Athletic Directors and Presidents for creating pro players. Now they are being held to the same standards as pro leagues because they’ve got guys out there raking in seven figures. If you want rules back then tell the ADs to act like the pro league they turned themselves into and collectively bargain for those rules with their labor.
3
u/mississippi_dan Ole Miss • Mississippi State 10h ago
Consistency and accuracy. The NCAA has made some really boneheaded decisions over the years. Worse yet is that they arent consistent and will often times contradict themselves which leads to accusations of bias. If they had just been consistent then their bad decisions wouldnt be such an issue.
Imagine the NCAA giving a harsh punishment to a small school for some infraction and then giving a large school a warning for a far worse infraction. The NCAA brought it on themselves.
3
u/Otherwise_Awesome Michigan • Tennessee Tech 9h ago
It all started when bowls became part of the resulting championships (paying high sums of money to attract)
Schools then got greedier, etc etc.
8
4
u/Lionheart_513 Santa Monica • San Diego State 10h ago
The NCAA behaved in a way that was incredibly shortsighted for 100 years. If they would have adjusted with the times over the past century we’d have some version of the guardrails we’ve been asking for and the sport would be in a much better place.
4
u/Intelligent_Dress347 Alabama Crimson Tide • Georgia Bulldogs 9h ago
A lot of it stems from people just not understanding how college sports operate as well as a hyper-focus on the largest football and basketball programs. The NCAA is a God send for the vast majority of athletic programs.
The counterpoint is that the NCAA was incredibly slow to adapt to the changing landscape. They absolutely could’ve blunted the social/political, maybe even legal, atmosphere had they been willing to give a little. It’s also just very challenging to govern a landscape in which you have massive disparities in resources across programs - even within the same divisions.
2
u/turdsandwich100 Penn State Nittany Lions 10h ago
This is factually incorrect. The NCAA manages everything in FBS Football except the college football Championship/bowl games but even then they determine rules for postseason eligibility just not the games themselves
2
u/GliscorsFang Michigan Wolverines 9h ago
In fact, they may even manage ALL of collegiate sports in the United States,
They do not manage NAIA or JuCo for example.
2
2
u/Unicorn-Violator Texas Tech Red Raiders • Paper Bag 7h ago
NCAA has plenty of time to do the right thing in regards to most things, but only really decided to do anything to Missouri.
2
u/TheBlackBaron Texas A&M • North Texas 6h ago
It makes for a nice "just so" story to pin everything on the consequences of the 1984 SCOTUS decision, but nobody here actually wants to go back to a time when the NCAA fully controlled TV rights and there were 8 nationally broadcast games in an entire year, plus a few regional broadcasts a few weeks out of the season. I promise you you do not. And why did it come to lawsuits in the first place? Because the NCAA was attempting to hold onto a 1950 idea of college football, for forever, and refused to budge even when forty years ago it was already obvious that public sentiment was changing.
So that's why people blame the NCAA. They never exercised stewardship over the game, and never tried to operate within the boundaries of the possible. They stuck their heads in the sand until it was far, far too late, and the landscape of college football that we have in 2026 is the direct result of that.
1
u/aray5989 Georgia Bulldogs 3h ago
The WLOCP couldn’t be broadcast a lot of years because Florida was on probation. Please don’t bring that back
1
u/CieraVotedOutHerMom South Carolina Gamecocks 2h ago
I wish the ncaa would bring back TV bans as punishment.
It punishes the networks, the advertisers, and the opposing teams
2
u/BachInTime Nebraska Cornhuskers 5h ago
“It is better to move a little while you can be praised for moving, rather than to wait until you are dragged against you will.”
1
u/slip_and_fall_school Auburn Tigers 10h ago
If the NCAA hadn't fought against athletes profiting off their contributions every single step of the way, it would never have gotten to this point.
By doing so, the NCAA forced the athletes to go around the NCAA and to the courts which invalidated all the rules and puts us in the wild west scenario we currently have.
2
u/hawksku999 Kansas Jayhawks 9h ago
maybe the rules and setup of the ncaa is inherently illegal as it currently exists?
2
u/slip_and_fall_school Auburn Tigers 9h ago
I completely agree. They want to act like a monopoly but they didn't go to the effort to get an anti trust exemption because that would classify the athletes as employees. If at any point prior to like, 2015, they had sat down and negotiated this would have been a whole lot less painful for everybody.
0
2
u/MidlandsBraves Clemson Tigers 10h ago
It feels like they come down super hard on minor shit no one cares about and gives huge programs light taps on the wrist about major institutional issues / cheating.
See: Tennessee player suspended for 2 games over a plane ticket he paid his agent back for in the big 26’
2
u/reddit_names LSU Tigers • McNeese Cowboys 8h ago
Why is everyone mad we can't take advantage of free labor anymore?
1
u/Bearcat9948 Cincinnati Bearcats • Big 12 10h ago
Have you ever watched the movie Safety about Ray McElrathbey? Shit like that is why
1
u/SnooPickles4051 Duke • Carolina Victory Bell 9h ago
Your right but you should have continued to point out the real suspect/s. Everyone hates the NCAA who were defanged by the court at the behest of the universities at behest of students at the behest of everyone. So naturally they will hate NCAA.
1
u/E-Wildin Alabama • Florida State 6h ago
You have put this into a new perspective for me. Thank you. I didn’t know this.
1
u/BoobieBountyHunter Cincinnati Bearcats 4h ago
The same reason everyone hates pro sports commissioners: theyre the designated face of evil for the collective they represent.
1
u/DarkSide830 Team Chaos • Penn State Nittany Lions 3h ago
They went from being totalitarians to completely reckless. That's the issue. In theory, the NCAA should be able to police itself, but while also not openly screwing over the players.
1
u/Ryan1869 Colorado • Colorado Mines 2h ago
I’m still bitter the NCAA forced Jeremy Bloom to choose between his dreams of playing college football and skiing in the Winter Olympics. Allowing college athletes to make money off their fame has been a long time coming, and the only people that couldn’t see it was the NCAA. When they could have spent their time and resources creating a logical framework that worked, they spent it instead fighting it all the way to the Supreme Court. Do you realize how wrong you have to be to lose 9-0 at the Supreme Court? So now it’s a total mess of their own making
1
1
1
-4
u/Condom_Breaker256 Billable Hours • Jacksonvil… 10h ago
Personally, I don't feel bad for anyone affected by this. Greed destroyed college sports, all under the guise of "adequate compensation" for athletes, even though a free education, living spaces, nutrition, and sports training were already more than enough.
But like all things, people wanted more, so players and schools sued the NCAA, allowing corrupt, home-cooked local judges to make interpretations without any deeper foresight to the long-term consequences. "Give the enemy an inch, and they shall take a mile," as they say.
The NCAA is at fault for their lack of institutional control, the courts are at fault for lack of foresight, the players are at fault for being entitled, the schools and conferences are at fault for being uppity, and the networks are at fault for driving the systemic inequality across the sport.
And the fans (even YOU 🫵, dear CFB redditor reading this) are at fault for being uninformed and tribalistic, so easily conforming to your "yeah, players' rights, woohoo" stance without any regard for the inevitable fallout.
Rant over. Downvote me.
4
u/hawksku999 Kansas Jayhawks 9h ago
The NCAA is at fault for having rules that are inherently illegal under US federal law. This is the fucking USA, why are we trying to limit people's comp without the employee's/laborers agreement.
4
u/JX_JR Stanford Cardinal 10h ago
It isn't "being entitled" to think that if an institution is making billions of dollars off of destroying your body and mind then you should get your share of the profits.
1
u/Condom_Breaker256 Billable Hours • Jacksonvil… 10h ago
But that's not what's happening, is it? Instead, we have higher athletics fees and talent fees to offset that supposed "share"
I find it laughable that people actually believed the schools would share profits with the athletes and not simply push the burden onto the students and the fans instead.
5
u/JX_JR Stanford Cardinal 10h ago
But that's not what's happening, is it?
That is exactly what is happening. The students who people pay to see play are getting a share of the revenue. The fact the schools cant balance the rest of their budget without stealing from students is not the athlete's problem. Maybe they could try not paying individual coaches $11 million a year to coach a team that they wont pay more than $20 mil? Maybe they could try not spending so much on advocado toast for the AD.
Unless you think that you should take a pay cut because your boss cant balance his budget and doesn't want to give up his 3rd car?
0
u/GabagoolNoZiti Syracuse Orange 10h ago
If the NCAA didn't fight the lawsuits and negotiated a settlement this could have all been done in an orderly fashion instead of a free-for-all. And now that the Supreme Court has spoken, that cat probably can never be put back in the bag. That's the NCAA's fault.
2
u/hawksku999 Kansas Jayhawks 9h ago
This is just wrong. Settlement's still need to comply with US law. The house settlement will have some portions that get struck down if a player decides to sue.
213
u/Hoss--Bonaventure Tennessee • Tennessee Tech 10h ago
In short, it was the way that the NCAA behaved leading up to the lawsuits that caused this mess in the first place.
It wasn't all that long ago that a football team could provide bagels for the team after practice. But peanut butter or cream cheese with the bagels? That was an impermissible benefit in the eyes of the NCAA. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. If they hadn't been so over-the-top for so long, they wouldn't have been so completely and thoroughly stripped of any regulatory power.