Abstract
The college athletics industry is worth $16 billion, and it only continues to grow as the number of collegiate students and student-athletes increases. The governing body of collegiate athletics, the National Collegiate Athletic Association ("NCAA"), prides itself on the amateur status of its athletes. To preserve its athletes' amateurism, the NCAA mandates that its member institutions agree not to compensate student-athletes with athletic scholarships that are above the university's cost of attendance. Typically, this type of horizontal agreement- one between competitors that artificially caps the amount a worker can earn violates Section 1 of the Sherman Act as an unreasonable trade restraint. The NCAA, however, is permitted to continue capping athletic scholarships, and thus preserving the amateurism of its athletes, because the Ninth Circuit has determined that the procompetitive effects of scholarship caps outweigh the anticompetitive effects. The time has come to recognize that the injustice of withholding due compensation from athletes who are generating billions of dollars in revenue for universities outweighs the NCAA's interest in preserving amateurism.
Document Type
Response or Comment
Publication Date
2017
Recommended Citation
Daniel Laws, Comment, Amateurism and the NCAA: How a Changing Market Has Turned Caps on Athletic Scholarships into an Antitrust Violation, 51 U. Rich. L. Rev. 1213 (2017).