Member-only story
The Problematic Politics of College Sports
The NCAA’s new compensation rule could give female athletes of color a boost — but will it?
The conversation regarding the difference between the millions of dollars that college athletes make for their universities versus their payment (or lack thereof) for those services has been a hot topic for decades. Last year, the college sports industry made a whopping $14 billion and yet the star athletes responsible for a large chunk of that money saw none of it. Some prominent schools make at least $100 million a year from the efforts of their athletic departments and yet the NCAA, which brings in roughly $8 billion annually, has long maintained a policy decreeing that college athletes should remain unpaid amateurs for the “purity of the game.”
That is, until recently.
In a stunning reversal, the NCAA voted at the end of October to side with California governor Gavin Newsome’s new “Fair Pay To Play” bill, which allows college athletes to make money off of their name and or likeness. California’s legislation sparked other states to follow suit, with a handful of them introducing similar legislation. Once the NCAA started to see the writing on the wall, and realized that if they didn’t change their decision there would be a patchwork of laws on the books, it made sense…
