getty images
The game is “already over on the question of whether college athletes can be paid to play sports” -- and the "most obvious sign is that even the NCAA’s leaders have stopped trying to turn back the tide," according to Radnofsky & Higgins of the WALL STREET JOURNAL. In the “most significant concession in its existence,” the NCAA is "no longer fighting the notion that at least some athletes can and should get money from their schools,” specifically for competing in sports. Instead, they are “calling for it, while trying to stave off full-blown employee status.” This comes as it has become “open season on the NCAA," with a "barrage of legal attacks around the country.” All of them are “pursuing either employment rights for college athletes, or their ability to be compensated for the work they’re performing.” Legal experts said that the "death knell isn’t coming from any one development in a specific case,” but rather from the “combined weight of all of the cases.” The NCAA’s leaders are “aiming to usher in the era themselves,” unveiling a plan in December for the richest schools to “form a new tier in which they could cut name, image and likeness deals directly with athletes, and pay them unrestricted benefits nominally linked to education.” They hope that will “be enough to persuade Congress to pass legislation that stops their doomsday scenario: college athletes being declared employees of their universities" (WALL STREET JOURNAL, 3/7).
STUCK IN THE OLD WAYS: In D.C., Barry Svrluga wrote in most aspects of governing college sports, the NCAA is "either outdated, overmatched or both.” College sports are “splintering into a million pieces and as many court cases.” The NCAA is “in control of none of it, pulling back in vain when it should have been pushing forward.” NCAA President Charlie Baker is “trying to be proactive” in asking Congress to “establish laws that would deliver a more modern college sports model and, importantly, protect the NCAA from antitrust litigation.” But “even that is telling,” as it is an "admission that the organization has lost control of its mission and desperately needs federal help to have any hope of getting it back.” The NCAA was "not built for this era, " and without leadership that can "anticipate what’s coming rather than react to what happens, it is obsolete” (WASHINGTON POST, 3/7).
