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Code Switch

Ballers, Shot Callers

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.614.5K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2021

⏱️ 27 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Supreme Court just ruled on a case that could change the future of college sports, potentially paving the way for NCAA athletes to be paid. But is paying student athletes a good thing? And how would it affect the already fraught racial dynamics of college sports?

Transcript

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0:00.0

What's good, Joe? I'm Gene Zambie and you are listening to Co-Twitch from NPR.

0:05.7

Okay, so the NCAA, the body that governs much of collegiate sports, has been around for a real

0:12.0

long time, like even before a lot of the big pro leagues, like the NFL or the NBA even existed.

0:18.3

And the NCAA has long argued that the whole point of college sports, the reason that people are

0:23.6

fans of them, is because the students who play those sports are not pros, that they're amateurs,

0:29.6

playing for things like school pride, and the principles of sportsmanship and competition,

0:33.6

yada yada yada, paying those athletes the NCAA maintained, with Taint College sports,

0:39.3

it would ruin those sports for the fans, ruin it for the players. Besides that, they said

0:44.4

many of those so-called pseudo athletes already get scholarships to play sports. Why should they

0:49.3

also be compensated on top of it? For a long time it seemed, most people agreed with those arguments.

0:55.2

This, by the way, is all while the NCAA made billions of dollars in revenue each year,

1:00.4

from the same sports it insisted were not professional. That was money used to pay everyone,

1:06.8

but the athletes. Well, earlier this week, the Supreme Court handed on the decision that could,

1:12.8

potentially completely upman college sports, the Justices unanimously ruled that the NCAA could

1:19.2

not keep the athletes who played those sports from being paid. In his opinion, Justice Breck

1:24.4

Havanaugh wrote, no where else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay

1:29.4

their workers a fair market rate, on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their

1:35.3

workers a fair market rate. And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why

1:41.1

college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.

1:48.0

Now, this case that the Supreme Court decided this week was focused on pretty small

1:51.8

payments to athletes related to things like, you know, college expenses, books, things like that.

1:57.2

But it might open the door to bigger payments, even potentially compensation to those athletes

...

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