This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 29th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court's sharp rebuke of the NCAA over education-related benefits for student athletes last week may just be the beginning.

Cato's Ilia Shapiro argues that the reasoning offered by the court is essentially no different from the cases that will inevitably follow.

We spoke yesterday.

With respect to antitrust and the NCAA, it feels like this case is a long time in coming,

because there have been complaints for decades about how the

NCAA treats athletes and the restrictions they place on them. What did the

Supreme Court tell us? When I was a senior in college more than 20 years ago I took a class on the political economy of sports and this was one of the issues.

It's one of the ever debated issues, amateurism, pay for play, coaches getting signed to multi-million dollar deals, players not

being able to afford a meal.

And this is not something that developed with the internet age or anything like that that even back in the 30s and 40s

when sports became revenue generators you know the Rose Bowl and all of that sort of

thing this is not a new dynamic, not a new phenomenon. And I think it's just

come to the point where everyone's come to realize, everyone including elite

lawyers have come to realize that there's just, this doesn't pass the smell

test.

And specifically to this case, it doesn't pass the antitrust rule of reason that when the

NCAA, all the different schools and conferences get together to

restrain trade, meaning to restrain the compensation of the athletes that are

generating these revenues, that's as much an antitrust violation as if steel companies were doing it.

Yeah, and the collusion here, to be clear, the collusion is against these young people.

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