The Supreme Court on Monday handed a unanimous win to Division I college athletes in their legal fight against the National Collegiate Athletic Association over caps the organization sought to impose on compensation related to education.
The top court voted 9-0 to affirm lower court rulings that found that antitrust law prevented the NCAA from restricting payments to athletes for items such as musical instruments or as compensation for internships. In its opinion, the court rejected the NCAA’s argument that its players’ amateur status would be impossible to maintain if they could receive pay, even for education-related expenses.
“Put simply, this suit involves admitted horizontal price fixing in a market where the defendants exercise monopoly control,” Justice Neil Gorsuch, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote for the court.
The conservative justice wrote that it was “unclear exactly what the NCAA seeks.”
“To the extent it means to propose a sort of judicially ordained immunity from the terms of the Sherman Act for its restraints of trade — that we should overlook its restrictions because they happen to fall at the intersection of higher education, sports, and money — we cannot agree,” Gorsuch wrote.
The outcome was largely expected following oral argument in the case in March. It upheld an injunction imposed by a federal district court that barred the NCAA from limiting “compensation and benefits related to education.” The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier approved of the injunction.
The Supreme Court case, National Collegiate Athletic Assn. v. Alston, No. 20-512, is separate from the ongoing controversy over NCAA rules that restrict athletes from being paid to play or for doing endorsement deals.
However, Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested in a concurrence to Monday’s opinion that those rules may also run afoul of antitrust law.
“Everyone agrees that the NCAA can require student athletes to be enrolled students in good standing. But the NCAA’s business model of using unpaid student athletes to generate billions of dollars in revenue for the colleges raises serious questions under the antitrust laws,” Kavanaugh wrote.
He added that it was “highly questionable whether the NCAA and its member colleges can justify not paying student athletes a fair share of the revenues on the circular theory that the defining characteristic of college sports is that the colleges do not pay student athletes.”
“And if that asserted justification is unavailing, it is not clear how the NCAA can legally defend its remaining compensation rules,” Kavanaugh wrote.
