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What just happened: Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed a law Monday allowing college athletes to strike endorsement deals, a move that could upend the business model of college sports that denies student athletes the ability to trade on their talent. “Colleges reap billions from student athletes but block them from earning a single dollar,” Newsom tweeted. “That’s a bankrupt model.” The professional basketball stars LeBron James and Draymond Green have also thrown their support behind the law as a matter of economic justice for their amateur counterparts.

“Paying College Athletes: Answers to Key Questions on New Law”

The debate: Should college athletes be allowed to profit from their sport?

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

The National Collegiate Athletic Association, the nonprofit organization that administers student athletics, made over $1 billion in revenue in 2017. Much of that money is returned to member schools, which use it to fund their sports programs, coaches and administrators, as well as scholarships and supplementary academic assistance for student athletes. The athletes themselves are compensated only in financial aid and are forbidden to be paid in exchange for the use of their name, image or likeness.

California’s law breaks this prohibition, allowing students to book sponsorships, even with the help of agents. But it would also challenge the system of amateurism that has governed college sports for decades, risking N.C.A.A. fines “potentially in the tens of millions of dollars” for California schools whose athletes decide to monetize their renown, according to an analysis by the California State Assembly’s staff, and even risking their teams’ eligibility to compete.

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WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Athletes have been cheated

College athletics is less a nonprofit enterprise than an industry exploiting its workers, writes Brian Rosenberg, the president of Macalester College, in The New York Times. He points out that universities with top teams can rake in nearly $20 million a year from Nike or Adidas sponsorships, while the athletes themselves, whose talent is what attracts such sponsorships in the first place, walk away with nothing. He writes:

College basketball players are worth a lot of money, but they aren’t legally allowed to make it. So the schools, coaches, agents and shoe companies make the money instead — all in the name of “amateurism.”

Katelyn Ohashi, a former University of California, Los Angeles, gymnast, has criticized the unfairness of N.C.A.A. rules that prevented her from making any money from a video of a perfect floor routine that went viral earlier this year. She told Mr. Newsom:

Here’s the fame, but then there’s no compensation, and it’s so crazy. People are like, “Oh, you must be so rich.” And I’m like, “You must not know the N.C.A.A.” … When my routine went viral, [N.C.A.A. President] Mark Emmert called me to congratulate me, and I’m like, “You should be thanking me.”

In fact, according to an analysis cited in The Economist, if players were paid in proportion to the amount of revenue they generated for their colleges, “the top 10 percent of football and 16 percent of basketball players would be paid around $400,000 and $250,000 a year respectively.” While the N.C.A.A.’s desire to keep so-called professionalism out of college sports may have made sense before they became such a big business, the author writes, it’s clearly an illusion that no longer holds:

The two most lucrative college sports, American football and basketball, are highly competitive. Many universities are willing to bend over backward to enroll talented players. And the argument that university athletics remains amateur would hardly earn passing marks in even an introductory college course.

Allowing athletes to court sponsors would corrupt college sports

Removing the N.C.A.A. restrictions on endorsements would create a winner-take-all dynamic within and among universities, writes Cody J. McDavis, a former Division I basketball player. The best players at the best schools would reap all the benefits, Mr. McDavis says, while less popular sports and athletes would suffer. He writes:

Major brands like Nike would pay top football and basketball talent at the biggest schools, while student-athletes in other sports or at smaller programs would be ignored. Currently, corporate funds go to athletic departments and are generally distributed among all sports; with third-party payments, those funds could instead mostly go directly to a few student-athletes, starving the rest.

The N.C.A.A., for its part, has said the California law “would erase the critical distinction between college and professional athletes.” Even The Los Angeles Times editorial board, which came out in favor of the law, acknowledges that some change to the spirit of college athletics would be inevitable. They write:

The measure would inevitably eat away at the distinction between professional and college sports. Celebrated collegians could make money not only by endorsing sneakers and sports drinks, but also by autographing jerseys, pitching workout videos and putting their name on baseball bats and hockey sticks. In short, they could profit from the fame that their work as an athlete brings.

Sports need to be scaled back

As those on opposing sides of California’s law debate how the fruits of the college sports economy ought to be distributed, others assert that the solution is simply to decommercialize the activity altogether.

Jonathan R. Cole, a professor at Columbia and author of “Toward a More Perfect University,” suggests in The Atlantic that the emphasis placed on campus athletics is “totally out of control.” In 41 states, he writes, the highest-paid public employee is not a professor or neurosurgeon, but rather a college football or basketball coach. For students, meanwhile, the difficulty of keeping up with both coursework and demanding athletic schedules has created an incentive for academic fraud. Taken together, a picture emerges of college sports as a pseudoprofessional industry that encroaches upon the mission of higher education. He writes:

For the highly selective colleges and universities, the leaders ought to roll back the percentage of recruited athletes. … The highly selective colleges ought to withdraw from the N.C.A.A. and form their own league since they are not trying to build national championship programs. … Finally, university leaders should consider forming special institutions located in different geographic areas that are devoted almost entirely to athletics and bodily-kinesthetic intelligence.

One school that has provided something of a model on this front is Spelman, a historically black college for women. In 2011, Spelman learned that its N.C.A.A. division was losing three members. Rather than find another conference in which to compete at great expense, the school decided to withdraw from the N.C.A.A. and eliminate its athletics department in favor of a fitness program for all students. Beverly Daniel Tatum, then Spelman’s president, wrote in The Times in 2013:

Whether it’s diabetes, high blood pressure or heart disease, black women are more likely to suffer from these ailments — and die from them — at young ages. All are linked to obesity and lack of physical activity. … We decided that it was more important to support our entire campus with a wellness initiative than 80 student athletes with N.C.A.A. funding.

WHAT’S NEXT

California’s changes aren’t scheduled to take effect until 2023, leaving the N.C.A.A. ample time to mount court challenges to the law, which the organization has suggested violates the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. If the law is upheld, the N.C.A.A. will have to decide whether to penalize the schools with fines, which may or may not be legally enforceable, or even expel them.

For now, California is betting that the outsize importance of its universities within the world of college sports will make those threats impossible to carry out. “I don’t necessarily take it to heart,” Newsom said.

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MORE PERSPECTIVES

Jemele Hill makes the case for black athletes to leave white colleges for historically black ones. [The Atlantic]

Readers discuss Mr. McDavis’s Op-Ed arguing that paying student athletes would ruin college sports. [The New York Times]

Saahil Desai argues that college sports amount to affirmative action for white people. [The Atlantic]

WHAT YOU’RE SAYING

Here’s what readers had to say about the last debate: Do we need a wealth tax?

Nadine, a political science student from Egypt, wrote in: “In Islam, the main instrument for income redistribution is called the ‘Zakat,’ which is quite similar to the wealth tax. Unlike income taxes, Zakat is applied on a person’s accumulated wealth. The philosophy behind this is that money is made to be spent in various activities, contributing to the economy, and not hoarded in banks. Therefore, as long as you’re using your income in different endeavors, it will not be taxed under the Zakat. Zakat is 2.5 percent of the sum of money that you kept aside and didn’t use for one year.”

And John Marshall from New York suggested raising the capital gains tax rate, now 20 percent: “As Bill Gates pointed out in response to AOC’s 70 percent tax (and something I’ve been evangelizing my entire career as a tax attorney), wealthy people don’t pay ordinary income taxes, they pay capital gains.”

Spencer Bokat-Lindell is a writer for the Opinion section. @bokatlindell

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