In WaPo, John Feinstein celebrates the passage of a California law:
There’s a good reason athletic administrators are running around screaming that the sky is falling over a new California law that will allow college athletes in the state to be paid for the use of their names and images beginning in 2023.
For them, the sky is falling. The Fair Pay to Play Act, signed into law Monday by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), is the beginning of the end for the NCAA’s archaic and patently unfair rules on “amateurism.”
For years, it has been against NCAA rules for a student on an athletic scholarship to be paid by anyone beyond the value of his or her scholarship: not by the school and not by anyone outside the school — whether it be a company that wants help pitching a product, someone who wants to pay for autographs or an appearance, or a company that aims to sell a jersey with a star player’s name on it.
You can pay the school, but not the athlete.
Even before Newsom signed the bill, NCAA President Mark Emmert was wailing about how disastrous this would be for college athletics and making veiled threats about being forced to declare “student-athletes” from California ineligible if they accepted any outside money.
For college athletes, the lack of control over their own merchandising opportunities is an obvious case of injustice in the individualistic world we live in. With revenue diverted from the schools or the NCAA to the students, this new law will also change the dynamics of the entire college system, and I look forward to discovering how the individual students begin harvesting the money, and how that’ll change the college athletics system. Will teams rip apart as stars become rich without even making it to the professional leagues, while their teammates reap nothing more than they do today?
Perhaps NCAA president Emmert is right, this is the end of college athletics.
To which I say, good.
Oh, and this is a perfectly wretched cross of the California law with functional programming. Sick, sick, sick …
