This week, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, former Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, bowed to the inevitable and proposed that Division I teams compensate their "student" athletes to the tune of at least $30,000 a year. As college sports have become ever more commercialized, Baker didn’t have much choice.

The top 22 Division I schools make over $150 million a year in sports revenue. Coaches can make more than $10 million a year. Texas A&M is paying its fired football coach, Jimbo Fisher, $75 million in a contract buyout. Until recently, the only people left out of this bonanza were the players.

The NCAA hoped that Baker could get an antitrust exemption from Congress, on the model of the one enjoyed by Major League Baseball. But there is little support for that.

The courts are also unfriendly to the NCAA’s view. Pending litigation would grant college players employee status, allow them to unionize, and give them back pay for branding deals (known as "name, image, and likeness," or NIL) made by universities trading on the appeal of the players.

The hostility to the one-sided commercialism of college sports cuts across the usual ideological lines. In the 2021 case of NCAA v. Alston, a unanimous Supreme Court struck down the NCAA’s attempt to have colleges collude on what level of scholarships they offered players, to hold down the cost of bidding wars. In an invitation for more lawsuits, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a scathing concurring opinion:

Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate … [I]t is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.

As student athletes are finally in line to get their share of this massive windfall, many commentators have taken this as a victory for fairness. I’m not so sure. The entire premise that these players are students is a sham. They are obligated to spend 30 to 40 hours a week on their sport and encouraged to take the lightest possible academic load.

For the top sports universities, thanks to TV and endorsement revenues, athletics is a big profit center. But one level down, other universities that try to compete lose a fortune that would be better spent on academics.

Ohio State booked $252 million in sports revenue last year, while nearby Ohio University competed for the same championships on just over $29 million in revenue. UConn, famed for women’s basketball, spends $82.3 million on athletics, but $40 million of that is a subsidy from the university’s general budget.

Meanwhile, the NFL is spared the expense of needing a minor league farm system. College football does it for them—for free.

It would be far better to abandon the pretense that players at Division I schools are bona fide students. The NFL could adopt and help finance "university" teams, players could wear their colors, and fans could continue to root for good old Ohio State or good old Texas. Other colleges, lower on the food chain, could opt for a genuine student sports program without bankrupting the college in the process.

In 2009, Northeastern University in Boston dropped its 74-year-old football program. Since then, the university has become one of the most popular schools, rising in the U.S. News rankings from 96th to 40th.

Oberlin, where I went, set the all-time record for the most consecutive losses of a college football team (44). The college didn’t go broke bidding for high school athletes and there was no TV revenue. I still got a pretty good education.