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If you watched a minute of college football this fall, you saw the ads. A voice-over darkly warns that, without congressional action, college sports face an existential crisis. NIL is forcing schools to cut women’s sports and Olympic programs. The very fabric of amateur athletics is unraveling. The solution, viewers are told, is the SCORE Act. It would solve the crisis, though it’s not really explained how.
In reality, the SCORE Act was a desperate attempt by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and its members to clean up their own mess. The solution being peddled would take away the only tools college athletes have to protect their economic rights: the antitrust and labor laws that protect every other working American from corporate consolidation and abuses of power.
The NCAA and its member conferences say that their “educational mission” justifies special treatment from Congress. But that educational mission hasn’t stopped conferences from expanding across the country, forcing college athletes to spend more time in airport terminals than in classrooms. That mission didn’t stop schools from paying football coaches tens of millions while pleading poverty. And it certainly didn’t stop the NCAA from punishing athletes for accepting $3.83 worth of extra pasta while ruling that years of fake classes for UNC athletes fell outside its jurisdiction.
Ultimately, the NCAA’s hypocrisy became unbearable in Washington. In December, Republican leadership pulled the SCORE Act from the House floor, defeated by an unlikely coalition of conservative Republicans who saw it as corporate welfare, progressive Democrats who recognized it as an attack on worker rights, a bipartisan group of state attorneys general defending public institutions, and the Congressional Black Caucus, which refused to help strip protections from predominantly Black athletes whose labor generates billions in revenue from college football and basketball games. It was a rare legislative victory against the powerful monied interests of college athletics.
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