A California bill is again set to disrupt college-sports governance, undermine the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s principle of “amateurism” and set up a system to pay some athletes.
Senate Bill 1401, called the College Athlete Race and Gender Equity Act, would require some colleges in the state, both public and private, to pay athletes if the team generates more than twice as much revenue as it spends on scholarships.
The bill is just the latest way that advocates for college athletes are breaking down the authority of the NCAA, said Sharianne Walker, dean of the College of Business at Western New England University and an expert in athletics governance.
While the legislation is still being worked out, it has passed out of two state Senate committees in California and seems likely to pass that chamber, at least. If it becomes law in its current form, it could apply to athletes who play football and both men’s and women’s basketball at more than 20 colleges in the state that are members of the NCAA’s Division I Football Bowl Subdivision.
An analysis by Sportico estimated that football players at such institutions could earn as much as $132,000 annually from the plan, in addition to their athletic scholarship, and men’s basketball players would reap $107,000. Women’s basketball players would earn about $15,000 annually, Sportico reported.
B. David Ridpath, an associate professor of sports business at Ohio University, said the plan may not be the ideal for advocates that want an open-market solution to paying athletes. But its progress is a sign that more recent measures to allow athletes to profit have not dampened the appeal of college sports.
This is California’s second effort to undo the NCAA’s restrictions on compensating athletes — a restriction the association says is necessary to preserve the ideal of amateurism, that athletes are students first and play for the love of the game, not the financial rewards.
In 2019, the state passed the nation’s first measure allowing college athletes to earn money from their name, image, and likeness. Under such agreements, athletes could earn money from endorsing a product or from selling autographs.
That bill forced the NCAA to change its rules to allow such arrangements, and a wave of state legislation followed — in part to ensure that colleges in other states could compete with California for top athletes.
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt another blow to amateurism, ruling that the NCAA cannot prevent colleges from providing athletes extra academic benefits beyond the value of their scholarship. Those benefits could come in the form of tuition for a graduate degree or vocational training.
The California bill differs from these other measures because it requires the colleges to give money directly to the athletes. If enacted, the law could also cut into the money that athletic programs use to pay for the so-called “nonrevenue” or Olympic sports.
There are lots of other ways to cut the costs of athletics spending, Ridpath said, such as controlling coaches’ pay or limiting the expense of lavish facilities.
While the bill’s impact could be significant for the athletes and the NCAA, colleges in California are waiting to see how it all plays out.
“The University of California does not have a position” on the bill, a spokesperson for the University of California system said in an email. “We will continue to evaluate the impact this bill will have on UC’s athletic programs and all UC student athletes,” the spokesperson said.
The California State University system said it is “currently reviewing the bill to learn more about the impacts to our student athletes and campuses.”
Walker said the bill’s passage will be “a gigantic gut-check for a lot of institutions” that will have to ask, “have we sold our souls to the devil over athletics?”
