The Brendan Sorsby case was a no-lose proposition for the NCAA. A win would have shown that the toothless institution still has a bicuspid or two remaining in its pie hole. A loss allowed the NCAA to bang the drum — again — for the federal government to clean up its self-made mess.
“The NCAA strongly disagrees with the court’s ruling in Sorsby’s case and is deeply concerned about the damaging, far-reaching and broadly destabilizing ramifications of this outcome -- which undermines and corrupts the integrity of sports,” the NCAA said in a statement issued on Monday, via ESPN. “The NCAA is committed to supporting student-athlete mental health but must continue to aggressively defend against actions that defraud college athletics and threaten competitive integrity, such as betting on one’s own sport.”
NCAA president Charlie Baker echoed the predictable whining from the losing side.
“There is no better example of why targeted intervention from Congress is necessary,” Baker said on Twitter. “When you have schools and deep-pocketed supporters willing to look the other way on the glaring integrity threat of betting on your own team — and judges whose rulings effectively strip away our ability to stop them — only Congress can equip the NCAA to apply this common sense rule to everyone fairly and consistently. The Protect College Sports Act would empower the NCAA to enforce rules including the gambling restrictions — it’s needed now more than ever.”
Congress isn’t the only source of a solution. If the NCAA and its members had embraced collective bargaining, Sorsby’s case would have been resolved by an arbitration process jointly created and maintained by the NCAA and the players’ union.
That’s the solution. A union. The players are now paid employees. (Before the reckoning, they were simply unpaid employees.) The sooner everyone accepts reality, the better off everyone will be.
The sooner Congress realizes it has far better things to do than to “save” a niche industry that doesn’t need an external savior, the sooner the NCAA and its members will do what it should already be doing.
Why isn’t the NCAA already moving in that direction? Obviously, it prefers a Congressional solution, because that would give the players fewer rights than collective bargaining would.
So knock it off, NCAA. Your former business model has been exposed as illegal and un-American. If you want an antitrust exemption that allows you to impose order in college sports, do what the NFL and the other pro sports leagues have done — embrace a unionized workforce that carries with it the ability to have various independent and competing businesses make rules that apply to all of them.
