Two and half years ago, the Supreme Court found in National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston that NCAA rules limiting education-related benefits—meaning scholarships for graduate or vocational school, payments for academic tutoring, and paid post-eligibility internships—were illegal restraints of trade under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Court rejected the mythical and amorphous notion of “amateurism” the NCAA used to justify limiting athlete compensation, and the Court described the NCAA’s litigation position as a request for “immunity from the normal operation of the antitrust laws.” The NCAA’s cartel over college athletics was fractured, and it opened a path for college athletes to finally collect the fruits of their labor. The response from the NCAA, conferences, and universities has revealed a deeply broken system built on hypocrisy and exploitation.

The NCAA is an association of athletic conferences, colleges, and universities. It is chiefly tasked with setting and enforcing rules governing college athletics and organizing, overseeing, and promoting championships in a wide range of college sports. The NCAA boasts that it is “dedicated to the well-being and lifelong success of college athletes.” But as the Alston Court emphasized in its ruling against the NCAA, the organization is an admitted monopolist that uses its power over college athletics to artificially restrain and suppress college athletes’ compensation, based on the notion that college athletes are students first, amateur athletes second, and never employees. At the same time, the NCAA, universities, administrators, and coaches collect billions in revenue from those athletes’ labor. Now, faced with the prospect of having to share the wealth, and a judiciary that has declared its conduct illegal, the NCAA and its members are turning to Congress for help.

The NCAA wants an exemption from the normal application of our antitrust and labor laws, so that it can continue to deny college athletes any compensation for their hundreds or thousands of hours of labor. Such an exemption would fly in the face of over a century of legal precedent that is steeped in the notion that consolidated economic power is inherently in conflict with the democratic ideals on which our nation is built.

By exploring how money flows through college athletics and how the NCAA has flouted our antitrust and labor laws to keep that money in the hands of a few, this report argues that the NCAA does not need or deserve such special treatment from Congress. It is the athletes—whose blood, sweat, and tears bring adoring fans to stadiums and television screens and billions of dollars to their schools—who need protection from the college athletics cartel the NCAA leads. The NCAA should be granted no such exemption.