Washington, D.C. — In response to the letter sent today by NCAA President Charlie Baker proposing a new model for compensating college athletes, the American Economic Liberties Project released the following statement.

“The NCAA’s announcement today, explaining that it would like to create a model allowing schools to directly compensate athletes for their name, image, and likeness, marks a major turning point in college athletics,” said Katherine Van Dyck, Senior Counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project. “But we cannot ignore what made it possible: the legal and financial pressure of our antitrust laws.” 

“In 2021, the Supreme Court told the NCAA that it is not above the law and that its rules limiting athlete compensation violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. Now, the NCAA is facing a class action lawsuit by athletes challenging its current NIL rules prohibiting schools from directly paying college athletes and seeking over $4 billion in damages, on top of lawsuits by more students and the NLRB arguing that they should be treated as employees and allowed to collectively bargain,” Van Dyck added. “Today’s letter from Charlie Baker is a direct response to that. If Mr. Baker still plans to ask Congress for antitrust immunity, Congress should remember how athletes got to this point. The strides we are seeing in college athletics exemplify the power of strong antitrust enforcement, and as published in an Economic Liberties paper, legislative intervention in the NCAA’s favor would undermine that progress and violate over a century of competition policy in the United States.”

Read “Playing by the Rules: Bringing Law and Order to the NCAA”, discussing why the NCAA’s campaign on Capitol Hill for an antitrust exemption should be rejected.

Learn more about Economic Liberties here.

###

The American Economic Liberties Project works to ensure America’s system of commerce is structured to advance, rather than undermine, economic liberty, fair commerce, and a secure, inclusive democracy. Economic Liberties believes true economic liberty means entrepreneurs and businesses large and small succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work; commerce empowers consumers, workers, farmers, and engineers instead of subjecting them to discrimination and abuse from financiers and monopolists; foreign trade arrangements support domestic security and democracy; and wealth is broadly distributed to support equitable political power.