Date of Submission

Spring 2024

Academic Program

Economics

Project Advisor 1

Michael Martell

Abstract/Artist's Statement

The debate for the last several decades over paying college athletes took a major turn in 2021 with the implementation of an interim policy on name, image, and likeness (NIL). This policy finally allowed athletes in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to earn an income by promoting products and services using their platform as a college athlete. The rule change followed a very important antitrust case, Alston v. NCAA, where the Supreme Court determined that some NCAA rules limiting college athletes’ compensation violated antitrust law. The collusive monopsony and cartel that the Power 5 conference schools formed was significantly impacted by NIL. These schools, members of the top five conferences in college sports, had agreed to avoid competition in the labor market of recruiting prospective college athletes.

The cartel implemented limits to employment, which were enforced by the restricted number of athletic scholarships each program could provide, and also restricted college athletes’ compensation to only providing for room, board, tuition, books, and incidentals. The costs which these schools endured to create more appeal to their athletic programs and their institutions as a whole became barriers for other schools to enter the cartel. However, NIL has provided college athletes with the opportunity to earn compensation in accordance with their contributions to their school’s generated revenue. The interim NIL policy has significantly increased competition in the labor market of college sports and reduced the monopsony power of the Power 5 conference schools. Through NIL, college athletes are essentially being compensated to play their sport since most of the money is coming from the school’s collectives and boosters.

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Open Access

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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