NCAA on defense in Supreme Court case

WASHINGTON — U.S. Supreme Court justices on Wednesday grilled the NCAA on its bid to maintain limits on education-related compensation for student-athletes, questioning its reliance on what critics have called the sham of amateurism in college sports.

During about 90 minutes of arguments in the NCAA’s appeal of a lower court ruling against the major governing body for U.S. intercollegiate sports, some of the nine justices seemed concerned that the organization could be using the cloak of amateurism to fix labor prices at an artificially low level.

“The antitrust laws should not be a cover for exploitation of the student athletes,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said.

The case concerns NCAA limits on non-cash payments to college athletes related to education — including benefits such as computers, science equipment and musical instruments. The San Franciscobased 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year found the NCAA’s rules to be anticompetitive under a federal law called the Sherman Antitrust Act.

When the NCAA’s lawyer, Seth Waxman, cited the organization’s more than 100-year history of promoting amateur sports, Justice Elena Kagan signaled skepticism.

“I guess it doesn’t move me all that much that there is a history to this if what is going on now is that competitors — as to labor — are combining to fix prices,” Kagan said.

Justice Samuel Alito noted that college athletes already receive other benefits, such as scholarships and accommodation.

“The distinction is not whether they are going to be paid, it’s the form in which they are going to be paid and how much they are going to be paid. Isn’t that right?” Alito asked.

But the justices also questioned a 2019 injunction issued by Californiabased U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken allowing education-related compensation, wondering among other things if the judge had imposed arbitrary new rules and paved the way to a whole host of future challenges to other NCAA policies.

College athletes who filed lawsuits in 2014 and 2015 — consolidated into a single case in California federal court — have argued that the NCAA’s compensation limits represent a form of unlawful restraint of trade at a time when the leading intercollegiate conferences are bringing in billions of dollars in revenue.