The NCAA’s SCORE Act, heavily promoted through TV ads, conceals a perilous antitrust exemption and a targeted denial of employee status for college athletes, creating constitutional vulnerabilities and morally repugnant parallels to prison labor that threaten the legislation’s survival.
Backed by a lobbying campaign that flooded airwaves during the college football season and promises to ramp up during March Madness, the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act appears to be the NCAA’s solution to the growing movement for athlete rights. But beneath the surface of this legislation lie traps that could ensnare Congress and imperil the future of college sports.
The NCAA generates $19 billion annually, positioning it as the world’s second-largest sports league behind only the NFL and ahead of the NBA, Major League Baseball, and the English Premier League (The Economist). This immense revenue stream is fueled primarily by media rights and fan support, yet the SCORE Act does nothing to ensure athletes share in this prosperity. Instead, it protects the NCAA’s current spending model, which includes excessive coach salaries and lavish facilities, while misleading the public about financial constraints.
Constitutional Trap: Antitrust Exemption and Equal Protection
The SCORE Act’s most glaring flaw is its grant of an antitrust exemption—a privilege no other American industry enjoys. The Supreme Court has already rejected the NCAA’s plea for such an exemption in NCAA v. Alston, holding unanimously that the NCAA’s restrictions on athlete compensation violate antitrust laws. By seeking congressional override of that decision, the NCAA invites a constitutional challenge under the Equal Protection Clause.
Legislation that singles out college athletes to deny them the same student employee status afforded to their peers in work-study programs would treat similarly situated students differently without a rational basis. Athletes are more integral to the NCAA’s enterprise than work-study employees are to their institutions, and they face far stricter control over their schedules, academic choices, and personal lives. An exemption that denies athletes this basic classification while allowing other students to be hired as employees is almost certain to be struck down in federal court.
Moral Trap: The Prison Labor Comparison
In pending litigation, the NCAA has advanced an argument that is both legally dubious and morally reprehensible. To justify denying athletes employee status, the NCAA’s lawyers have compared college athletes to prison laborers, invoking the 13th Amendment’s “slavery exception” as established in Vanskike v. Peters (974 F.2d 806, 7th Cir. 1992), a case that exempts prisoners from the Fair Labor Standards Act because “inmate labor belongs to the institution” (Justia).
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit roundly rejected this analogy in Johnson v. NCAA, stating: “We disagree with [the] comparison of college athletes to prisoners and refuse to equate a prisoner’s involuntary servitude, as authorized by the 13th Amendment, to ‘the long-standing tradition’ of amateurism in college athletics.” The NCAA’s reliance on such a precedent reveals the extreme lengths to which it will go to avoid treating athletes as employees, even if it means aligning itself with the legacy of forced labor.
The Work-Study Contradiction
At the heart of the SCORE Act’s employee exemption is a fundamental contradiction. Colleges have for decades operated work-study programs that employ thousands of students in campus dining halls, libraries, and offices. These positions are paid hourly at minimum wage, managed via simple timesheets, and are exempt from FICA taxes under IRS rules (IRS). No institution has ever claimed these programs are too costly or complex to administer.
Yet the NCAA asserts that extending similar employee status to college athletes would upend the amateur model. In reality, athletes already maintain detailed logs of their practice and competition hours—documentation mandated by NCAA bylaws (Division I Bylaw 17.1.7.3.4). Including them in existing work-study frameworks would require minimal administrative changes while granting them basic labor protections. The only logical explanation for the NCAA’s opposition is its desire to maintain control without accountability.
Why This Matters to Fans
The SCORE Act is not a step toward fairness; it is a legislative shield for an increasingly unsustainable model. By codifying an antitrust exemption and a targeted employee exclusion, Congress would be endorsing a system that exploits athletes while protecting the NCAA’s revenue streams and bureaucratic overhead. The constitutional risks are immediate: equal protection challenges would arise the moment the law is enforced, and the moral stain of comparing athletes to prisoners undermines any pretense of educational amateurism.
Fans who tune into March Madness and fall bowl games deserve transparency. The NCAA’s TV ads present the SCORE Act as a protective measure for college sports, but they omit the dangerous concessions embedded in the bill. This is not about saving college sports; it’s about preserving a power structure that enriches administrators and coaches at the expense of the athletes who generate the product.
Congress should see these flagrant fouls for what they are and reject the SCORE Act. True reform requires recognizing athletes as employees entitled to fair compensation and labor rights, not carving out exceptions that insult their contributions and invite legal disaster.
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