NCAA v. Alston: The Supreme Court Rejects the Amateurism Defense

Timeline

1. 2014Shawne Alston files suit; related cases are consolidated before Judge Claudia Wilken.
2. Mar 2019Wilken rules that NCAA limits on education-related benefits violate antitrust law, but leaves other compensation limits in place.
3. May 2020The Ninth Circuit affirms.
4. Dec 2020The Supreme Court agrees to hear the case.
5. Mar 31, 2021Oral argument.
6. Jun 21, 2021The Court affirms 9–0; Gorsuch writes for the Court and Kavanaugh concurs.
7. Jul 1, 2021The NCAA adopts an interim policy allowing athletes to earn from their name, image and likeness.

The ethical issues

• Whether amateurism is a legitimate justification for restraints on athletes' compensation.
• Judicial deference to sports organizations.
• Distinguishing education-related benefits from pay.
• Title IX and the fair allocation of new benefits between men and women.
• The limits of courts versus legislation in remaking college sports.

Stakeholders

Stakeholder	Interests & obligations
Athletes	Access to education benefits, and, potentially, wider compensation.
NCAA and conferences	Control over rules and their legal defense of amateurism.
Universities	Costs, recruiting competition, and Title IX compliance.
Congress and states	Possible legislation on NIL and athlete status.
Coaches and administrators	Salaries tied to the revenues athletes generate.

The case

After O’Bannon, athletes continued to challenge the NCAA’s limits on what schools could provide. A group of cases led by former West Virginia running back Shawne Alston and others was consolidated before Judge Claudia Wilken, who had decided O’Bannon.^[1]

The athletes argued that NCAA rules capping athletes’ compensation, set collectively by competing schools, were an unlawful restraint of trade. In March 2019, Wilken drew a line. She upheld limits on cash payments unrelated to education. But she ruled that the NCAA could not cap “non-cash education-related benefits,” such as computers, science equipment, musical instruments, graduate and vocational scholarships, tutoring, study abroad, and paid post-eligibility internships. Individual conferences could still set their own limits.^[1][3] The Ninth Circuit affirmed in May 2020. Judge Milan Smith, concurring, wrote that athletes’ treatment was “the result of a cartel of buyers acting in concert to artificially depress the price.”^[1]

Background

The lawsuits that became Alston were led by former athletes Shawne Alston and Justine Hartman.^[1] They focused on the NCAA’s limits on non-cash compensation for academic purposes, such as computers and internships. The NCAA said these limits prevented the appearance that athletes were being paid to play or treated as professionals.^[1] Wilken based her ruling on the large gap between the revenue that athletes’ performances generated and what the athletes themselves received.^[1]

The Ninth Circuit’s view was mixed. The panel accepted that the NCAA had a legitimate interest in “preserving amateurism and thus improving consumer choice by maintaining a distinction between college and professional sports.” But it held that the NCAA’s restrictions on education-related benefits still violated antitrust law.^[1]

The rules and governance

The legal standard was the Sherman Act’s ban on unreasonable restraints of trade, applied through the “rule of reason.” Under it, courts weigh a restraint’s harm to competition against its claimed benefits and ask whether less restrictive alternatives exist.^[1][2] The NCAA asked the Court for a more deferential standard, arguing that its role in defining amateur sport deserved special treatment. Gorsuch rejected that request.^[2]

The ruling’s reach was deliberately limited. It covered only education-related benefits, not direct compensation for athletic performance.^[1] Wilken’s injunction barred the NCAA from preventing post-eligibility scholarships for undergraduate or graduate degrees at any school, vocational school scholarships, tutoring, study-abroad expenses outside the cost of attendance, and paid post-eligibility internships.^[1] Individual conferences remained free to set their own limits.^[1] The injunction also let the NCAA keep limiting cash awards for academic achievement, but not below the level it allowed for athletic awards, then $5,980 a year. The NCAA told the Court that this “is the very definition of a professional salary.”^[7]

The Supreme Court

The NCAA appealed. It argued that the decision could allow sham “education-related” payments, giving the example of a hypothetical $500,000-a-semester internship with a sponsor, and that courts should defer to the NCAA’s judgment about how to preserve amateurism.^[1]

On June 21, 2021, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion held that the NCAA was not entitled to special treatment under antitrust law and that the lower courts had applied established principles correctly. He noted that the Court was not addressing the broader rules on compensation, and acknowledged that “some will see this as a poor substitute for fuller relief.”^[1][2][4]

Gorsuch began from the money. “At the center of this thicket of associations and rules sits a massive business,” he wrote. The March Madness broadcast contract was worth $1.1 billion a year and the College Football Playoff deal about $470 million a year. In 2017 the Southeastern Conference made more than $409 million from television contracts alone.^[7] He rejected the NCAA’s reliance on a passage in NCAA v. Board of Regents (1984), which had said the association needs “ample latitude” to preserve amateurism. That remark, he wrote, was an aside in a case about television restrictions, and the market had changed since. CBS had paid $16 million a year to televise the tournament from 1982 to 1984, and Division I schools raised more than $13.5 billion by 2016.^[7] He stressed “the modesty of the current decree”: the NCAA could still define which benefits were education-related, and conferences could impose tighter limits. He agreed that a “least restrictive means” test would be “erroneous and overly intrusive,” but found that the district court had not applied one. Its “demanding standard hardly presages a future filled with judicial micromanagement of legitimate business decisions.”^[7]

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately. He argued that the NCAA’s remaining compensation rules “also raise serious questions under the antitrust laws.” He wrote that “the NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America”, comparing it to restaurants in a region agreeing to cut cooks’ wages. “Price-fixing labor is price-fixing labor,” he wrote, and “a monopsony cannot launder its price-fixing of labor by calling it product definition.” He noted that the athletes who generate the revenue, “many of whom are African American and from lower-income backgrounds, end up with little or nothing,” while administrators and coaches earn “six- and seven-figure salaries.” Traditions, he wrote, “cannot justify the NCAA’s decision to build a massive money-raising enterprise on the backs of student athletes who are not fairly compensated.” He concluded: “The NCAA is not above the law.”^[2][5][7]

Immediate effects

With state NIL laws set to take effect on July 1, 2021, and the Court’s ruling undermining its legal position, the NCAA adopted an interim policy on June 30, effective July 1, allowing athletes to earn from endorsements and other NIL activities.^[1] Lawsuits challenging the remaining compensation rules followed, culminating in the House v. NCAA settlement that allowed schools to pay athletes directly.^[6]

Aftermath

Wilken, the judge who had decided O’Bannon and Alston, also oversaw the House settlement. After she gave it final approval in June 2025, NCAA President Charlie Baker called the ruling “a new beginning for Division I student-athletes and for the NCAA.” He acknowledged that for years the NCAA’s rules on benefits and NIL had produced “a sense of chaos” and litigation, “some of which spurred hastily imposed court orders upending the rules.”^[8] Under the settlement, the defendant conferences, not the NCAA, design and enforce an annual cap on direct payments to athletes, set at 22.5% of revenue (about $20.5 million per school in the first year), along with rules for third-party NIL contracts. The court keeps jurisdiction over implementation. Baker wrote that with scholarships and other benefits, athletes at many schools could receive “nearly 50% of all athletics department revenue.” Scholarship limits are replaced by roster limits, and the NCAA receives a release from future litigation on these subjects for ten years.^[8] He also said “significant challenges remain,” including efforts to classify athletes as employees and state laws that undercut national rules, and that “only Congress can address these issues.”^[8] The modest decree in Alston, and Kavanaugh’s warning about the rest of the NCAA’s rules, had become the opening chapter of a much larger change.

The core dilemma

The NCAA argued that college sports’ value depends on athletes being amateurs, and asked the courts to respect that judgment. The athletes argued that “amateurism” was a label for a price-fixing agreement. Should the law treat college sports as a special institution or as an industry?

Competing values

• Institutional autonomy vs. legal accountability: sports bodies’ freedom to define their product against antitrust law’s general application.
• Education vs. compensation: whether benefits must be tied to education to be acceptable.
• Equity vs. market value: new benefits could widen gaps between sports and between men and women.
• Judicial restraint vs. justice: a narrow ruling against the broader questions it raised.

Strongest arguments

For the athletes and the Court: schools compete fiercely for coaches and facilities while agreeing to cap what they give the athletes who make their sports valuable. Antitrust law does not permit that because the industry calls itself amateur.

For the NCAA’s concerns: college sport is tied to education, and courts are poorly suited to managing it rule by rule. Sweeping changes could hurt non-revenue sports and women’s programs funded by football and basketball, and Congress is the better body to set national rules.

Applying the frameworks

Justice

A justice lens asks whether it was fair for schools to agree together to limit what athletes could receive while coaches, administrators and conferences earned large sums. The ruling addressed only education-related benefits, so the lens also asks whether the remaining limits were just, as Kavanaugh’s concurrence suggested they were not.

Rights

A rights lens focuses on athletes’ freedom to bargain for the value of their labor. Antitrust law protects competitive markets, not rights directly, but the decision recognized that collective limits imposed by employers or buyers can unfairly suppress what workers can earn.

Utilitarian

Consequentialists weigh benefits to athletes, especially education benefits that support careers after sport, against the NCAA’s fears of disguised pay-for-play and damage to the college model. The rapid changes that followed, NIL and then the House settlement, are a test of which predictions were right.

Walk it through: the Simple Decision Model

1. Spot the issue. You are a university president in 2019, after Wilken’s ruling, deciding whether your conference should allow the education-related benefits now permitted. The stakeholders include athletes, non-athlete students, coaches, donors, the conference and the NCAA. The codes in play are the court’s injunction, NCAA rules, conference rules and Title IX.
2. Gather facts. What benefits are now allowed? What will they cost, and how will they be distributed between men’s and women’s sports?
3. Test options. Options: (a) allow none beyond the minimum; (b) allow the full range for all athletes; (c) allow a targeted set with safeguards against abuse. Weigh athletes’ education against cost and the risk of disguised payment.
4. Check codes and law. Are you opposing benefits mainly to protect revenue? Would your choice be fair to athletes in every sport?
5. Decide and document. Record the decision and its rationale.
6. Communicate and follow up. Communicate clearly to athletes what is available, and review how the benefits are used.

What’s settled and what’s contested

• Settled: NCAA caps on education-related benefits violate antitrust law; the NCAA gets no special deference.
• Contested: whether athletes are employees; how revenue sharing should work under Title IX; whether Congress will create a national framework.

Why this case matters

Alston is the Supreme Court’s clearest statement that amateurism is not a legal shield. Kavanaugh’s concurrence in particular is required reading for anyone thinking about the future of college sport.

Key terms

Myth of amateurism

The critique that athletes generate large revenues without the pay or labor protections other workers have. Tested by justice, consent and dignity.

Distributive justice

Fairness in how scarce opportunities, resources, benefits and burdens are shared.

Agency

An athlete’s ability to make decisions and act independently about their body, career and voice.

Legal but unethical

Law sets out what can be punished; ethics asks what is right. Compliance is a minimum, so an action can be lawful and still wrong.

Definitions from the Ethics Cases glossary.

Discussion questions

1. The Court's ruling was narrow, about education-related benefits, but unanimous. Why do you think the justices kept it narrow?
2. Kavanaugh wrote that the NCAA's business model "would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry." Is he right? What would follow if he is?
3. Should courts defer to sports organizations' definitions of their own products, such as "amateur" sport? Why or why not?
4. How should new athlete benefits be distributed between men's and women's sports?
5. Is antitrust law the right tool for deciding athletes' rights, or should Congress act?

Sources

1. National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston — Wikipedia
2. NCAA v. Alston, 594 U.S. 69 (2021) — opinion text — Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
3. Why the NCAA Lost Its Latest Landmark Case in the Battle Over What Schools Can Offer Athletes — Sports Illustrated
4. Supreme Court sides with former college players in dispute with NCAA over compensation — ESPN
5. Supreme Court says NCAA can't limit some benefits to student athletes — NBC News
6. Supreme Court rules in favor of athletes in NCAA compensation case — Politico
7. NCAA v. Alston, No. 20-512, slip opinion (June 21, 2021) — Supreme Court of the United States
8. A Letter from NCAA President Charlie Baker (on final approval of the House settlement) — NCAA