On the one hand, please don’t call ’em professionals ($$).
The Southeastern Conference filed an amicus brief last week to support the NCAA in its ongoing attempt to prevent the recognition of college athletes as employees of the schools they attend.
The NCAA is a defendant, along with Villanova and other universities, in Johnson v. NCAA, a case originally brought by current and former college athletes in which they say that they should be qualified as employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
The conference argued that participating in college sports does not qualify as work under the law, that schools are not employers, and that athletes should not be paid.
“Such participation should be categorized as an extracurricular educational activity to be administered and conducted in a manner consistent with each institution’s broader educational mission and policies,” the SEC wrote in its brief. “Not as an employer-employee relationship between the institution and the participants that requires mandatory pay.”
On the other, can we please treat them the way professional players are treated?
That has added another layer to the highly-charged transfer issue. In the first year of the one-time transfer rule, coaches and administrators alike balked at the near-endless focus on the transfer portal, which unlike free agency in professional sports could be entered and exited at nearly any time.
… The American Football Coaches Association has recommended a pair of transfer “windows” that would allow players to move between teams at defined periods of time while giving coaches more certainty over recruiting and roster construction.
As always, the definition of amateurism is whatever they say it is.
Get The Picture 
I’d like to think the NIL, COA, transfer issues, etc. can be sorted out without letting the employer/employee genie out of the bottle.
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I hope so, too, but the chase for almighty dollar has rendered that impossible at this point. The only question now is when is it going to happen and how radical will the changes be.
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I like how you put that. The dollar chasing from all parties has made it impossible at this point.
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Agree…it should if intelligent non-greedy leaders are so inclined. With respect to transfers, I think they are attacking the wrong issue. Let kids switch schools, but under rules of eligibility go back to either the one year pause or cap number of transfer players a team can have eligible for competition in a season. There needs to be a rational balance for player freedom vs fairness under the rules of competition. Don’t see how the courts can interfere with the rules of the game unless it’s the NCAA legal team bungling the defense.
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Does being an employee ,i.e., getting paid by the school, ultimately mean the end of scholarships? If so, the player can and possibly should pay his own way. This would all seg into unrestricted free agency.
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It would end the requirement for the employee “be enrolled in school.”
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That’s when I’m out.
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Sounds like the transfer portal window idea is dead for now. At least until possibly late summer. What I read last night was that the NCAA Transformation Committee, which is looking at trying to streamline NCAA deregulation, wants to couple things like the portal window with other issues that need to be addressed (like NCAA enforcement of rules concerning enticement or inducements for recruiting and transfers through the use of NIL). There is an August 1st deadline for getting new rules into place and no one seemed particularly optimistic that anything would happen by then which means another year of NIL and portal chaos.
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Players already receive payment in the form of stipends, not to mention the schollies, meals, rooming, etc. In return for that labor schools receive millions in the market.
It’ll be interesting to see the gymnastics the ncaa will perform to define that situation as being different than an employer/employee relationship.
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The IRS probably could try to make a case now if they wanted to:
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/employee-common-law-employee
It would seem pretty hard for the universities to defend against this definition and for the players to say their benefits aren’t taxable.
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