the BigAmateurism monologues

For over seventy years, the NCAA and in-system stakeholder beneficiaries of the big-time college sports marketplace have proclaimed that any challenge to the NCAA’s regulatory authority or basic amateurism-based business model would result in the fatal collapse of college sports. From capitulation to the full athletics scholarship in 1956 to the name, image, and likeness debate in 2021, the NCAA has opposed the modernization of college sports with totalitarian militance. Yet with every change—most imposed by the very external regulatory threats the NCAA/Power 5 seek to eliminate—college sports not only survived but thrived. This episode closes out 2021 with a discussion of several fundamental changes to the college sports landscape that disproves the NCAA’s fearmongering. As the Supreme Court said in its dismissal of the NCAA’s latest “sky is falling” campaign: the games go on!