The College Basketball has finally made an agreement to move on…

The College Basketball has finally made an agreement to move on…

The N.C.A.A. and the major athletic conferences accepted a historic $2.8 billion settlement on Thursday, and the first thing to note about it is that it severely damaged the organization’s prized amateurism model: schools can now pay their athletes directly.

However, one fundamental tenet endures, and the N.C.A.A. is probably going to prioritize upholding it: players who receive compensation from the universities are not employees of those institutions and do not, therefore, have the ability to engage in collective bargaining.

When the agreement was announced, John I. Jenkins, the president of the University of Notre Dame, said in a statement that Congress needed to “establish that our athletes are not employees, but students seeking college degrees.”

The N.C.A.A. is making an effort to save the final remnants of its amateur model, which for many years prohibited collegiate athletes from receiving compensation from organizations or individuals without jeopardizing their eligibility. The settlement was reached in response to increased legal and political pressure on that position in recent years; a judge’s approval is still needed.

The argument may seem strange at first glance. The N.C.A.A. has been compelled to remove restrictions on player compensation over the past ten years due to a combination of public pressure, court decisions, and the fact that players receive none of the billions of dollars in revenue that college athletics generates annually. A California law made it unlawful to prevent collegiate athletes from participating in name, image, and likeness (N.I.L.) deals, which allowed athletes to pursue remuneration; a few of them get seven figures a year.

College athletics have expanded to become a more national endeavor at the same time. As universities have switched conference allegiances in an effort to get TV money, regional rivalries and traditions have been abandoned. Nowadays, individual conferences can reach as far as Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, from Palo Alto, California. As a result, players from a wide range of sports are spending less time on campus and more time traveling to games.

Adam Hoffer, a former economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and director of Excise Tax Policy at the Tax Foundation, said, “I don’t know how you wouldn’t call them employees at this point.” The N.C.A.A. will resemble a professional league more than it has in the past.