Whither the NCAA: Reforming the System

Intercollegiate athletics has long been caught in the ambiguous space between professional and amateur sport. As a hybrid and immensely popular system run by the NCAA, intercollegiate athletics has been critiqued as ethically hypocritical, educationally corrosive, materially exploitative, and economically unsustainable. Economic, political and legal pressure has been building over the last 10 years to reform the system. Such reform will ultimately require a choice between the professional and the amateur models, or a bifurcation whereby a select group of a few dozen schools chooses a professional paradigm while a thousand-plus schools opt for the official NCAA vision of academically centered amateur athletics. After considering the arguments for a market-oriented reform in the direction of professionalism, I argue for an educationally-based reform that is accompanied by a constrained and conditional antitrust exemption for the NCAA or an alternative governing body.