Sports
As the Basketball Games Begin, the N.C.A.A.'s Model Fractures – The New York Times
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This weekend, college basketball tournaments will unfurl before millions of viewers and against a backdrop of seismic change.
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Billy Witz likes to point out that, in college sports, more has changed in the last five years than in the previous 50.
“When I started saying that, I used to think, ‘Am I being hyperbolic?’” he said.
But Mr. Witz is not exaggerating: The amateur student-athlete model that drives the National Collegiate Athletic Association is unraveling. In 2021, after a Supreme Court ruling, the N.C.A.A. changed its rules to allow players to market their names, images and likenesses, unleashing a flood of payments to players. Football and basketball stars who, a decade ago, might have chosen a school with plans to attend for three or four years now swap teams one season at a time. This month, an Ivy League basketball team voted to form a union after a federal official ruled that the players were employees of the school.
Mr. Witz, who has covered college sports for The New York Times since 2019, is busy staying on top of these developments. In an interview on the eve of the first round of the men’s and women’s March Madness basketball tournaments, two of the N.C.A.A.’s crown jewels, he put some of the dramatic changes in context and described the broad horizons of his beat. This conversation has been edited.
The Dartmouth men’s basketball team voted to form a union after a National Labor Relations Board official said the players were employees of the school. What are the implications of this?
This has never happened before. Nobody has gotten this far in making the case that college athletes are employees. Ten years ago, Northwestern football players got close. The N.L.R.B. decided not to assert jurisdiction over that case. That could very well happen again.
It doesn’t appear that this is going to be settled anytime soon. Dartmouth has indicated that they are willing to go to the mat for this. I was told by a Dartmouth official that the players’ argument that they are employees cuts too far into an Ivy League belief that sports are not a job; they’re something closer to an avocation. Some of the Dartmouth basketball players acknowledge that this may not be settled before they finish their college careers.
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