WASHINGTON D.C., DC — Big news on coming out of Washington DC this week. The United States Supreme Court unanimously affirmed a ruling that will allow an increase on the education related benefits student athletes can receive from universities.
The debate on amateurism in college sports has been a hot button topic for at least a decade.
So I spoke with Wake Forest associate professor Todd McFall about what this means for college sports.
"Right now it means that if schools would like to start offering, what the court has deemed as educational services, if they want to offer whatever that means beyond the scholarship, it's perfectly legal to do so, the NCAA has no means to combat that."
So that means schools essentially are now allowed to provide athletes with things like laptops, vehicles, private tutors, and anything else a university deems as an academic aid.
"It could mean that a school gets really creative and says, our star qb needs transportation from campus to the practice facility, so we're going to give him a corvette for that. We don't know what it means yet, but from an economics sense what it means is that now schools can start to compensate players above and beyond what the scholarship cap has been, which has been in place the last 70 years. "
Todd does not speak for the athletic department at Wake Forest, so what he says here, may not happen for any athletes.
he's an economic expert and college sports fan, who is able to explain to all of us what yesterday's Supreme Courts ruling *could mean for you at home and your kids, as well as the future of college sports.