(Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
By Sam Britt
Justices on the Supreme Court questioned the legitimacy of the argument put forth by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) on Wednesday that it should be able to limit compensation for college athletes, according to CNBC.
The case was brought forth by former West Virginia running back Shawne Alston. The lawyer representing the student-athletes, Jeffrey Kessler, argues the NCAA is violating federal antitrust law by restricting education-related payment to athletes.
The NCAA argument is in order to maintain amateurism and parity it must put limits on student-athlete compensation.
However, the players are arguing the NCAA is "operating a system that is a classic restraint of competition in business," according to NPR.
“These are competitors all getting together with total market power fixing prices,” Justice Elena Kagan told Seth Waxman, the NCAA’s attorney and a former U.S. solicitor general.
Waxman argued NCAA sports are defined by the amateur status of its athletes. He said education-related benefits are effective salaries.
Kessler responded that this argument was another version of the idea that paying players will ruin the sanctity and “destroy the demand for college sports.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked Waxman if his argument was really that “consumers enjoy watching unpaid people play sports.”
Waxman responded and said it was.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that it appeared that schools were “conspiring with competitors to pay no salaries to the workers who are making the schools billions of dollars on the theory that consumers want the schools to pay their workers nothing.”
Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to be the most sympathetic judge to the NCAA’s arguments. He said that if the courts overturned an unspecified amount of NCAA policies the competitions may no longer be amateur.
“All of sudden, the whole thing comes crashing down,” Roberts said.
A decision in the case is expected to be reached by June.