Spencer Thomas | editor-in-chief

College athletes are getting paid now, and it feels like a landslide. Phrases like “unprecedented times” get thrown around, but that’s not the case. Americans have grappled with the death of amateurism in athletics since the Civil War.

The inevitable tumble of the dominoes started in 1868, when the National Association of Base Ball Players voted to allow its teams to pay their players. For years, baseball had been considered a game for amateurs. Players were not meant to be paid. Of course, there were controversies — players like Lip Pike were investigated for receiving under-the-table payments for their athletic talents, but it wasn’t until the winter meetings that year that America’s pastime went pro. At the time, people thought it was the death of amateurism in athletics. The idea that people would be having the same debates about college students over a century later would have been absurd.

Now, it’s college athletics’ turn to cross that threshold and forgo the purity of “playing for fun” in exchange for rewarding the athletes who make up a billion-dollar business. As the NCAA begrudgingly opens the doors to college athlete compensation, their plights closely mirror that of the NABBP 156 years ago. Both fought fruitlessly against athlete compensation, whether against Reggie Bush or Lip Pike.

If the pattern continues, the NCAA will not survive in its current form.

An opinion from CBS Sports in 2021: “There is no more amateurism because … what was it, anyway? Cost of attendance was handed out to athletes, not normal students.”

An opinion in the New York Sunday Mercury in 1874: “Amateur clubs… can play for gate-money, and share the proceeds. Wherein this differs from regular professional play, we are at a loss to conceive.”

In 1868, a professional game between clubs from New York and Brooklyn charged a $0.25 admission fee that went to the athletes.

In 2024, the University of Tennessee instituted a 10% “talent fee” on ticket purchases that goes toward its players.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Professionalism in sports is still a good thing. When amateurism was forced out of the Olympic Games, we saw NBA players come together and form The Dream Team, something people marveled so much that it is a cornerstone of America’s athletic history. This October, we will all be joyfully watching as professional baseball players play for millions of dollars in MLB’s postseason. But the NCAA’s messy break-up with unpaid labor is turning ugly in a variety of ways, and the worst of it (so far) happened last week in Las Vegas.

The UNLV Football team was having a wonderful autumn. Led by transfer quarterback Matthew Sluka, they were 3-0, beating power conference opponents and earning national ranking votes for the first time in school history. Then on Wednesday, Sluka quit the program, saying in a statement “representations that were made to [Sluka], which were not upheld after [Sluka] enrolled.”

Between clarifications from his father, agent and the university, the facts seem to be that Sluka was verbally promised six figures of name, image and likeness money by an assistant coach to suit up for the Rebels this season– money he never received. Quitting before he plays in a fourth game means that Sluka can redshirt this season, preserving one last year of eligibility for 2025. Sluka has already used four years of eligibility playing at Holy Cross before transferring to Sin City.
 

Now, the Rebels will play the rest of their season with their backup quarterback, who will be thrust into top-level action for the first time on three days’ notice. It’s a tragedy that could derail a program that was experiencing perhaps the best moment in its history. It shows that in its current state, college athletics is in a worse place than it was before NIL money started pulling the strings.

This is not the fault of the athletes who are finally seeing rewards for their efforts. It is the inevitable result of the complete lack of regulation in the industry. UNLV technically didn’t do anything wrong either. A verbal promise from an assistant coach is not binding. Every school is out for itself in navigating the new landscape, and their mistakes are just as likely to be a consequence of their naivety as of malice. There should be much more involvement from a regulating body, but the NCAA has left it up to the schools to clean up its mess. This is the NCAA’s spiteful retribution for not getting its way. “If you won’t let us do this our way, you can figure it out on your own.”

Former Duquesne Men’s Basketball Head Coach Keith Dambrot foresaw this exact problem during a preseason press conference last fall, claiming the lack of transparency can leave student-athletes ‘hung out to dry’.

In 1868, the Mercury wrote, “The National Association has fought against it until their laws on the subject have become dead letters, and now all they have to do is not to refer to it at all, but to leave it to club-action entirely for regulation.”

The NCAA’s refusal to create a fair system only punishes players, programs and fans.

It begs the question: What is the point of the NCAA, if not to preserve the integrity of college athletics? Or as the Mercury wrote in 1876, “The once strong and powerful Amateur Association has, through mismanagement, almost faded out of existence; that is so far as carrying out the rules are concerned.”

A solution does seem to be on the horizon. The NCAA and Power 4 schools recently implemented a system that would allow schools to directly pay their players. That brings about whole new issues of transparency, equity in revenue sharing and more. It’s hard to find a solution that doesn’t create twice the number of problems that it solves. The NCAA agreeing to this doesn’t mean they are safe, because remember that the NABBP begrudgingly agreed to athlete compensation too, and once teams started paying athletes, the league was on a downhill trend it would never recover from. They crowned their last champion in 1870. A few years later, leagues that were unabashedly professional, the American and National, vacuumed up the talent. The sport didn’t die, but the regulating body did, as did any team that didn’t jump headfirst to the concept of professionalism.

Sound familiar? If history is any indication, the NCAA is in deep, deep trouble.