Higher education financing is maddeningly complex — state subsidies to schools, federal grants to students, for‐​profit schools, “nonprofit” institutions, student loans, seemingly limitless ways to handle loan repayments — and in the grand scheme of things whether college athletes can get paid beyond “educational expenses” is a pretty minor thing. Of course, it isn’t that minor if you are an athlete, or even if you were one of millions of people who loved playing college sports video games, which met their demise in part due to legal battles over compensating college players. All of this is why legislation likely to be enacted in California, the Fair Pay to Play Act, is making big noise, threatening to pit our largest state against arguably the country’s biggest sports power: the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA.

In California v. the NCAA, Root – Grudgingly – for the NCAA by Neal McCluskey