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NCAA Amateurism as an Anticompetitive Tying Restraint

Antitrust litigation against the NCAA has focused on its members’ collusive restraint on athlete compensation at levels below marginal revenue product. The recent O’Bannon v. NCAA and In Re NCAA Grant-in-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation have both prescribed a relevant market for “college education” where schools compete for athlete labor by offering tuition and fee or cost-of-attendance offsets. This article argues that this unitary definition conflates two separate products, academic education and athletic participation, that NCAA members offer as a bundled tie. The NCAA has mandated purchase of the tied product, academic education, as a pre-requisite for access to intercollegiate athletics participation, the tying product. Paradoxically, the NCAA has then argued that this bundled tie, which this article argues violates the Supreme Court’s three-pronged ‘quasi’ per-se rule prohibiting tying arrangements, represents a claimed ‘pro-competitive justification’ by integrating athletics and academics. This article offers evidence that this tying arrangement serves no legitimate pro-competitive purpose under the NCAA model of amateurism. Rather, it extracts consumer surplus, enhances dominant cartel members' market power, and forecloses competition not only from non-members but also from smaller NCAA member-schools. As such, the NCAA model of amateurism violates antitrust law governing tying arrangements and should be enjoined.