Did you know that the NCAA prohibits schools from giving multi-year athletic scholarships?
In October 2010, Agnew filed a class-action antitrust suit over the cancellation of his scholarship and to remove the cap on the total number of scholarships that can be awarded by NCAA schools. In his suit, Agnew did not claim the right to free tuition. He merely asked the federal court to strike down an NCAA rule, dating to 1973, that prohibited colleges and universities from offering any athletic scholarship longer than a one-year commitment, to be renewed or not, unilaterally, by the school—which in practice means that coaches get to decide each year whose scholarships to renew or cancel. (After the coach who had recruited Agnew had moved on to Tulsa, the new Rice coach switched Agnew’s scholarship to a recruit of his own.) Agnew argued that without the one-year rule, he would have been free to bargain with all eight colleges that had recruited him, and each college could have decided how long to guarantee his scholarship.
So this sham educational institution has rigged the system so that poor kids can’t have any assurance that they’ll be able to afford to finish college. This is just a taste of the NCAA exploitation and opportunism that Taylor Branch highlights this month in the Atlantic. All that booster/tattoo/improper-favors stuff is a distraction.
