What would paying student athletes look like?

“Unions are tricky for college sports,” ESPN basketball analyst Jay Bilas said recently on the phone, “because you have public and private institutions and different state laws.”

“It’s not impossible to have a union of college athletes,” he said, “but it would be difficult.”

Bilas, an outspoken critic of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, was of course referring to Tuesday’s news that the Dartmouth College men’s basketball team had voted 13-2 to form a union. He was skeptical that this latest shot across the NCAA’s bow would go anywhere. Still, it was the latest example of the pressure the league is facing to finally abandon “amateurism” — the NCAA’s long-held dogma that prevents college athletes from getting paid. Naturally, many athletes have been able to put money in their pockets in recent years, thanks to so-called NIL payments (NIL stands for name, image and likeness). But that’s an ad hoc system, organized largely by athletic department supporters, that allows some athletes to rake in millions while others earn nothing. It’s not the same as colleges paying the athletes they employ.

Bilas said it was clear that schools would soon have to pay their athletes in big-money sports like football and men’s basketball. And he’s not the only one. Jeffrey Kessler, the lawyer who won the major antitrust case against the NCAA before a unanimous Supreme Court in 2021, has another case against the organization that will go to trial in January. The lawsuit alleges that college athletes have been illegally deprived of any payments because their names, images and likenesses have been used in promotional broadcasts that have earned millions for major athletic conferences such as the Big Ten. If he were to win that case — and the odds are in his favor — the NCAA and its conferences could be liable for up to $4 billion.

While the NCAA remains stubbornly resistant to settling the antitrust cases against it, the prospect of paying billions in damages could ultimately bring the organization to the table. Whether through a court victory or a settlement, Kessler said the lawsuit could lead to “the complete transformation of the current structure so that the athletes who generate all the revenue can receive fair compensation for what they contribute.”

But if a new structure were to emerge to compensate players, what would it look like? Andy Schwarz, an economist deeply involved in the fight to transform the NCAA, told me he could easily see unions playing a role — but it would be a different kind of union than what the Dartmouth players were trying to do . “You would have conference-level unions to negotiate terms of employment and define an athlete’s rights and obligations in contracts,” he wrote in an email. “In my opinion, the schools would provide the education and the conferences would employ the athletes as participants in a television program.” In other words, each conference, just like in professional sports, would agree to some sort of collective bargaining agreement with a players’ association.

Which still leaves the question of how individual players are paid under the umbrella of the collective bargaining agreement. Bilas told me that every time he was asked that question, he replied, “This is very simple. Just have a contract between the athlete and the school. Just like the rest of corporate America does.”

The contract may include more than just compensation. It could include buyout clauses, including financial penalties if a player jumps to another school, or if a school lets go of the player. It could be multi-year, which would create incentives for athletes to stay in school beyond the first year. A clause could even be included to ensure that the athlete receives a real education, rather than pursuing a “major in fitness” as is so often the case these days.

“In the beginning,” Bilas said, “some players may be overpaid and others may be underpaid, but soon a market will emerge and you will know what players are worth.”

Would Bilas’ idea further separate the big sports schools, like Ohio State and Alabama, from the smaller schools, like Ball State or Eastern Michigan, that don’t have the money to pay their athletes? Certainly. But that gap already exists.

“The walls are closing in quickly on the NCAA,” Kessler said. “Nine Supreme Court judges have recognized how exploitative this system is. How long can they hold on? It’s up to them. They can join the resolution and come up with a system for everyone, or they can go kicking and screaming into the night.” —Joe Nocera

HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

President Biden is going after big corporations and billionaires. In his State of the Union address, Biden signaled that he wanted to raise taxes on corporations and wealthy people. The policy wish list contrasted with Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, even though it is unlikely to become law as long as the Republican Party controls both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

China announced its economic growth targets. Chinese Premier Li Qiang said the world’s second-largest economy would target 5 percent growth in 2024, as it did last year. But he undermined investor hopes that Beijing would also announce measures to stimulate the economy, with some analysts saying slow growth was the new normal.

Apple changed course to enable a competitive app store in Europe. The move to allow Epic Games to develop a game store for iPhones and iPads in Europe highlights how Apple is adapting its operations to meet the Digital Markets Act, a sweeping new law designed to help small businesses compete with the largest. It came days after Apple was fined 1.8 billion euros ($1.95 billion) for thwarting competition from rival music streaming services through its dominant App Store.

TikTok is coming under new pressure from US lawmakers. The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party introduced one bill that would ban TikTok from U.S. app stores unless ByteDance, the Chinese parent company, divests. The company urged its users to tell their representatives in Washington to vote against the bill, resulting in congressional offices being flooded with calls.

Three questions for Rohit Chopra

A year after a rapid run on deposits at regional banks raised fears of a financial crisis, forcing government intervention, banks are gearing up for a major battle with their regulators.

Those regulators want to roll out a new proposal for banks to set aside more liquidity to weather an emergency — a risk that Wednesday’s $1 billion bailout of New York Community Bank by private investors made clear.

But the big banks are already resisting an existing plan to force them to hold more capital. And their protests could be successful: Fed Chairman Jay Powell signaled this week that plans to allow the largest banks to hold more capital may be revised.

DealBook spoke with Rohit Chopra, head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, about what went wrong last year and how to fix it. His answers have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

What do you think of Powell’s signal that regulators could back away from new capital requirements for big banks?

No final rule has yet been published. That is an ongoing regulation. But big banks need more involvement. Certainly, much of the financial industry told us in 2022 that everything is great: “We don’t see any risk of significant failure on the horizon.” And last March we had a domino effect: several banks went bankrupt, and without emergency intervention, even more would have gone bankrupt. So I don’t think we live in a world where we can count on big banks always being fine. And because they take a lot of insured deposits, they get a lot of implicit and explicit federal subsidies, and their failure could trigger global financial crises, we need to make sure that their shareholders are the ones holding the bag when something goes wrong. That’s the reason to do it.

What other solutions are available?

We now have a system where smaller banks have limits, but the very largest can essentially hand out free unlimited deposit insurance because there is a perception that if they mess up they would be bailed out, that they are implicitly insured. That seems fundamentally unfair to me. I would be in favor of substantially increasing the deposit insurance limit so that there is some parity between small players and the largest players.

I also support more restrictions on banks that rely heavily on these so-called uninsured deposits. If we look at Silicon Valley Bank, it grew very quickly and relied heavily on uninsured deposits. There is obviously more that can be done, but I would definitely put this on the list.

Is the situation at NYCB, where the problems have been caused by increasing losses on commercial real estate, a repeat of last year?

The problems we saw last year didn’t have much to do with commercial real estate. There are still many outstanding issues to ensure that last year’s bank failures are not repeated. But at the same time, there are the looming risks and protecting the system for that, including commercial real estate.

Thank you for reading! We’ll see you Monday. In the meantime, remember the clocks in the United States Jump forward this evening.

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