Quote Originally Posted by jimsumner View Post
Extremely limited, yes. In one sense.

But when SCOTUS states that the NCAA model "would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America" and adds that the current rules are "suppressing the pay of student athletes who collectively generate billions of dollars in revenues for colleges every year," that seems to presage a lot more than just an extremely limited ruling involving educational expenses.

Am I missing something?
On the big picture, I don't think you are missing much, but there is a bit of a qualifier here.

First, the language you quote is from Justice Kavanaugh's concurring opinion, which no one else on the Court joined.

Second, it's worth remembering that in the Alston case the players lost in the court below on their challenge to the NCAA's rules limiting the schools from providing $$ not "related to education." They (wisely) chose not to appeal that decision, allowing the case to go up to the Supreme Court on the narrow issue of "education related" payments on which the players were most likely to win, enabling them to get the blast of favorable publicity from this ruling and the widespread interpretation -- furthered by Kavanuagh's concurrence getting so much of the attention -- that this ruling essentially wipes out the NCAA.

I suspect the NCAA is hoping that allowing -- really going along with the various state laws allowing, which the NCAA would like to have stopped but couldn't -- NIL rights will take some of the steam out of challenges to the core remaining rule precluding schools from directly paying players for non-education-related benefits. And, I think a principled distinction can be made that there is a difference between players having the right to profit from NIL (which I'm 100% on board with) vs. still not allowing schools to pay them directly and that if you go the second route then there is no difference between that and professional sports. Nothing in the Supreme Court's decision precludes the NCAA from continuing to make that argument and the mere fact that Kavanaugh (apparently) doesn't buy it isn't dispositive.

But, as to NIL, I think the NCAA's efforts to try to decouple NIL rights from things that would give a "recruiting" advantage (or the example of boosters getting together to pay a player $1 million for signing autographs) are ultimately going to be fruitless -- they remain unlikely to get much traction on federal legislation so they will be at the mercy of the most lenient, player-friendly state's law, which won't preclude that kind of NIL gaming, and the NCAA has already said it's not going to try to enforce the more restrictive states' laws against players in those stated.