Immediate win-for-all situation: NCAA should drop its restriction on NIL rights for athletes and let EA Sports, etc. make & sell the NCAA basketball/football games, benefiting all constituencies. Why? Pandemic has exposed NCAA's specious antitrust defenses. A brief thread. 1/n

First, NCAA's claims that some people would stop watching college sports if athletes received NIL payments, reducing demand. But this can't be true in a pandemic. There are no NCAA sports to watch anyway. Allowing NCAA BB/FB video games would be clearly demand-enhancing. 2/n

Second, allowing NIL payments would not affect "integration" of athletics & academics. Allowing athletes to receive payments from video games now would not affect the lip service many schools already pay to the "academic endeavor", especially during distance learning. 3/n

As the pandemic's disproportionate impact on minority and poorer communities comes into sharper focus, these NIL payments could help address that problem. Many athletes come from rural towns & lower socio-economic backgrounds. This money could help them & their families now. 4/n

NIL payments would open door for EA BB/FB games, benefiting sports-starved fans. Pseudo-intellectual theories offered by NCAA acolytes aside, who thinks fans would stop watching college sports after the pandemic b/c athletes' NIL rights allowed video games to return? 5/n

Schools would also benefit right now, during a time of falling revenues and budget-tightening. Not only would schools receive royalty payments, but they would continue to garner the visibility they crave. Athletics by video game proxy would continue being the "front porch". 6/n

Programmers and other employees in the production of these video games would benefit. During a time when hours and positions are cut, restoring athletes' NIL rights would benefit workers. And it would remedy both a moral injustice and an antitrust violation. 7/n

It would benefit eSports as well. ESPN could televise these games just as other eSports contests are televised, opening the door for the return of advertising dollars. Schools could recoup some of the lost media revenue. 8/n

So why doesn't NCAA do this? Why don't schools push for this? Two reasons: myopia and plain greed. They clearly fear what happens after we return to "normal". They fear that once NIL rights are restored, more money will flow to the labor that creates the wealth. 9/n

It's hard to escape the conclusion that the NCAA & its cronies would rather harm themselves and others in the near term (w/o knowing how long this will be), in the hope that once things return to some semblance of normal, they'll keep making the same $$. Utterly shameful. /end