By Steve Brawner, © 2019 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

At the Little Rock Touchdown Club Sept. 23, University of Arkansas Athletic Director Hunter Yurachek was asked about a California bill allowing college athletes to profit from endorsements.

He said he’d been told by NCAA attorneys not to comment but said the university invests its revenues in the athletes and that the student-athlete experience is the best it’s ever been. He also said this.

“Being a student-athlete is a voluntary activity. It’s a heck of a commitment, but no one is making you be a student-athlete. No one’s making you put your name on that line and sign that scholarship. That’s something that you do, and you understand when you sign your name … what comes with that and what doesn’t come with that. And so if there’s an opportunity for you to make some money … as a person off your name, image and likeness, right now that’s not as a student-athlete, and so you ought to take that opportunity and go somewhere else with that.”

In other words, the athletes knew the rules and still agreed to play.

But those rules will change, sooner or later. Thanks to California’s law, it’s probably sooner.

On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law the Fair Pay to Play Act, which bars the NCAA from banning participation by California schools whose athletes are compensated for using their name, image or likeness. It takes effect Jan. 1, 2023.

It applies only to California, but the NCAA and other college athletic departments will have no choice but to respond – by suing, of course, and by threatening California with expulsion.

It won’t work, at least not for long. Eventually the NCAA must find a way to share more of its billions with the athletes if it wants to continue existing. After all, if the best college athletes can make money only in California, that’s where they will play.

The NCAA and the college athletic departments want to keep the status quo because they benefit from the rules they wrote. Those rules haven’t changed much even as college sports evolved from an extracurricular activity into a multi-billion-dollar business. Generations of college athletes from poor and minority backgrounds have struggled to make ends meet while the rich old rule-makers made plenty. At one point, the NCAA even made money from video games featuring players’ names and likenesses – again, without compensating the players – until a lawsuit finally ended that. In 2015, the NCAA finally began allowing players to collect small stipends in addition to their scholarships to help pay for incidental expenses. But those are pennies compared to what the rule-makers are paid.

At the highest levels, college athletics is really becoming a farce. Big-time programs exist alongside rather than as a part of their universities. Coaches’ salaries dwarf the universities’ presidents’. It’s “amateur athletics,” but only the athletes aren’t being compensated – legally, anyway, because the system encourages under-the-table payments.

The status quo is most unfair to football players. The best 18-year-old basketball players can play in the NBA or overseas. The best 18-year-old baseball players can go straight to the minor leagues. But the best 18-year-old football players must go to college if they want to keep playing.

In signing the bill into law, Newsom said he knows it will have consequences, and the state wants to “engage” the NCAA. In other words, the NCAA had better make a counteroffer before Jan. 1, 2023. He pointed out that only athletic governing bodies can keep students from making money off their name and likeness. If you’re a student with another skill, the free market still applies.

Yes, college sports is a voluntary activity, but so is almost any adult endeavor. No one “makes” you work for a factory or a newspaper. That doesn’t give a powerful entity the right to act like the standards that apply to the rest of society don’t apply to it.

Perhaps this could have been avoided had the NCAA voluntarily shared revenues with athletes more equitably.

Or maybe this was inevitable. This America. If you own anything, it’s your name and likeness.

Regardless, the rules are changing. Soon it will be the NCAA that must adapt if it wants to keep playing.