On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of former NCAA athletes who claimed the organization violated anti-trust laws by limiting education-based compensation.
The Supreme Court's ruling on Monday orders the NCAA to remove the limits by which member schools can offer education-related expenses to college athletes.
Under current NCAA rules, student-athletes cannot be paid, and scholarship funds offered to students are capped at the cost of attending the school — things like tuition, room and board and certain food expenses.
Monday's ruling will allow schools the ability to offer students further education-related expenses, like computers, graduate scholarships, tutoring and internships, according to the Associated Press.
Justice Neil Gorsuch issued the opinion of the court. In it, he wrote that the NCAA was "price fixing" by limiting the compensation athletes were able to receive. Justice Brett Kavanaugh also used the term "price fixing" to refer to the cost of athlete labor.
While the justices chose to side with athletes in Monday's ruling, it largely kept amateurism in place. The NCAA is still only obligated to pay athletes for educational expenses. However, the justices offered the organization a sharp warning.
"Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate. And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different," the ruling reads. "The NCAA is not above the law."
Nathaniel Grow, an associate professor of business law and ethics at Indiana University, said the ruling frees up the ways schools can support student-athletes.
"I think the biggest ramifications of this is that it definitely hints that the court system, the Supreme Court, is not going to be a defender of the NCAA, it is not going to protect the NCAA, that the NCAA is going to have to confront major changes to college sports that everyone has been debating for the last four, five years. And now the question is how does it all play out, where do we go from here is really uncertain. But this definitely suggests that suggest that change is not going to be stopped by the Supreme Court like change is coming but it is just a matter of when and how it plays out."
WRTV Anchor Amanda Starrantino contributed to this report.
