Bowing to the obvious, sort of

Give the pashas who oversee professional collegiate athletics this much: They can indeed read.

This is especially true when the handwriting is as bright and legible, and the wall it's written on as imposing, as it is in this case.

And so the NCAA yesterday voted unanimously to allow student-athletes to profit from the use of their names, images and likenesses, on account of they didn't have much choice. The California law prohibiting state schools from punishing athletes for accepting endorsement money blew the NCAA's lovely fantasy world to shards, and other states were lining up to follow suit. And so the organization was faced with an untenable prospect: Making its member institutions break the law in order to keep their "student-athletes" from getting a cut of the enormous profits they generate.

So, the pashas caved. Well, kind of. Sorta-kinda.

What they did, actually, was say this: Yeah, OK, if we use you guys as billboards for your schools' apparel deals we'll cut you in on the take, because we've gotta. But only if it's the same sort of deal regular students would get, and only if it doesn't create a competitive imbalance, and only if it maintains the fiction that you're still Joe College and NOT, you know, dirty uncouth professionals.

OK. So they probably didn't say the latter. Not in those exact words, anyway.

But trying to keep pretending there's a substantive difference between Power Five football and basketball and what goes on at the next level is a fool's errand, as everyone except the NCAA seems to realize. That delusion clearly remains in place, even as the NCAA itself votes to effectively cripple it. It cannot bring itself to admit theirs is as much a multi-billion dollar corporation as any on Wall Street -- and that as such their "student-athletes" are in fact employees of the university, with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto.

Thus this whole desperate long-way-around-the-barn parsing. You can profit from your labor like any professional, but not if it looks too much like you're a professional. 'Cause you're not. You're STUDENT-ATHLETES. This makes you different from PROFESSIONALS, because ... um, because ...

And there the logic train runs out of track.

Pretty obviously, all this doublespeak is the NCAA's way of caving to the inevitable without looking like it's caving to the inevitable. It's a half-measure designed to put the brakes on what it surely must know is coming, which is a clear break between Power Five athletics and everything else.

That break already exists, in essence. Rules for Division I and II athletics, and Division III athletics, already are different.  So the next step is an easy one: Casting fiction to the wind and allowing FBS football and Division I basketball to operate fully as the professional enterprises they are, and making everyone else adhere to the student-athlete model to which they already largely adhere.

For the NCAA, that's clearly a bridge too far just yet. But the first span has gone up.