Posterized

 Somewhere out there worlds just collided, and the universe has come undone. Quint and the Shark from "Jaws" are drinking buddies. Lions have laid down with lambs. Donald John Trump and his Q-Aninny fan club have stopped spinning fanciful tales.

All this because the Supremes heard the NCAA's rationale for using its "student-athletes" as a de facto workforce, and posterized it 9-0.

Also, Brett Kavanaugh -- yes, that Brett Kavanaugh -- summed it up in a way that had even  broken-down old lefties like me cheering.

The universe undone, indeed.

"Nowhere else in America can you 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," Justice Brett wrote in a concurring opinion to Neil Gorsuch's majority ruling.

In other words: You can't say your workforce isn't a workforce just so you can get away with paying it only in goods and services.

This essentially is what the NCAA has been doing for years and years, and yesterday even hard constructionist righties like Kavanaugh called 'em on their bushwah. In NCAA vs. Alston, SCOTUS ruled unanimously in favor of Alston, saying the NCAA can't limit compensation when it comes to education-related benefits.

This doesn't exactly mandate that the NCAA has to start compensating its workforce the way any other workforce gets compensated. But that's where we're headed now, and the NCAA knows it.

And it's brought it on itself, by turning college athletics into a cash-flow industry that for years has been wholly separate from the academic mission of the universities it's used as the mechanism to generate that cash. Maintaining an illusion of amateurism was just a way to justify punishing kids for taking a cheeseburger from a booster or wanting to transfer without penalty to whatever school he or she wanted.

The foundation for this construct has always been the concept of "impermissible benefits," which the NCAA defines as benefits not available to the average Joe or Jill College. The problem with that is a lot of those "impermissible benefits" -- being able to work during the school year, or being able to use one's talents to trade on one's name or image -- were available to Joe or Jill College.

A kinda-sorta for-instance: During the Blob's dimly remembered college days as a journalism major at Ball State, it earned beer money by stringing high school basketball games for the Muncie Star. My byline appeared atop my game stories. For that use of my name as a sportswriter in training, I was paid the princely sum of 25 bucks a game.

Yet the basketball player who lived down the hall in my dorm couldn't trade on his name as a basketball player. After all, he was already getting an allegedly free education.

I wasn't, although I knew other Joe or Jill Colleges who earned scholarships for their talents the same as the basketball or football players. Which means the basketball or football players weren't being treated like college students at all. They were being treated like, yes, a workforce.

As the Supremes pointed out yesterday. Resoundingly.