Dave Hyde: Justice for college players — and trouble for schools like Miami — loom ahead

The most daunting sight in college sports coming up won’t be Alabama coach Nick Saban landing in a helicopter at another South Florida high school to recruit away another local talent.

It’ll be Saban stepping from under the rotary blades with a bag of money.

In so many ways, the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling Monday that the NCAA couldn’t prevent modest payouts to athletes for educational pursuits was the first brick pulled out of an inequitable, intransigent, ineffective and generally crummy college sports system.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh sounded like a sports columnist from any of the last 50 years in writing his opinion:

“The NCAA couches its arguments for not paying student athletes in innocuous labels. But the labels cannot disguise the reality: The NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America.”

It’s one thing to say the NCAA is incoherent, puts money over morals and should go the way of the dodo bird. It’s another to propose its replacement. That gets you entangled in rules, competitiveness, traditional college conferences and and an uneven financial field that separates even the biggest schools into haves and have-nots.

Missing in all that is what should be central to any plan: The players. What if there was a system that put them first? And how?

The doomsday scenario some see is what American capitalism is built around — an open market. The players have never had one. And if it’s coming soon as the Supreme Court suggested, it would change the sports landscape significantly.

Take the University of Miami. It plays the haves but likes the have-nots, a private school without the financial footing of some big-wallet neighbors. It took Miami years to finance a $30 million indoor football facility — a feat that was properly and loudly celebrated.

Do you think its opening opponent this year, Alabama, has such problems? And the University of Florida doesn’t just have an $85 million indoor facility. It’s in the process of building a 13,000-square-foot facility for women’s lacrosse and soccer programs. Its operating budget of $143 million for athletics this year is nearly three times Miami’s budget, a collegiate source told the Sun Sentinel.

So how could Miami pay players like Florida? It couldn’t. Its officials have privately said so for years. There are lots of Miamis out there in big-time sports, too — and relatively fewer Floridas.

This suggests a Super Conference of the college’s richest programs is on the horizon, too. The Southeastern Conference. Texas. Ohio State and Michigan. Notre Dame, if it wants to join the playground rather than play by itself.

What are players worth? Well, an FBI investigation a few years back offered a glimpse into five-star basketball players. They’re worth six-figure bribes. That’s what college programs offered either directly or through eager agents and sneaker representatives.

The dregs of this current system forces players into a shadow economy to get their true value. The NBA offers another way. The minor-league G League is becoming an accepted route where players making upward of $100,000 a year. A few G-League graduates will be drafted in the top 10 this summer.

The Supreme Court’s Monday ruling was narrow and technical, pertaining to educational add-ons like computers, musical instruments or education abroad for athletes. But the unanimous vote and Kavanaugh’s opinion invite another case for general pay of athletes.

Meanwhile, yet another case courses through the legal system. This one involves six states that have allowed players to profit from their name, image and likeness being used by school athletic departments.

Florida is one of the six states. That means there’s a rare and temporary recruiting edge if the Florida schools want to use it: Come here and get paid if your name is marketed. What players wouldn’t be swayed by that?

Already in states like North Carolina, senator Wiley Nickel is pushing a bill through state legislature to add it to the list of states allowing such payment. “Unless we act quickly, North Carolina schools will start losing key recruits to states like Georgia, Florida and South Carolina,” he said.

That’s nothing to when Saban is allowed to drop from the skies with a bag of money. That day’s coming, the Supreme Court seemed to suggest. It’s right. It’s overdue. It also not clear how college athletics will look when that day arrives.