Sports

One day last October, Bubba Cunningham, the athletic director at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, made the short walk from his office to the ...

In fact, the payments they make aren’t much different from the under-the-table benefits that were sometimes distributed to players in violation of the old regulations. He showed them a diagram of a pyramid that had 45 million youth-sports participants at the base, and 5,780 professional athletes across the various leagues at the peak. The upheaval that gave college athletes the right to earn money from their sports began with a reasonable grievance. This might be the hidden cost of allowing college players to earn what the market will give them, and a price he is reluctant to pay. “I was very cognizant of not doing it just to make money,” she says, “but to serve a purpose.” And while it was easy to imagine a booster pointing toward Bacot during a game and boasting that his donations helped keep him at North Carolina, it was harder to conjure the image of someone at Bowman Gray Memorial Pool telling a friend: “That chlorine in the water? “It’s not a zero-sum game,” he says; the new conditions do allow some new and additional money to find its way into college sports. He threw his arms into the air and made two fists, as if to say to his teammates, “Enough of this — let’s get it right.” “It’s the obliteration of the entire dam.” For the first time in modern history, a college athlete didn’t need to go to a professional league to do that. The rules were as clear as they were strict: Players couldn’t receive any benefits linked to their participation in a sport. Smith Center, where the men’s basketball team was holding a noon practice, and took a seat at one end of the stands.