The Mythology Playbook

Abstract

The NCAA’s assertion of the necessity of collusively enforced amateurism hinges, inter alia, on the claim that consumer demand hinges on the capping of pay, despite the evidence from the first half-century of college football, when the sport thrived in the absence of any national price cap. At the legal and lay level, amateurism has taken on the quality of a mythology, able to withstand a barrage of contradictory evidence simply because its supposed truth is “known.” The study of the human tendency to favor mythology over contrary facts is central to behavioral economics (beginning with the pioneering work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman), which focuses on our substitution of irrational short-cuts (“heuristics”) for actual rationality. In this article, the authors highlight where the NCAA, the general public, and also the courts have accepted myth in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary. Then (in an effort to overcome known behavioral biases in favor of the status quo), the authors hypothesize a competitive college sports system from scratch and show the anticompetitive harms that flow from the introduction of NCAA-style collusive amateurism.