“At the end of the day my opinion is if, as an athlete, you don’t like the opportunity put in front of you, don’t accept it, take your ball and go home (or to the pros, or to Europe) but don’t claim an opportunity you willingly accepted is now unfair to you.”
You are basically making a free market/contract argument. Which is fine. Except that the other side of the transaction is a cartel. And the moral problem (for me) is that while there is a cartel for player comp there’s not a cartel for coach comp. With the very high coach salaries being enabled by the money not spent on players.
Suppose Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook and the rest of the tech companies got together and agreed programmers can only make $50k a year? And that you are not allowed to do any moonlighting using your tech skils? Would you argue that, hey, you don’t have to be a programmer – go do some other job? Or go work in another country? Of course not – you’d say that was wrong and should be illegal (which it is). The holding in the Obannon case in fact was that the previous cap was illegal. [Although the judge in that case did allow a new slightly higher cap for quite curious reasons. But that’s a whole other legal/technical discussion that rapidly has to get down into the weeds.]
Plenty of college students are also employees of the school – work study jobs for example. But that market doesn’t have a cartel on comp. If kids don’t want to work for min wage at the cafeteria, they are free to try to get a different job on campus with different pay. Or go work at Starbucks or McDonalds instead.
All the flyspecked legal issues that folks throw up (non-revenue sports, title ix, etc.) are so easily solved. They are such weak sauce and certainly no justification for the messed up current system. The most easy and obvious fix, by the way, is not to have the schools pay the star revenue players salaries. Instead, continue to give them just scholarships but remove the rules that prohibit them from getting outside work and outside comp.
Last point. Until you deal with the deprived value of the star revenue players, the system is doomed to continue to be dirty. It all could be so easily solved and cleaned up and made fair. Cheers!