I know, you're right. It was the SCOTUS! Enforcing the law. The SCOTUS of course is well known for maintaining extremely unjust and ultimately overturned law and public policy, so they're no angels. And they're totally pro-business and pro-establishment, and so if you're like, all rich and powerful, like the NCAA and big universities definitely are, the SCOTUS is usually your friend, and they indeed can and will interpret the law, and the constitution in ways favorable to you. And yet almost with extreme prejudice, and 9-0 unanimity, cutting across all ideological lines, they found in favor of the players' interests. That's how egregious and lawless the exploitation on the part the schools, schools like Notre Dame, really was. And still is. All of these schools, with ND at the forefront, would return to full exploitation if they felt they could somehow get away it, and I don't just mean by the letter of the law, but including societal standards as well. And it's probably too late for that. Nobody really gives a shit about the players, not even liberal do-gooders. But they like to virtue signal, and the exploitation in this case is so awful, and so easy to understand, it's not subtle or with any gray area at all, that no respectable person in polite society with any pretensions to being a moral person, or a 'good' person, could ever go back.
But it's like you say, if the SCOTUS had just held firm with the status quo with another corrupt and intellectually and morally heinous ruling, the way they maintained actual slavery for so many years, and then Jim Crow, we wouldn't be in this mess. That's why NIL was started, the NCAA had no choice, and they did the bare minimum, allowing players to profit off the marketing value of their own individual personhood, which the NCAA used to totally keep for themselves, and they could get in serious trouble if they didn't relinquish at least that much. Where schools like ND used to profit off the players NIL, and kept all the money for themselves.
But eventually those two iniquities were overturned, and such was the case with the NCAA's exploitation racket. It was just too evil!
