“Ninety percent of the NCAA revenue is produced by 1 percent of the athletes,” Sonny Vaccaro says. “Go to the skill positions”—the stars. “Ninety percent African Americans.” The NCAA made its money off those kids, and so did he. They were not all bad people, the NCAA officials, but they were blind, Vaccaro believes. “Their organization is a fraud.”

I finally read Taylor Branch’s takedown of college sports in the Atlantic, and it’s a knockout. “The Shame of College Sports” details how the NCAA oversees a billion-dollar industry, diverting profits from participants to the top stakeholders. The organization uses the student-athlete concept to—perhaps illegally—strip athletes of their rights to their representation and labor. They have opaque, arbitrary enforcement and appeals mechanisms. They’ve enlisted universities in perverting their own central mandate: education.

And I eagerly consume their product, so I’m a big part of the problem. In a perfect world, I think athletic scholarships shouldn’t exist. At minimum, students should have proceeds from their likeness (jersey sales, video games, etc.) placed in a lockbox until after they graduate.

But in the meantime, it’s exciting to hear that players have contemplated taking matters into their own hands. As Branch shares, “William Friday, the former North Carolina president, recalls being yanked from one Knight Commission meeting and sworn to secrecy about what might happen if a certain team made the NCAA championship basketball game. ‘They were going to dress and go out on the floor,’ Friday told me, ‘but refuse to play,’ in a wildcat student strike.”

Can you imagine the reaction? I’d love to see it. Dunkers of the world unite…