Flock Talk: Fake Plastic Trees

 

I’ve often written in Flock Talk about the NCAA’s unwavering devotion to preserving power under the guise of protecting "student-athlete welfare." For decades, they’ve hidden behind polished mission statements and public platitudes while building a billion-dollar empire on the backs of unpaid labor.

Now, with mounting legal challenges and the dawn of revenue-sharing settlements forcing them into a corner, the NCAA and its allies have unveiled their newest "solution": the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act — the SCORE Act.

On the surface, it gleams like a pristine plastic rose: it formally protects name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights, promises better healthcare, academic support, and transparency on student fees. But as Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees reminds us: "It wears her out… it wears her out." These aren’t real reforms — they’re carefully sculpted illusions designed to preserve an old, rotting system.

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The Shiny Surface

The SCORE Act looks, at first glance, like a gift to athletes. It promises a right to profit from NIL, expanded mental health services, and medical care that extends beyond graduation. There’s even degree completion aid and new requirements for life skills education.

But like the "fake plastic love" in Thom Yorke’s lyrics, these gestures are more about appearance than substance. Underneath, the bill consolidates power exactly where it has always lived: with the NCAA and its powerful conferences.

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Hidden Roots of Control

The bill grants the NCAA sweeping authority to set "pool limits" on total athlete compensation — effectively capping how much schools can distribute to players at about 22% of revenue. That means, no matter how many millions a football team brings in, the athletes themselves remain bound to a fixed slice.

It also preempts all state NIL laws, stripping away the power of states like California, whose trailblazing efforts forced the NCAA to finally allow NIL rights in the first place. Once again, any momentum toward genuine athlete empowerment is stifled, replaced by a single federal standard carefully crafted to protect institutional coffers.

Most damningly, the SCORE Act explicitly declares that athletes can never be classified as employees — no matter how many hours they work, how much revenue they produce, or how strictly they’re controlled.

This provision guarantees that athletes can’t organize, can’t collectively bargain, and can’t receive fair labor protections or true revenue sharing. They’re forever kept in that fake plastic garden, admired for their beauty and entertainment value but never allowed to truly grow.

As Yorke sings, "She looks like the real thing, she tastes like the real thing… my fake plastic love." The NCAA’s promise looks and sounds like real reform. But it isn’t.

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The Political Backdrop: A Plastic Chorus

Though the SCORE Act is being introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, it is no grassroots movement for fairness — it is the culmination of a relentless, well-funded lobbying push by the NCAA itself.

On its launch day, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), Subcommittee on the Administrative State Chairman Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI), Congressman Russell Fry (R-SC), Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY), Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI), and Congressman Shomari Figures (D-AL) joined forces to announce this "landmark" bill.

"Student athletes are the embodiment of the American Dream," Fitzgerald declared. Yet his words ring hollow when we remember that this dream is carefully engineered to protect billion-dollar TV deals, preserve coaching salaries, and maintain administrative empires. Congressman Figures echoed that the bill ensures students "can be fairly compensated and adequately protected" — but the moment you read the fine print, you see that this "fair" compensation is tightly restricted and carefully capped.

Congressman Fry described the current NIL environment as "the Wild West," praising the SCORE Act for bringing "order to the chaos" — but whose chaos is it? For whom is this order meant? Order for the universities and conferences who want to stop paying legal fees and avoid further scrutiny.

Perhaps most telling is Chairman Jim Jordan’s involvement. A former college wrestler and coach himself, Jordan has a long and complicated history with NCAA power structures, often defending traditional models that restrict athlete freedom and opposing unionization or true athlete labor rights. His fingerprints on this bill should send a shiver down the spine of anyone genuinely hoping for reform.

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The NCAA’s Familiar Script

This is not the NCAA’s first remix of control disguised as reform. Their playbook is painfully predictable: resist change until forced to act, then unveil a carefully crafted "solution" that maintains control while creating just enough illusion of progress to pacify critics.

Yes, the SCORE Act offers real improvements in healthcare and academic support. But these concessions are designed to shield the NCAA and its member institutions from legal exposure, antitrust lawsuits, and labor challenges. They’re structural facelifts — not a reconstruction of the foundation.

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Who Really Benefits?

We should always ask: who stands to gain the most? In this case, it’s clear. The NCAA, the major conferences, and the athletic departments that have spent decades hoarding revenue and power.

Athletes? They get the freedom to decorate their cages with NIL deals — but those deals are now tightly regulated, capped, and supervised. They remain excluded from the true wealth they help generate and denied the labor rights that would allow them to shape their futures.

As Yorke laments, "If I could be who you wanted… all the time." That’s the quiet, impossible wish of every athlete trapped in this system — to be recognized not as a marketing asset or a line item, but as a human being with real value and real rights.

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But at What Cost?

Do I think it is good that Olympic sports will be protected under this proposal? Absolutely. We already know that some schools had begun drawing up lists of "non-revenue" sports to cut as a knee-jerk reaction to the House settlement and impending athlete compensation changes. Softball, volleyball, soccer, lacrosse, track and field — these programs represent crucial opportunities for student-athletes and provide richness and diversity to collegiate athletics.

But at what cost do we protect these sports? Would it not be better to create a structure where football and men’s basketball exist as separate NCAA revenue entities — still maintaining their identity as "student-athlete" programs but with their own economic framework, distinct from Olympic and non-revenue sports?

Under such a model, football and basketball could continue within the NCAA system while acknowledging the undeniable commercial reality they represent. Their athletes could receive expanded benefits and more equitable revenue participation — not as "employees" in a strictly professional sense but as enhanced stakeholders in the collegiate ecosystem. Meanwhile, non-revenue sports would no longer have to justify their existence on the financial shoulders of football and basketball, freeing them to return to a truer educational and developmental mission.

Of course, this separation would raise valid questions: How do we fund those non-revenue sports if they are no longer cross-subsidized by football and basketball dollars?

One solution: schools and conferences could establish dedicated endowments or revenue-sharing foundations specifically designed to support non-revenue sports. Corporate sponsorships, alumni donations, and broadcast rights from Olympic sports themselves — though smaller — could help build a more sustainable funding base. Additionally, Title IX compliance can be creatively leveraged to ensure equitable resource distribution and safeguard these programs from future cuts.

By untangling these economic realities, we could finally build a system that honors and protects Olympic sports while providing fairer compensation and agency to the athletes whose talents drive university profits and national exposure. In this vision, all athletes would remain "student-athletes" in spirit, but with an infrastructure that matches the different scale of their sports’ economic impacts.

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Final Thoughts

True reform won’t come from the same leaders who built this exploitative structure. It won’t come from carefully worded federal bills designed to preserve TV contracts and administrative balance sheets. Real change requires reimagining athletes as full economic partners — as workers entitled to fair compensation and a collective voice — and envisioning a system where Olympic sports are protected without being used as emotional bargaining chips.

Until then, the SCORE Act is just another layer of artificial turf, another fake plastic promise.

Anything less?

Just another verse in the NCAA’s long, sad song of fake plastic trees.

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 FULL TEXT OF SCORE ACT