But none of that money flows to the student athletes at the center of that deal, because the NCAA mandates that college athletes must be “amateurs in an intercollegiate sport, and their participation should be motivated primarily by education and by the physical, mental and social benefits to be derived.” Moreover, according to the NCAA, “student-athletes should be protected from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprise.”

But some observers are now forcefully arguing that the NCAA itself, with its billion-dollar deals and tens of millions in profit, has become just the type of exploitative commercial enterprise its own bylines warn about. Legal scholars have written that the NCAA hides its exploitation behind a “veil of amateurism” that “keeps the revenues of college athletics away from student-athletes.”

[What the NBA gets that the other big sports leagues don’t]

Courts have ruled that some of the organization's practices violate antitrust laws.

But public opinion on the question of student-athlete pay is more mixed. Polls have consistently shown that most Americans are uncomfortable with paying college students to play semiprofessional sports. A 2015 YouGov survey found that 25 percent of respondents said student athletes should be paid for their time. A 2014 Washington Post survey had similar findings.

But the surveys have also consistently shown considerable racial gaps on the question. In the YouGov survey, black respondents were more than twice as likely (45 percent) as whites (21 percent) to support pay for student athletes. The Post survey similarly found that nonwhites were more than twice as likely to support student-athlete pay as whites.

One reason for the discrepancy: Most big-time college athletes are black.

“In the nation’s six largest athletic conferences between the years 2007 and 2010, African American men were only 2.8 percent of full-time degree seeking undergraduate students but represented 57.1 percent of football teams and 64.3 percent of basketball teams,” according to the study in Political Research Quarterly.

In other words, “debates about the financial benefits provided to college athletes are likely to be implicitly about race for most white Americans,” the authors wrote. And their results strongly suggest that white Americans' implicit racial biases partly explain why black college athletes still aren't getting paid for their labor.

More from Wonkblog:

The real secret to Asian American success was not education

What Trump’s whiter, less academic Cabinet says about race and class in America

White resentment is fueling opposition to gun control, researchers say