To illustrate, prior to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, Embiid had produced 4.67 wins for the Kansas Jayhawks (calculated essentially according this approach used for the NBA). Using college revenue data from the U.S. Department of Education, economist Robert Brown (for research Brown, I, and a few others are working on) estimated that one win for the Kansas men’s basketball team was worth $159,601 in 2010-11 ($166,585 in 2014 dollars). Given these two numbers, Embiid was worth approximately $777,286 (again, prior to the tournament). If we take the USA Today number seriously, this means the Jayhawks have underpaid Embiid by a bit more than $650,000.

Repeating the same calculation for every player on the Jayhawks, we see, as the following table illustrates, that Andrew Wiggins (who some people think is worth the number one pick in the NBA draft) was only the fourth most productive Jayhawk this year. Even though Wiggins has underperformed relative to expectations, he has still been underpaid by more than $450,000. And combined, this entire team has been underpaid by about $2 million.

Now let’s imagine for a moment that the Kansas Jayhawks hired this talent in a competitive labor market. In such a market, a firm underpaying their employees would face a problem. If a worker like Embiid generates more than $700,000 in revenue and is paid less than $200,000, another firm would be more than happy to pay more.

But in the NCAA, this option doesn’t exist. Paying more money is a violation of NCAA rules. If a school violates these rules it will first face penalties, and, as Southern Methodist discovered in 1987, can actually be prohibited from playing. Such a prohibition reduces the revenue of the program to zero, hence making the practice of paying players more money a very bad deal.

There is, though, a simple solution. Again, one team going “rogue” won’t have anyone to play. But let’s imagine a scenario where more than one school decided to create a “professional NCAA.” A collection of “rogue” teams could both pay their employees (i.e. student-athletes) more money, and have someone to play (hence be able to produce revenue). And if they did this, the following would likely happen: