For years, intercollegiate athletics has been accepted by all of those involved as a privilege and not a right. The court systems have stood off to the side, allowing coaches and athletics administrators to impose regulations on issues ranging from academics to hair length to the consumption of alcohol in or out of season.

The accepted premise has been that because intercollegiate athletics is a voluntary enterprise, if student-athletes don’t like the rules, they are free to not participate — or they can transfer to another institution. The rules are clearly laid out in team meetings and student-athlete handbooks in the formal sense and reinforced in an informal fashion by captains and peer pressure from teammates. Sports information directors and coaches remind student-athletes that college athletics are the front porch to the school and that student-athletes are treated by the media as public figures. A walk-on fourth-string player’s poor behavior generates more negative publicity for the school than the typical student on the campus.

None of that is new to anyone involved in intercollegiate athletics.

What is new is a recent court decision in Atlanta that made athletics administrators and school presidents shudder.

In June, a student-athlete at Georgia Institute of Technology was arrested on felony charges of conspiring to distribute and possess 94 pounds of marijuana valued at $60,000. Because of such charges he was suspended from the school and the football program. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in jail and a $1 million fine.

The severity of the situation far surpasses a student-athlete being drunk in public, getting into an altercation, or even academic misconduct. It was an act that combined federal officials and a student-athlete participating in a voluntary organization — a 22-year old student-athlete who was a two-year starter in a revenue sport in one of the premier conferences in the nation, not an 18-year-old naïve freshman.

For those administrators who read of the arrest in their local newspapers, they had to feel sympathy for Georgia Tech and likely used the news as an example for their own student-athletes of how not to behave. The consequences imposed by the school for the student-athlete’s actions appeared to be fair, and the student-athlete was permitted to enroll at the school until his appeal process was completed. After the school ruled against him and expelled him, the student-athlete was dismissed.

The student-athlete, however, retained a lawyer who argued that the student-athlete was the victim of disparate treatment or not treated the same as previous students at the school who were charged with felonies. Later that month, a court agreed with the student-athlete and ruled that he could return to classes and try to graduate in December as scheduled.

Georgia Tech challenged that ruling and was overturned twice in early November. Finally, on November 15, a county court judge ruled that the student-athlete must be permitted to rejoin the team, since the punishment was “arbitrary and strikingly dissimilar to the school’s treatment of other similarly situated athletes who have been accused of breaking the law.” 

The court has made its decision for now and Georgia Tech’s board of regents is now compelled to deal with its next step of legal action. The school’s AD and the head football coach have calmly accepted and complied with the court’s verdict. But like many around the nation, they have to wonder what is next? Where does the control over student-athletes’ behavior end? Thinking the worst, would a murder felony charge yield similar results? When did higher education, and more importantly, participation in intercollegiate athletics, become a right?

Sadly, the lawyer used the school’s previous actions against it, arguing and citing evidence that other students and student-athletes facing felony charges were not treated as harshly. It did not matter if the alleged criminal activities of past students and student-athletes at the school varied. It did not matter that the judge wrote in his ruling that his decision was with “wariness and trepidation regarding inappropriate judicial scrutiny and interference with the operation, management and administration of educational institution.” It did not matter if the school’s stated rules and regulations, including policies and procedures for due process and a fair hearing, were administered.

What matters is that a new fear has been instilled in athletics and higher education administrators. It is a fear that longstanding rules and regulations can be overturned by the judicial system. It is a fear that even if 99 percent of student-athletes in America are attending diligently to academics, competing ethically and abiding by the rules, 1 percent of dissenters can do as they please until all appeal processes in the court of law have been rendered. The power of the coaching staff and athletics administrators is lessened. Comprehensive action plans to impose consequences for criminal behavior are weakened. Simple guidelines followed by an overwhelming majority of student-athletes diminish in their effectiveness.

Sadly, we are of the Y generation as in “why do I have to do this?” Sports have become a right. And we cannot fault Georgia Tech because everyone has been guilty of giving second chances, though some could argue that history has shown that cases of third and fourth chances do exist. Those chances will not exist in the future. Giving the benefit of a doubt will no longer be an option. Chances for redemption are gone. Presidents are turning the other way. Athletics directors will not put their reputation on the line for a 20-year-old’s return to the playing fields. And coaches will help in completing paperwork for transfers for kids they recruited and mentored.

And even then it might not be enough to bring back the notion that intercollegiate athletics is a privilege and not a right, since the courts have made their ruling.  

Robert H. Zullo is an assistant professor of sport administration at Mississippi State University.