Wednesday ends the 10-year excommunication of former basketball player Chris Webber from the University of Michigan, part of the NCAA's punishment for what the NCAA said Webber did: accept $280,000 from a booster over five years.

Michigan's Fab Five Associated Press

Webber's actions violated the NCAA's amateurism rules, the organization found, and tarnished the legacy of the famous "Fab Five" recruiting class that played for national titles in 1992 and 1993. A school spokesman said NCAA sanctions prohibit Michigan from rehanging banners from those years, which were pulled down and stowed away in 2002 like sordid relics from a period of fascist rule.

One of Webber's main beefs with college sports was that he made millions for Michigan but wasn't paid. This kind of resentment, when mated to the sorts of opportunities that come from overzealous boosters and the like, is now responsible for most of the so-called scandals in college sports.

To those who believe athletes ought to be paid for their labor, Webber is the fall guy for a system that's horribly broken. Today, the members of this group—let's call them the de-vilification crowd—are breathlessly awaiting a court decision, as early as next month, that may give some serious teeth to an ongoing suit against the NCAA.

Launched in 2009, Ed O'Bannon v. the NCAA is named for the UCLA player, who started college the same year as Webber. On June 20, a federal judge in California will consider whether to grant the case class-action status, which would then enable it to include many thousands of current and former NCAA athletes. Class-action certification also would significantly increase the potential damages and put additional pressure on the NCAA to settle the case.

The impetus of this suit was O'Bannon's pique at the NCAA for licensing a videogame that used his number and likeness—and those of other players. The players, of course, weren't paid.

The vast majority of the damages in the case could come from the mushrooming millions in broadcast-rights fees being paid to schools for the right to show games. Michigan, for example, made about $26 million in TV-rights money in 2011-12 and $6 million in trademark and licensing. Of the nearly $117 million that Michigan spent on athletics that year, less than $17 million (14.5%) went to athletes—who are currently permitted only to collect tuition, room and board (with a few exceptions) or risk NCAA sanctions including disqualification.

In the suit, O'Bannon and his supporters argue that athletes are crucial parts of a college-sports machine that is worth billions annually and that barring them from reaping some of those revenues violates the Sherman Antitrust Act by artificially fixing prices.

The possible outcomes of a win by the plaintiffs in the O'Bannon case have been cast in doomsday extremes: If the NCAA loses, some say, the governing body will be immolated as athletes turn into cash-addled mercenaries and top-level conferences are bombed into the stone ages. Big Ten Conference commissioner Jim Delany predicted the latter in a March court filing, arguing that rather than divide revenues with players, conference schools would "downsize the scope, breadth and activity of their athletic programs." The O'Bannon case is set for a jury trial in June 2014.

The truth is that a win for O'Bannon is more likely to result in the reapportionment of the money that's been pouring into two areas: coach and executive salaries and facilities construction.

The reason those expenditures have soared is that schools need ways to spend their growing cash. They can't pay players, so they choose the next best thing: shiny facilities to lure them. Hence situations like Michigan tearing apart its 23-year old football-training center, Schembechler Hall, to build a $9 million newer, bigger version.

Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross, says suppression of player compensation in American college football has created an inverse situation to that of overseas professional soccer leagues, which invest in talent above all else. "In Europe, you see millions of dollars of players playing in decrepit stadiums," Matheson said. "Here you have free players playing in multi-million-dollar facilities."

Even Daniel Rubinfeld, a former U.S. Department of Justice economist and an expert working on behalf of the NCAA, acknowledged in a March brief that a loss of licensing revenue could reduce how much schools spend on coaches and training facilities (cue the silencing of boom cranes across the Southeastern Conference).

Figuring out how to share revenue with athletes, of course, is a labor unto itself. In a brief prepared for the O'Bannon plaintiffs, Stanford economist Roger Noll outlined how much a Michigan basketball player would have made in 2008-09 and 2009-10, based on a model that mimics the revenue-distribution rules in professional leagues. The answer: about $250,000—or $30,000 less than Webber took. Under a formula by Robert Brown, an economics professor at California State University San Marcos, Webber was worth four times the booster money he took.

If there's any model for the possible effects of suddenly paying athletes after years of not doing so, it's the Olympics. In 1960, an unnamed supporter of the ban on paying aspiring Olympians told Sports Illustrated: "If we water down the rules now, the Games will be destroyed within eight years." In London last summer, 26 years after the Olympics changed its rules on amateurism, swimmer Michael Phelps somehow overcame the taint of millions in corporate sponsorships to win a record 22nd Olympic medal.

Phelps took classes at Michigan and did some Olympic training at its pool. The Wolverines were proud to claim him.

Write to Rachel Bachman at