Paying athletes opens universities up to all sorts of questions -- which is to say lawsuits -- regarding worker's compensation law, labor law, antitrust law, tax law. In short, it would very likely turn athletes into employees of their university, rather than students participating in an activity, as the NCAA strenuously, and so far successfully, argues is the case. Cross that line and everything would be different.

It would no doubt fall to the courts to decide whether a tailback who sprains his ankle is eligible for workman's comp. (Sperber tells in his book "Onward to Victory" about how the term "student-athlete" was coined by the NCAA to replace the professional-sounding word "player" in response to losing workman's compensation claims to injured athletes in the 1950s.) The value of an athletic scholarship might become taxable income. Athletes could win the right to unionize and strike. Unions have struck over smaller matters than an entire industry, college sports in this case, limiting the salaries of an entire class of employee at an artificially low level, called an athlete's stipend.

And don't forget that, as the NCAA warned after Chambers' Nebraska bill moved out of committee, any school that pays its athletes runs afoul of strict eligibility rules. Those rules might seem arbitrary and draconian when considered individually -- why is it, again, that athletes can't hold down a job or accept a ride to the airport? -- but they work pretty well at squelching precisely this type of debate before it can really get started. They'll probably render the bills in Nebraska and Texas, even if they pass, moot. The NCAA didn't get to control college sports by being dumb. An argument can be made that the NCAA's main reason for existing is to act as a cartel to maximize profits for its members, partly by limiting wages for players.

Sperber, the Indiana professor, says the problem the NCAA doesn't seem to want to face is that college sports are pretty much already a professional arena. He points out that, contrary to popular belief, an athletic scholarship is not a guaranteed "free ride" through school. "In fact, they're one-year contracts, they're renewed every July, basically at the behest of the coach, and coaches often renew for athletic reasons, not academic reasons," he says. "And when scholarships are like that, you've got to say these are contracts, and how is this different from professional sports?"

The answer might be that it's different only in the imaginations of fans. "Some of the marketability of college athletics, a part of the reason people like college athletics, is they like the idea of amateurism," Missouri basketball coach Quin Snyder told the Associated Press. "I think that's kind of a myth. But it's a myth that's very popular.

An unscientific fan poll by Yahoo Sports this week found that a slight majority opposed paying college players.

Another argument against paying players is that most athletic departments lose money, even if they have successful football and basketball programs, since they also have to fund sports that don't bring in any income. If they had to pay their players, they'd lose even more. NCAA spokesman Wally Renfro pointed out that the NCAA's $6 billion television contract with CBS would not come close to paying every scholarship athlete $2,000 a year.

Many schools would be forced out of the big-time sports business if they had to pay their athletes a stipend, never mind market rates. That would create a smaller group of schools that could compete at the top level.

"Don't you think it's already like that right now?" asks Kinney, the football player turned columnist. "You don't see too many schools who are constantly in that top 10 or top 15 range, battling for a national title."

"It might be very salutary," Sperber says, "because it would seem to me the landscape of higher education would be divided between those schools that are in big-time college sports, paying the players, and are essentially in the entertainment business, and all the rest, who are essentially in the education business. And parents would have a pretty clear idea where to send their kids."

Sperber envisions that vast majority of schools that don't want to play in the big arena dropping down to Division III or club status, where scandals are rare.

So how likely is such a scenario? As far-fetched as it seems, it might not be so far off. While it's hard to imagine the legislative efforts in Nebraska and Texas having much impact because they're so isolated, the idea of amateurism in big-time college sports may meet its Waterloo in the courts.

What if Chris Webber, angry over his allegedly unsated hunger for a Big Mac, had sued the University of Michigan, claiming that the value of his scholarship was chump change in comparison to the profits he created for the basketball program? It's not so hard to imagine a court agreeing that Webber was a paid professional whose salary was artificially limited to the cost of a scholarship. There is precedent in a successful class-action lawsuit against the NCAA by so-called restricted coaches, entry-level assistants. The courts found that an NCAA salary cap for restricted coaches violated antitrust law.

A player winning such a suit would change everything, should that victory survive NCAA appeals that would undoubtedly be fierce and sustained.

"It seems to me it would cut through the bullshit," Sperber says.

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