Michael Hiltzik: This lawsuit has the NCAA staring down extinction. Is that a bad thing?

There can be few American public institutions more widely detested than the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

The NCAA spent decades promoting the ideal of the amateur "student-athlete," barring football and basketball players from compensation while their coaches and university athletic directors collected millions of dollars a year. Its disciplinary system, rife with favoritism and inconsistencies, is honored by member universities more in the breach than the observance.

And when it doesn't get its way, it hasn't been shy about bullying — not that it always works, as when it threatened in 2019 to ban California universities from championship games if the Legislature voted to allow payments to those student-athletes.

(The measure in question passed anyway and was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom.)

As it happens, the very issue covered by that legislation — compensation for the use of college players' "names, images and likenesses," or NIL for short — is at the center of what the NCAA implies could be an extinction event for the collegiate sports system as we know it today, if not for the NCAA itself.