When the mens basketball Final Four tips off Saturday in Minneapolis, the NCAAs biggest and most lucrative event will proceed as it normally does: the athletes on the floor for Virginia and Auburn, Michigan State and Texas Tech, will play games that generate hundreds of millions of dollars in total revenue for their schools, the NCAA and broadcast companies. The coaches and athletic directors, TV executives and NCAA suits will share in the riches. But athletes themselves still wont receive their fair share and thanks to a recent federal court decision, that wont change in the immediate future.

If the goal was to tear down the NCAAs amateur sports cartel completely, Judge Claudia Wilkens March ruling in a landmark lawsuit against the NCAA was by any measure a disappointment.

Wilken, a judge in the Northern District of California who has spent nearly a decade hearing such lawsuits from former college athletes against the NCAA, once again found that the college sports behemoths restrictions on athlete compensation violate federal antitrust laws . More than that, she excoriated the amateur system which artificially caps the amount universities can pay athletes in exchange for their labor as a meaningless, unjustifiable sham.

The rules that permit, limit or forbid student-athlete compensation and benefits do not follow any coherent definition of amateurism, Wilken said.

And yet, for as much as Wilkens scathing 104-page decision agreed with the arguments of the star attorneys representing the latest group of athletes to sue the NCAA, she stopped short of delivering the deathblow they sought. Wilken did not remove the cap on compensation in a way that would have forced schools to offer players something akin to salaries. Instead, she ruled only that universities could pay players additional compensation related to their education expenses and achievements.

Proponents of better compensation and labor rights for college athletes have hammered the NCAA on numerous fronts over the last decade, with federal lawsuits , attempts to unionize , legislation in statehouses and Congress , and new leagues that aim to compete for top-tier athletes by paying them more than the NCAA allows. Progress, though, has come only in small increments like Wilkens ruling, as judges and government bodies have validated their arguments even as they refuse to throw the knockout punch.

The NCAA celebrated Wilkens ruling as a victory. But to many of those advocates, it was yet another indication that the question about college sports is no longer whether the NCAAs archaic amateur system will collapse. Its how, and when, it finally will.

I dont think were at a tipping point yet, said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who released a report that called for paying major college athletes last week. But its coming.