“In a landmark decision, a federal judge ruled Friday that the NCAA is in violation of the nation’s antitrust laws by restricting the compensation that major college football and men’s basketball student-athletes can receive for use of their names, images and likenesses.”
The decision:
Will the NCAA go to Congress next?
Here’s a link to the AP story.
Good for those kids and all future athletes. Good on Judge Wilken for not being swayed by the ridiculous rhetoric that issued from the NCAA.
Honestly, tho, I never thought this would turn out any differently; the plaintiffs had fantastic arguments on their side and the NCAA had “well, we like it this way” on their’s.
I did find this bit somewhat disturbing tho:
How the hell can that be enforced? I would think the first person who challenged the limit would win easily, since that’s the same sort of anti-trust violation that Judge Wilken just ruled against, isn’t it?
Look forward to the day when a judge rules that MLB is in violation of the nation’s antitrust laws…
Baseball has an exemption from the antitrust laws:
Right. From your link, “The rationale was that baseball games were local affairs, not interstate commerce”. I doubt it applied in 1922 and am fairly certain it doesn’t apply in 2014. And only Congress can overturn the exemption. Good luck with that.
According to ESPN, the “Ruling will not affect any recruit enrolled in college before July 1, 2016.”
So, what they’re doing is illegal, but they can keep doing it for the next 2 to 7 years.
WTF?
Howard Metzenbaum used to routinely bring up the idea of overturning baseball’s antitrust exemption, but since he left the Senate, no one has mentioned it.
The NFL has actually been on the losing end of antitrust claims, once when the tried to stop the Raiders from moving to Los Angeles and once when they blocked the USFL from getting TV contracts, if I recall correctly.
In the short term, this appears to be a small win for the players. Both sides will appeal and maybe for some of the same reasons, i.e., challenging the court’s authority to set a salary cap. The players don’t want a cap at all and the schools don’t want one that determines a minimum amount they have to pay out of tv revenues because, well, they want all the money. It seems to me that the $5,000 cap will be a pittance to the Ohio States and Alabamas but will put a dent in the budgets of the Akrons and the Arkansas States. I haven’t read the decision all the way through, though, maybe the cap only applies to the big schools? And the money can be held in trust, which means players still won’t receive anything while they’re in school. How does that really help them now?
It also appears that Wilken upheld the schools’ right to restrict outside earnings. That will certainly be appealed by the players. Booster money is worth potentially more than the $5,000 television payments.
But in the long run, the ruling helps Jeffrey Kessler’s case as it works its tedious way through the system, according to Lester Munson of ESPN.com. Munson says that this settles the anti-trust argument in advance for Kessler and he can focus on challenging and overturning the remaining restrictions. That one won’t be here for another three or four years, though.
All in all a nice first step but a curious and slightly muddled decision.
I have no idea who he is, but [Jeb Lund has a fairly good commentary on the ruling at VICE.
I simply don’t see how Wilken’s silly salary cap or continued restrictions on outside income will survive the next round of lawsuits.
Charles Pearce of Grantland wrote yesterday that the real importance of the O’Bannon decision was that a door had been opened, the athletes had stepped through it and then closed it behind them. The NCAA’s ability to unilaterally make rules favoring itself without regard to the players has been obliterated and it will never get it back. Still, the schools’ got off so easy that they may want to consider not appealing this verdict.
The best thing that could happen now is that a school like Michigan says “fuck it” and sends a small army of recruiters into the deep south with offers of $30,000 stipends.
One last word about Judge Wilken’s concerns about the “commercial exploitation” of the players should they be allowed to accept endorsement money. Ridiculous, that’s the word I’ll use.
See, we have these people called “lawyers” and “financial advisors” who are professionals paid to represent the best interests of their clients. In addition, offering guidance is a natural purview of the schools as well. If the schools want any semblance of paternalism to remain, then helping their athletes cope with the complexities of commercial freedom is a good place for it. The last thing it should be is an adversarial relationship.
I notice a couple of things in the judge’s “remedy.”
First, it applies only to “recruits”; it doesn’t seem to apply to current players.
Second, everybody is talking about a $5000/year cap, but there appear to be two different sets of payments. First, there’s money put into trust, which the player receives when he leaves school or his eligibility runs out; this can be limited to $5000/year. Second, recruits can be offered “a limited share of the revenues generated from the use of their names, images, and likenesses in addition to a full grant-in-aid,” and “the NCAA will not be permitted to set this cap below the cost of attendance.” The way I read the second one, players can receive, in effect, the equivalent value of their scholarship in cash, immediately, in addition to the scholarship itself.
I still see a problem with the fact that it is the school that is paying them, and not the companies licensing the player’s names/likenesses; it is asking for a Title IX lawsuit from somebody claiming that these payments count as “men’s sports expenditures.”
Too late; that’s already gonna happen.
Remember in March when the NLRB said that college athletes are employees?
The lawyers involved make clear they only filed this suit only because of their concern for the plight of student athletes: they only request a very modest $52.4 million dollars in attorney fees and costs:
http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/writer/jon-solomon/24675420/obannon-lawyers-seek-524-million-from-ncaa-after-victory
The NCAA files an appeal:
For some fraction of the cost of constantly fighting these lawsuits – they’re never going to stop being filed and the schools can’t ultimately win them – the schools could head them off by adjusting their eligibility rules. Letting boosters gift to the athletes won’t cost them anything in numbers of fans or television monies, despite the bluster of a few self-delusional traditionalists.
They’ll still watch. Oh yes, they’ll watch.
Catherine Bellis is a 15-year old tennis phenom. She just won her first real tournament match in the first round of the US Open, but will have to decline the $60,000 that comes with it, so she can play tennis for her college.
[
](https://sports.vice.com/article/why-americas-newest-tennis-sweetheart-should-sue-the-ncaa)
Personally, I think she and her 'rents are being stupid as hell. Take the money. Fuck playing for college. She can pay for her own college with her winnings after she retires from the pro circuit.
But FFS the NCAA is a ridiculous scam and needs to be stopped.
If the US Open folks had any balls, they would announce that the 60K is being put into a scholarship fund for the girl with any remaining money to be paid out to her after graduation. Let the NCAA fight that shit.
I don’t think it really qualifies as a “scholarship” if the money comes after graduation.
In a recent Grantland piece, Andrew Sharp commented on how muted the media response has been to the news that Georgia RB Tod Gurley was suspended for selling his autograph. And that there was so little outrage was in itself a small amount of progress. We’re shifting, in ways that we’ve seen before,to a general acceptance of a behavior that was only recently considered unacceptable.
This past Wednesday a new lawsuit was filed by a group of former college players, this time against the television networks, alleging
This battle is far from being won but I get the feeling that the suits will never stop coming until reasonable concessions are made.
Once on the Rozelle Rule, too (which basically meant teams who drafted players kept them for ever and ever), in Mackey v. NFL.