At a reception attended by several university presidents in Manhattan, Arizona State President Michael Crowe was asked to reflect on a not-so-distant future where football and basketball players Sun Devils ball would get a share of the billions of dollars their sports generate in media rights deals.
“I don’t support that. And are we preparing for that, too? The answer is no, we’re not,” Crowe recalled. “This is not an outcome that is conducive, in my opinion, to the success of the pluralistic, gender-balanced college sports framework that we currently have in the United States.”
Regardless, the NCAA and major college sports conferences face a new antitrust lawsuit — among other legal and policy challenges — that could force policymakers to reckon with a reality in which some athletes are employees paid or at least earn money. a revenue sharing model that closely resembles professional sports.
House v. NCAA is a class-action lawsuit heard in the Northern District of California by Judge Claudia Wilken, whose previous rulings in NCAA cases have paved the way for college athletes to profit from their fame and for schools to devote more money in their hands.
One of the decisions was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, where the justices ruled 9-0 against the NCAA in 2021. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s scathing concurring opinion in the Alston case still resonates.
“Nowhere else in America can businesses agree to not pay their workers the fair market rate, based on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers the fair market rate.” , Kavanaugh wrote.
Two years later, college sports are once again at risk of having their future dictated by outside forces unable or unwilling to tackle a problem.
NCAA President Charlie Baker is scheduled to testify before a Senate committee on Tuesday, the 10th hearing on Capitol Hill focused on college sports since 2020.
The former Massachusetts governor and other college sports leaders continue to push for a federal law regulating how athletes can be compensated for their name, image and likeness work, but the next set of threats is getting closer.
Two separate issues before the National Labor Relations Board – a complaint against USC and the Pac-12 and a unionization drive by the Dartmouth men’s basketball team – plus another lawsuit in Pennsylvania could lead to the granting employee status to university athletes. Hubbard v. NCAA is another antitrust case, seeking damages for certain athletes who were denied education-related benefits as a result of the Alston case.
But the California case is widely seen as the biggest threat to a long-standing amateur athlete model that is not evolving quickly enough to satisfy its opponents.
“I’ve seen college sports leaders say they want a sustainable and ‘legally defensible’ model. “They then say that Congress is the only place that can create this model. What they really mean is that Congress is the only place that can authorize a model with the restrictions that they want,” he said. Kansas City-based sports attorney Mit Winter recently tweeted.
The California lawsuit, filed by Arizona State swimmer Grant House in 2020, could potentially cost the NCAA and major conferences more than $4 billion in damages, although Wilken has not yet decided whether a class of damage had to be certified.
A loss for the NCAA could require professional sports-style revenue sharing from these multibillion-dollar television deals for big-time college football and March Madness basketball because they involve the use of names, images and player similarities.
“What we’re going to ask the court to do for the course is to strike down all the current bans on NIL. So the most important one is the rule that prohibits conferences from paying students for NIL,” said Steve Berman, one of the lead plaintiffs’ attorneys and a familiar legal foe of the NCAA.
In fact, it might be time to pay the players.
“Things have been on the wall for a while, with cases coming up specifically in the Ninth Circuit and we haven’t really seen a huge seismic shift from the NCAA,” said Dan Lust, a professor at the New York Law School. . “The real question is, what happens to these other sports if they don’t have the same level of funding? That’s really the question.”
This is an argument the NCAA will make in its defense. As Crowe pointed out, even at the wealthiest Power Five programs such as Texas and Ohio State, money generated from football and basketball funds opportunities for hundreds of other athletes.
And if the bigger schools started paying their players, the pressure on the rest of Division I to try to compete would cause many to consolidate their resources to support fewer sports. There are legitimate questions about whether schools would be able to comply with Title IX.
“I want to find a way to fairly compensate our student-athletes for the value they bring to their universities while continuing to provide opportunities for all,” said Bryce Choate, former distance runner at Oral Roberts and board member. of the governors of the NCAA. .
College sports leaders have attempted to walk a thin line with their demands for government involvement, immediately calling for an NIL bill that preempts state laws and prevents athletes from being considered employees of their schools while still also wanting to avoid full-fledged federal oversight.
The NCAA is no longer just waiting for Congress to fix the NIL, but is working on a set of rules — rules that the House lawsuit seeks to tear down the guardrails put in place. Berman said he expects a trial in fall 2024.
Crowe, the ASU president, said he would like to further improve athletic scholarships, providing more money for stipends and long-term health care coverage.
Some college athletes realize that probably won’t be enough.
“The dollars that have flowed into our space are real,” Nebraska athletic director and former Huskers football star Trev Alberts told ESPN.com. “I’m not opposed to student-athletes being involved in sharing what they’re helping to generate. … Change is hard, but … I’d rather be in the business of change than slowly dying from 1,000 cuts.”
