College athletes are slowly inching towards their right to get paid after a California district judge ruled against the NCAA’s attempt to end an antitrust lawsuit over licensing.
Judge Claudia Wilken decided that the class action brought by current and former Division I college athletes against the NCAA will go to trial in California after rejecting the league’s claim that withholding player licensing revenue increased financial and social support for women’s sports and less popular men’s sports. Wilken wrote
This justification also fails because the NCAA could provide support for women’s sports and less prominent men’s sports through less restrictive means. … For instance, the NCAA could mandate that Division I schools and conferences redirect a greater portion of the licensing revenue generated by football and basketball to these other sports.
Friday’s decision follows a long line of shot-down excuses from the NCAA to get students to drop the case against the league, member schools, video game company Electronic Arts and the Collegiate Licensing Company. EA and CLC have since settled their way out of the case in 2013.
In a consolidated class action suit filed in 2009, 24 players said that the organizations “conspired not to compensate athletes for the use of their names, images, and likenesses in video games and television broadcasts,” according to Megan Morley for the Antitrust Alert.
When the suit was amended in 2013 to include the claim that the defendants all agreed not to pay athletes for using their likeness, the NCAA tried to get it tossed out. According to Morley,
It told the court that in light of the Supreme Court’s opinion in NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, 468 U.S. 85 (1984), the athletes cannot allege any facts that can allow the action to survive. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld the prohibition on paying student-athletes as procompetitive because the ban preserved amateurism in collegiate sports.
Wilken refused to issue a summary judgement on this on Friday because of conflicting evidence that amateurism actually improves the popularity of Division I sports, especially since the NCAA’s definition of amateurism has changed over the years.
With television licensing rights for Division I football and basketball being worth billions of dollars, this antitrust suit isn’t the only one trying to hammer away at what the NCAA means by “amateur athletes.” Another suit was filed on behalf of four players in March, according to Gregg Clifton and Michael Ackerstein in the Collegiate & Professional Sports Law Blog.
The suit seeks to eliminate current NCAA and conference amateurism regulations and create a market where institutions compete for the services of men’s basketball and football players in a less regulated way. This would be a major shift from the NCAA’s current amateur model to one similar to free agency in professional sports that would permit student-athletes to attend the highest bidding institution. …
The suit alleges the NCAA and its member institutions “have lost their way far down the road of commercialism, signing multi-billion dollar contracts wholly disconnected from the interests of ‘student athletes,’ who are barred from receiving the benefits of competitive markets for their services even though their services generate these massive revenues.”
While the original five-year-old case won’t go before a jury until June, student athletes have definitely started to receive the attention that they have been looking for, especially in the wake of the NLRB ruling. Even with a court ruling, this raises the ethical question: Do college athletes deserve more beyond an education?