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Class-action status in the damages portion of an antitrust lawsuit against the Indianapolis-based NCAA was granted by a federal judge on Friday, a decision that could put the association on the hook for a potential multibillion dollar payout to former and current college athletes.
House vs. the NCAA is being heard in the Northern District of California by Judge Claudia Wilken, whose previous rulings in NCAA cases paved the way for college athletes to profit from their fame and for schools to direct more money into their hands.
Brought by Arizona State swimmer Grant House in 2020, the lawsuit challenges the NCAA’s remaining name, image and likeness compensation rules. TCU women’s basketball player Sedona Prince; and former Illinois football player Tymir Oliver are also listed as plaintiffs.
Wilken’s latest ruling could make more than 14,000 current and former college athletes eligible to claim damages if the NCAA loses the case.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys claim athletes who were restricted from cashing in on their fame before an NIL ban was lifted in 2021 are owed damages for what they would have been able to make.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys are also targeting the billions of dollars in media rights revenue for the football and basketball players whose sports drive the value of those deal for the NCAA and the five wealthiest college sports conferences.
A loss for the NCAA could require professional-sports style revenue sharing of those multibillion-dollar television deals for big-time college football and March Madness basketball because they involve the use of players’ names, images and likenesses.
“What we’re going to be asking the court to do for the class is to strike down all current prohibitions on NIL. And so the most significant is the rule that prohibits conferences from paying students for NIL,” Steve Berman, one of the lead plaintiffs’ attorneys and a familiar legal foe of the NCAA, told AP last month.
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NCAA’s days are numbered.
We should all be so lucky. It sewed the seeds of its own demise when it fundamentally redefined what it meant to be “amateur”. Virtually all the micromanaging coming from the NCAA these last few years has been in the interest of creating a reason to justify its own existence.
Its overriding tendency to side with trans “women” has been monumental in undermining women’s college athletics–and collegiate athletics are the one branch where women can often stand on their own. (We certainly know the WNBA and NWSL can’t.)
Choosing the less popular side on divisive social issues–one that pits gender dysphoria sufferers (<1% of the population) against 51% of the population–would be institutional suicide if it weren't for the heavy ESG financing undergirding most of these efforts. But the woke money will dry up before people's attitudes on these issues will ever change.
And this is just one example of many where the NCAA is shooting itself in the foot.
Leftist judges are hell-bent to destroy college athletics. The teams may have college names, but they’ll soon be nothing more than the equivalent of AAA. We need to update the tax code so college athletes who receive tuition, room, & board pay taxes on it.
Exactly. Want to get paid, then take away the scholarship vehicle.