NCAA President Mark Emmert Defends Organization Against New Lawsuit on 'Meet The Press' With March Madness in Full Swing
Despite the "Big Dance" fully underway and "Sweet 16" spots in the Final Four tourney being decided, NCAA president Mark Emmert took time Sunday morning to address the legal challenges facing the organization - including a new lawsuit filed on Monday that could change the landscape of college athletics, on NBC's Meet The Press.
Four student-athletes, including Clemson University football defensive back Martin Jenkins and Rutgers University basketball forward Johnathan Moore, have filed an antitrust complaint against the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the "power" athletic conference - the Southeastern Conference (SEC), the Big Ten conference, the Pacific-12 (Pac-12), Big 12 conference, and the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC). The lawsuit hopes to get rid of the organization's rules that limit the payment student-athletes receive to tuition, meals, and related fees, despite the billions being racked in by the conferences and NCAA at their expense.
"Many of the rules that the NCAA implements go against antitrust laws," says Bloomberg News sports business writer Scott Soshnick to LatinoPost. "The schools and conferences end up controlling how the players are compensated, setting up artificial restrictions that may not be legal."
The new lawsuit against the NCAA and the athletic sports conferences is the latest of several high-profile legal actions against the collegiate athletic governing body that may alter the business of college sports. Former UCLA Bruins basketball player, Ed O'Bannon, spearheaded a class-action antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA challenging their right to profit from the names, images, and likenesses of former student-athletes without compensating them. U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken ruled in February that the case can proceed after the NCAA petitioned for a dismissal arguing the First Amendment precludes them from seeking permission from student-athletes to broadcast of college athletics games.
EA Sports, who was also named in the O'Bannon lawsuit after seeing his likeness used in a college basketball video game, settled for an undisclosed amount, forcing the video game company to drop their popular college football series altogether.
The NCAA is also keeping an eye on the members of the Northwestern University football team, who formed the College Athletes Players Association (CAPA) in January and filed paperwork with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) seeking to unionize the revenue-generating teams in the school, which would recognize student-athletes as employees of the school since they receive payment in the form of scholarships.
Soshnick says a favorable ruling for CAPA by the NLRB could challenge the legality of the term "student-athlete," a stipulation in every collegiate athlete's scholarship contract created by former NCAA executive director Walter Byers to avoid paying workers compensation for athletes. The term "student-athlete" term was created in 1964 and written into the NCAA rulebooks after they lost a compensation court case the previous year, with term giving the NCAA legal leverage against any future lawsuits, according to Byars, in court testimony presented by former Texas Christian University (TCU) running back Kent Waldrep's lawyer, John Collins, who sued the school after they rescinded Waldrep's scholarship following a severe neck injury suffered in a game, that left him paralyzed.
Collins argued that Waldrep should be considered a TCU employee who is entitled to receive workers compensation since he was recruited to play football - with his scholarship being a legal contract for work and his coaches controlling his schedule and pay. A US appeals court rejected the claim, in 2000, saying he was not an employee of the school since he had not paid taxes on financial aid that he could have kept even if he could not play football.
NLRB approval of unionization would give student-athletes recognition as school employees, allowing them to negotiate with the NCAA over issues such as sports-related medical expenses and establishing educational trust funds for former players.
Soshnick believes that if the latest antitrust suits are successful, it would change the dynamics of the business of college athletics, including creating bidding wars among the top programs for high school talent.
"There is growing pressure for the NCAA to change the way it does business," says Soshnick. "These rules in place were created with the intent to generate revenue. The NCAA is going to have to change or the courts will force them to change."
College athletics generated more than $16 billion in broadcast rights, according to court documents, on top of money coming in from sponsorships, tickets sales, merchandise and payouts from championship tournaments and bowl games. The NCAA signed a 14-year, $11 billion deal with CBS Sports and Turner Sports for the broadcast and digital rights to the men's Final Four tournament, in 2010, while ESPN coughed up $5.64 billion, in 2012, for the rights to the newly formed College Football Playoffs that launches this upcoming season.
"Six billion dollars just for the College Football Playoffs alone, that's comparable with the television deal of a professional league like the NBA," says Soshnick.
Emmert conceded that some reform is necessary but defended the collegiate athletic governing body's business practices on NBC's Sunday morning news show Meet The Press, saying that the arguments being presented in court cases against them are being framed the wrong way and dismiss the true value of an education.
"Should student-athletes, whether they are basketball players or any other sport, be unionized employees of the university or is this fundamentally about students playing the game and receiving the most important thing that is going set them up for the rest of their life - a good sound education and the opportunity to get that education," said Emmert to Meet The Press' David Gregory. "Obviously, universities and colleges believe that these are student-athletes, these are young men and women who should continue to be students and not be unionized employees."
Emmert also contended that the billions generated by tournaments like the Final Four and the College Football Playoffs goes back by the 450,000 students-athletes playing sports in the NCAA and is not pocketed by the universities and athletic conferences.
"There is a lot of confusion about where that money goes, what that money is all about. Absolutely March Madness generates a lot of revenue," said Emmert. "That revenue is used to support all of the other tournaments - Divisions I, II, and III. If a young man or woman is playing golf, volleyball, lacrosse, ice hockey, all of those tournaments, everything that goes on in college sports, is supported by the revenue that comes out of March Madness. So the vast majority of the revenue flows into the NCAA goes, goes right out to the universities, either direct or indirectly through the support of these championships."