NCAA Antitrust Ruling Is Inadequate to Fix Athlete Pay Problem

Posted by Bloomberg

NCAA Antitrust Ruling Is Inadequate to Fix Athlete Pay Problem

By Joe Nocera

There isn’t a jurist in the U.S. who knows more about the National Collegiate Athletic Association than Claudia Wilken, the senior district judge for the Northern District of California. Let me rephrase that: There are precious few people in the U.S. who know more about the NCAA than Judge Wilken.

In 2009, Michael Hausfeld, a plaintiffs’ lawyer with a crusader’s bent, filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA in her Oakland courtroom. Called the O’Bannon case — Ed O’Bannon, the former UCLA basketball star, was the lead plaintiff — the lawsuit argued that the NCAA should allow college athletes and former college athletes to retain the economic rights to their own name, image and likeness.

During the five years it took to get that case to trial, it evolved into something much broader: whether the NCAA’s rules forbidding athletes to be paid was a violation of the nation’s antitrust laws. Wilken asked penetrating questions of a number of the NCAA’s witnesses in the June 2014 trial, making clear that she wasn’t buying their assertion that “amateurism” was the secret sauce that gave college football and basketball its immense appeal.

When Wilken handed down her ruling that August, it seemed at first like a slam dunk for the players. Wilken said the NCAA’s rules were, in fact, evidence of cartel behavior that constituted an unlawful restraint of trade.

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