Judge rules against NCAA in O’Bannon case

  The NCAA took a financial hit and a blow to its image Friday when a federal judge ruled that the governing body for college sports can’t stop football and basketball players from selling the rights to their names and likenesses, opening the door for student athletes to receive payouts once their college careers are over.

   In an historic decision that came after a contentious five-year legal battle, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken ruled in favor of former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon and 19 others in a lawsuit that challenged the NCAA’s regulation of college athletics on anti-trust grounds. She issued an injunction prohibiting the NCAA from enforcing its rules on money given to athletes when it comes to their names, images and likenesses.

    In a partial victory for the NCAA, Wilken said it could set a cap on the money paid to athletes, as long as it allows at least $5,000 per athlete per year of competition for players at big football and basketball schools. “The NCAA’s witnesses stated that their concerns about student-athlete compensation would be minimized or negated if compensation was capped at a few thousand dollars per year,” Wilken wrote.

   The NCAA, which claimed throughout the trial that paying athletes would violate the principles of amateurism that had always the foundation of college sports, said in a statement it disagreed with the decision and was still reviewing the decision. 

   Sonny Vaccaro, the former athletic shoe representative and activist who recruited O’Bannon to file the suit, said it was a huge win for future college athletes. “The kids who are going to benefit from this are kids who don’t even know what we did today,” Vaccaro said. “It may only be $5,000 but it’s $5,000 more than they get now. The future generation will be the benefactor of all this. There are now new ground rules in college sports.”

   Judge Wilken said she expected the schools to shoulder the additional costs, suggesting that high coaches’ slaries and rapidly incrasing spending on training at many schools suggest these schools would, in fact, be able to afford to offer student athletes a limited share of the licenseiing revnue generated by their use of student-athletes nmames, images and likenesses.

    We are entering a brave new world. From here, it appears the NCAA is rapidly losing the power it held for years over student-athletes in revenue producing sports and is becoming more vulnerable to other legal action, including undergraduates seeking unionization.      

     This ruling comes after an anti-trust suit filed by O’Bannon and others on behalf of college athletes to receive a share of the billions of dollars generated by college athletics by huge television contracts. O’Bannon, the MVP of the UCLA’s 1995 national championship basketball team, said he signed on as lead plaintiff after seeing his image in a video game authorized by the NCAA that he was not paid for. Any payments to athletes would not be immediate and will not take effect until the start of the next FBS football and Division I basketball recruiting cycle. Wilken said they will not affect any prospective recruits before July 1, 2016. The NCAA could try to overturn the decision on appeal.

     Former athletes will not be paid, because they gave up their right to damages in a pre-trial move so the case would be heard by a judge, not a jury.