SAN FRANCISCO — Former UCLA standout Ed O’Bannon is watching the NCAA men’s basketball tournament with mixed emotions.
There’s the love for the game and the tournament itself — he led his UCLA Bruins to the 1995 championship with 30 points and 17 rebounds and earned the most outstanding player award. But then there’s the commercial side of things.
“Everybody’s getting paid except for the players,” O’Bannon said in a phone interview from Las Vegas recently. “It’s not fair, and it needs to change.”
Four years ago, O’Bannon filed a lawsuit against the NCAA and the video game maker EA Sports seeking compensation after recognizing an avatar in the company’s March Madness game that he says was created in his image. Since then, the lawsuit has blossomed into one of the biggest legal threats the NCAA has ever faced over the issue of paying student athletes who attract billions of dollars in revenue annually, and the latest court filing from the NCAA weeks ago highlights how much is at stake.
Athletes who play collegiate sports at a high level, as O’Bannon did, do so without compensation and sign documents, including the so-called form 08-3a, giving the NCAA and its member institutions the rights to use their images and likenesses to “promote NCAA championships or other NCAA events, activities or programs.”
O’Bannon and other former student athletes, including basketball legends Oscar Robertson and Bill Russell, who filed the lawsuit are seeking to require the NCAA to share in the skyrocketing revenues earned from television deals, video games, marketing schemes and other money-generating ventures using their images and likenesses.
If they succeed, it would force the NCAA to essentially pay student athletes for the first time in its 107-year history. The lawsuit proposes that former players receive direct payments while current athletes could tap a trust fund once their playing days are done.
Specifically, the lawsuit alleges the NCAA and its member schools have unfairly and illegally fixed the value of every player’s commercial rights at zero. The lawsuit claims the NCAA and colleges do this by requiring every student athlete to sign forms agreeing to pay without compensation and giving all commercial rights to the NCAA.
So far, the judge has turned down every NCAA attempt to toss out the case, including earlier this year.
For its part, the NCAA is steadfast in its position that student-athletes are prohibited from receiving payment for participating in sports. The NCAA argues that whatever revenues it earns are used for the benefit of its member schools and students, including those who have filed the lawsuit. It argues that paying players would sound the death knell of amateur athletics.
“The NCAA is not exploiting current or former student-athletes but instead provides enormous benefit to them and to the public,” said Donald Remy, the NCAA’s top lawyer. “This case has always been wrong — wrong on the facts and wrong on the law.”
In its latest court filing in March, the NCAA submitted more than 2,000 pages of legal arguments and statements from university administrators urging a judge to block the players’ attempts to turn the lawsuit into a class action. If that happens and the lawsuit prevails, the NCAA’s financial exposure could reach into the billions of dollars.
