… to an important lawsuit that’s brewing between the NCAA and a group of former university athletes. Kevin Arnowitz explains:
The debate over whether college athletes should have their images used by the NCAA for commercial purposes has been percolating for years. With the emergence of the video game industry, commemorative championship-season DVD and other merch, the NCAA profits greatly from the likeness of amateur athletes.
Yesterday, one such athlete — former UCLA basketball standout Ed O’Bannon, along with thousands of other former college athletes — filed a class action lawsuit against the NCAA in federal district court.
A loss could cost the NCAA hundreds of millions; such an outcome would also probably mean a radically new relationship between players and the organization, with student players routinely given more legal heft in their dealings with the NCAA.
O’Bannon, whose professional basketball career didn’t pan out, is rather eloquent:
Every student-athlete – past, present and future – wishes to get paid when they’re in school. Let’s be honest about that…
My biggest thing right now is, once we leave the university and are done playing in the NCAA, one would think we’d be able to leave with our likeness. But we aren’t able to. If you don’t take your likeness with you, you should at least be compensated for every dime that is made off your name or likeness…
The NCAA has been doing people wrong for a long time. It’s about time something changes…
God put me on this earth to do something. And it obviously wasn’t to play NBA basketball, which I thought it was. I thought I was born to play the sport. I thought born to be a hall-of-fame ballplayer. But that didn’t happen….
Arnowitz ends with the following thought for the day:
I also wonder if an ancillary benefit of the suit might be broadening the conversation toward the universities themselves. It’s hard to voice this opinion without coming across as priggish — particularly when you write about basketball for a living — but is it possible that quasi-professional sports maintain too prominent a place at public universities?
If merely voicing the opinion makes you priggish, what does that make UD?
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Update: Roundup of some of the bigger pending lawsuits against the NCAA.
July 24th, 2009 at 3:21PM
"…is it possible that quasi-professional sports maintain too prominent a place at public universities?"
I’m having a hard time reading that without disabling episodes of convulsive laughter.
July 24th, 2009 at 3:37PM
Lots of universities make big bucks selling jerseys of star athletes. If I were an athletic director, I’d stop putting athletes’ names on the backs of their jerseys TODAY. Can’t be too careful.