Remember that House v. NCAA settlement? The one that was supposed to enable universities to directly pay their athletes while simultaneously saving college sports?
We’ve got mixed reports.
First, members of the 1983 NC State men’s basketball team—you may know them from that clip of Jim Valvano running around the court after winning the national championship—sued the NCAA yesterday, requesting compensation for the NCAA continuing to use their names, images, and likenesses. (Possibly including that clip, although that might be more prominent during ESPN’s Jimmy V Classic than the NCAA Tournament, and might even be fair use as historic footage? I am not a lawyer.)
It’s possible this suit is very small. My guess is that it is, relative to the $2.7 billion the college sports industry is prepared to shell out to former athletes. But the industry is only prepared to shell that out to athletes who’ve played since 2016. That leaves…a lot of years of athletes not covered. How many will sue? How effective will these lawsuits be? This isn’t a new concern—it’s one of the many a lot of us have been raising while the House plaintiffs’ lawyers and college sports officials try to ram this settlement through—but it’s the first lawsuit we’ve seen in this category, at least to my knowledge. Can athletes from the 80’s, 90’s, 2000’s, and early 2010’s nickel and dime the NCAA to a meaningful extent?
Meanwhile, NCAA president Charlie Baker started his post-settlement press tour, giving his first interview yesterday since the settlement votes all went down. One interesting thing he mentioned was how this agreement could help keep Division I together. As we’ve covered before and should probably cover again soon, Division I’s present existence doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s supposed to be a collection of schools who treat athletics similarly, but it ranges from the University of Georgia to Central Connecticut State University. This is a growing problem, especially as the industry tries to craft revenue-sharing rules. The Southeastern Conference has a lot of revenue to share. The Northeast Conference, in which CCSU plays, has very little. If the question of athletes–as–employees was limited to the SEC, it would be a different question. Division I has ballooned in size since its inception, and the schools encompassed are more different from one another than leadership in the 70’s ever envisioned. Fans, however, love college sports “as we know them,” and we know them in their current nearly 400-basketball-team format. We want Division I to stick together, even if Division I sticking together will forevermore be a forced, uncomfortable fit.
What did Baker say? He called the agreement “glue” keeping power conferences from breaking away before the payments have all been paid. The way I’m taking this is that Baker believes this settlement can function as a contract between all Division I schools, one that keeps them unified over the ten-year period of payouts. I admittedly hadn’t thought of it this way before, and I’m far from entirely convinced myself (again, not a lawyer), but it’s an intriguing premise. It sure sounds nice. But that’s kind of the theme of the whole settlement effort.
Miscellany
- I’m really curious about Aleksander Barkov’s head, and about how healthy it is, and about what that’ll mean for the rest of the Stanley Cup Finals. Leon Draisaitl nailed that noggin, as Brad Marchand’s wisdom from two rounds ago continues to hold up: Hurting people intentionally is part of playoff hockey, and that’s because it’s a huge competitive advantage. I wonder how long it’ll be before someone realizes they could tie suspensions to the length of an injury absence. I guess the problem there is that the goon might not be as good as the player he hurts. Never mind. Back to the drawing board.
- The aggravation Kristaps Porziņģis’s injured calf suffered Sunday has a name, and it’s “a torn medial retinaculum allowing dislocation of the posterior tibialis tendon.” What does this mean? In one way, I don’t know. In the other, it means he’s day-to-day. Sounds like he’ll try to play Game 3. Very curious what drove the intensely medical explanation. Is this a requirement with NBA injury reports? Is Porziņģis one of those people who overshares on social media?
