Labor conflicts between the NCAA and its college players are being further intensified.
On December 18, local time, the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) v. NCAA case was officially announced. In February, the NLRB sued the University of Southern California (USC), the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the PAC-12 League, and the NCAA for treating college football and basketball players as "amateurs" rather than "employees."
Ramogi Huma, the association's executive director, has said that top college football and basketball players are "physically and financially exploited by the NCAA."
"Amateur" or "professional", this is already a decades-long dispute over the big ** mobilization and the NCAA.
According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to a person's name, image, and likeness (NIL). However, under the previous rules, NCAA athletes would lose these rights when they signed a college scholarship agreement, and would need to comply with the prohibition of monetary transactions, the prohibition of any commercial endorsements, etc., and violators would be punished by bans and other punishments, and they would be disqualified from playing.
It wasn't until June 2021, when the dust settled on Alston v. NCAA, that the U.S. Supreme Court found that the NCAA's restriction of education-related grants from universities to *** members violated monopoly law. Subsequently, the NCAA lifted restrictions and allowed *** players to profit from NIL.
According to data provided by sports marketing platform Opendorse, in the first year after the lifting of the ban on NIL, 75% of the big ** mobilizations were sponsored, and the total revenue is expected to be as high as 9$1.7 billion, with an average income of $3,711 per person.
But this NIL income is a drop in the bucket in terms of league revenue.
Taking football as an example, starting from the 2024 season, the four major football leagues of the NCAA, including the SEC, Big 12, Big Ten, and ACC, will receive more than $3 billion in copyright revenue every year, and this figure will be close to $5 billion by 2026.
By way of comparison, according to Opendorse**, the NIL market is expected to grow by nearly 20% in 2023 from last year's $1 billion. In other words, all NCAA players can only get $1.2 billion a year.
Of course, this is only NCAA authorization to share some of the NIL rights with players, and it is only "less than one in one" for the overall benefit involved. The "amateur, professional" issue is whether colleges and the NCAA need to pay college players, which is the lion's share of the NCAA's interests.
The NCAA has been reluctant to budge into this core dispute.
In 2014, Kain Colter, a former Northwestern University quarterback, and other members founded the Collegeathletes Players Association and applied for union status with the National Labor Relations Board. The approval from the NLRB gave the organization the legal right to engage in collective bargaining. Players can negotiate wages and benefits with their schools, divisions, and the NCAA.
This is the first attempt by a college player to form a union and apply for a team and the NCAA to pay wages. But in August 2015, after a year and a half of negotiations, the NLRB finally rejected the legitimacy of Northwestern's proposed "union" status.
In this ruling, the NLRB's resolution makes it clear in legal sense that "*staff" is still a "student" and not an employee employed by the school.
Since then, as the commercial value of the NCAA has intensified, there have been more and more lawsuits over whether college players are college or NCAA employees, to disputes over the rights and interests of the NIL. In addition to the NLRB v. NCAA case**, several other cases have also reached a critical juncture in the past two weeks.
In 2020, a federal antitrust lawsuit was filed in House v. NCAA, which seeks compensation from all players who did not make a profit from the NCAA games that played in NCAA top five league games (June 15, 2016 through July 1, 2021, when college football and basketball players played in NCAA's top five leagues) before the NIL was lifted.
On Nov. 3, Judge Claudia Wilken ruled and approved three proposed ordinances. According to FOS, the total amount of compensation is more than $4 billion. Although the case won't go to trial until 2025, a final ruling could force the NCAA to change its compensation rules to allow revenue sharing between athletes and the athletic department.
In addition, Matt Bewley et al. v. NCAA and Johnson v. NCAA are also awaiting further rulings.
The NCAA has been forced into a situation where it has to defend itself," Sam Ehrlich, a professor of sports law at Boise State University, explained to the FOS about the situation facing the NCAA today. ”
Judging from a series of recent reform measures, the situation of "encirclement, pursuit, blockade" has made the NCAA begin to "voluntarily abandon" some of its interests in exchange for overall stability.
According to the Daily Mail, on December 5, Charlie Baker, president of the NCAA organization, sent a letter to its Division-1 member schools, requesting the creation of a new department and allowing the universities to pay fees directly to the members, including the equity fees involved in the NIL agreement.
According to TA, the current sports budget of Division-1 member universities is up from $2 per yearRanging from $500 million to $5 million per year, 259 of the 350 schools spend less than $50 million per year.
In addition, the NCAA's rules for the transfer and transfer of major players have also been further reformed.
On December 6, U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey of Northern West Virginia ordered a ban on the NCAA's current transfer rules, alleging that the rule's waiver process violated federal antitrust laws, according to the Associated Press. In other words, the NCAA has temporarily lifted the ban on players who transfer to secondary transfers and schools, and the region is limited to West Virginia and six other states.
According to the Associated Press, Charlie Baker and college athletic leaders have recently made a long-term petition to Congress to help the NCAA create a federal law that would regulate how athletes are paid for NIL trades.
Releasing more rights and interests is the current means of maintaining stability in the NCAA, but in the face of the increasing number of "anti-monopoly" accusations and threats from multiple parties, the NCAA will have less and less room to operate. Whether or not the billions of dollars can be discarded depends on how determined the NCAA is in the coming years.