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 officially opened. 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" has been a decades-long dispute surrounding college athletes and the NCAA.
According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to sell an individual'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 penalties, and they would be disqualified.
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 student-athletes violated monopoly law. Subsequently, the NCAA lifted restrictions to allow student-athletes to monetize the NIL.
In the first year after the lifting of the ban on NIL, 75 percent of college athletes received sponsorships, with a total estimated revenue of $917 million, or an average of $3,711 per person, according to sports marketing platform Opendorse.
But this NIL benefit is only a drop in the bucket in terms of the league's income.
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 media rights revenue every year, and this figure will be close to $5 billion by 2026.
By way of comparison, the NIL market is expected to grow by nearly 20% in 2023 from last year's $1 billion, according to Opendorse's forecast. In other words, all NCAA players can only earn $1.2 billion a year.
Of course, this is only NCAA-authorized to share some of the NIL rights with players, and it is only "less than one in one" for the overall benefit involved. The question of "amateur, professional" is whether colleges and the NCAA need to pay college players, which is also the lion's share of the NCAA's interests.
The NCAA has been unwilling to budge on this core dispute.
In 2014, former Northwestern University quarterback Kain Colter and other members founded the College Athletes 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 bargain collectively. 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 to the team and the NCAA for wages. But after a year and a half of negotiations, in August 2015, the NLRB finally rejected the legitimacy of Northwestern's proposed "union" status.
In this ruling, the NLRB's decision makes it clear in legal sense that "student-athletes" are still "students" and not employees employed by the school.
Since then, as the commercial value of the NCAA has intensified, litigation has become more frequent, ranging from the question of whether college players are college or NCAA employees, to disputes involving NIL's rights. In addition to the NLRB v. NCAA trial, several other cases have also entered a critical juncture in the past two weeks.
In 2020, a federal antitrust lawsuit was filed in House v. NCAA, which seeks the NCAA to compensate all players who did not make a profit from the NCAA games that played in the NCAA's top five leagues (June 15, 2016 to July 1, 2021) before the NIL was lifted.
On Nov. 3, Judge Claudia Wilken ruled and approved three proposed ordinances. According to the 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 athletic departments.
In addition, Matt Bewley et al. v. NCAA and Johnson v. NCAA are also awaiting further ruling.
"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, told 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, NCAA organization president Charlie Baker sent a letter to its Division-1 member schools, asking for a new department and allowing these universities to pay fees directly to student-athletes, including equity fees involved in the NIL agreement.
According to TA, current athletic budgets at Division-1 member universities range from $250 million per year to $5 million per year, with 259 of the 350 schools spending less than $50 million per year.
In addition, the NCAA's rules for the transfer and transfer of college athletes 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 are recently making 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" complaints and threats from many parties, the NCAA will have less and less room to operate. Whether or not the billions of dollars can be discarded will depend on how determined the NCAA is in the coming years.