As college basketball’s premier tournament continues, sports attorney Jeff Kessler has an even bigger prize in mind than the NCAA crown.
On behalf of several current college athletes, Kessler this week filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA and the five biggest conferences (the Southeastern, Big Ten, Pacific-12, Atlantic Coast and Big 12).
The suit takes direct aim at the model that limits compensation for college athletes to tuition, room and board and minor incidentals — while placing serious constraints on what they may earn away from campus. The schools impose these restrictions even as the athletes generate hundreds of millions in revenues.
“In no other business — and college sports is big business — would it ever be suggested that the people who are providing the essential services work for free,” Kessler told ESPN.
He has a point. Certainly it leads to some perverse incentives. For example, porn actress Miriam Weeks, a k a Belle Knox, has built her fame on being a student at a premier university. Now she is supplementing her skinflick income with book deals, a sex-toy line and public appearances. A New York strip club advertised her as the “Duke University student slash XXX hottie.”
In sharp contrast, despite freshman Jabari Parker’s undeniable value to Duke as a star basketball player, NCAA regulations forbid him from, say, writing and profiting from a book about his experience with the Blue Devils, whose season ended Friday with a loss to the Mercer University Bears.
To put this in perspective, there is more spending on advertising for March Madness than for the Super Bowl. And the NCAA’s multi-network TV deal brings in about $770 million a year. The student athletes get none of this. Instead, many leave without degrees or ones that are worthless.
We’re not sure Kessler’s suit is the right way to go. But so long as college sports puts academics and degrees second to revenues, it’s hard to argue that the people who produce that pie shouldn’t get a fair slice.