NCAA Wins Ruling in Federal Court

Any restraints in the rules of the NCAA (a limit on the number of TV broadcasts, a bar against payment to players), the court ruled, must be shown in court to be reasonable.

Lastly, both the NCAA and O’Bannon can stress that the O’Bannon case raises unique applications of antitrust law that deserve attention from the national’s highest court. “It does not require more”, the decision said.

The NCAA won a victory by avoiding Wilken’s injunction that would have allowed deferred payments to players.

The NCAA and plaintiffs’ attorneys have 14 days to seek a full review from the court of appeals and 90 days to petition the Supreme Court.

At the 9th Circuit, Judge Jay Bybee writes for the majority that the trial judge was largely correct, but that cash compensation packages can’t be ordered up as a remedy just yet.

In the report, he also goes on to say: “The difference between offering student-athletes education-related compensation and offering them cash sums untethered to educational expenses is not minor; it is a quantum leap”.

The ruling did have a few of the same “amateurism is amateurism because amateurism” language we’ve seen from the NCAA in recent years, however. “At that point the NCAA will have surrendered its amateurism principles entirely and transitioned from its “particular brand of football” to minor league status”. The ruling was handled by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Wilken ruled last August that the NCAA’s rules at the time violated antitrust laws.

Former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon in 2010.

“We will make those judgments in short order”, Remy said.

Until this year, the NCAA prevented schools from doing even that, banning pay for anything beyond scholarships for tuition, books room and board. “There was sufficient evidence in the record to support the award”. “No”, Thomas said. “But it’s absolutely a strengthening factor for the NCAA”. I don’t read the opinion that way.

That said, the case is likely to continue, with previous comments from the NCAA’s top lawyer suggesting it could head all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, according to Michael Marot of the Associated Press (h/t Yahoo News).

In a closely watched case with sweeping implications for the multi-billion dollar college sports empire, a federal appeals court on Wednesday dealt a damaging blow to the NCAA’s grip on student-athletes but left intact a cornerstone of the organization’s fight to preserve its current way of doing business.

“We’re going to try to fully develop the record to establish that the conferences could compete and pay student-athletes without interfering with amateurism”, Berman said. But judges ruled that their argument was “not credible”. When those regulations truly serve procompetitive purposes, courts should not hesitate to uphold them. “The point was a significant one”. They could not stop schools from providing full scholarships to student-athletes but took out the proposal for deferred cash.

The stipends have also been pitched as additional assistance rather than payments to players because they are calculated via a formula and uniform for each player at a school.