Rastall Ramblings: Lawsuit Latest Example of College Sports Chaos
As the saying goes for college athletics: Billable hours remain undefeated.
The last handful of years in college sports have been marked by important court cases to decide the fate of the future of conferences, revenue sharing for athletes, the legality of name, image and likeness (NIL) deals, rules for transfers and everything in between.
The latest landmark legal case to bubble to the forefront in college football specifically came last week when the University of Wisconsin–Madison sued the University of Miami, alleging tampering regarding the transfer of cornerback Xavier Lucas from the Badgers to the Hurricanes this past winter.
Wisconsin accuses Miami of tortious interference — causing a breach of contract between Wisconsin’s NIL collective and Lucas.
The drama of this case stemmed from Lucas’s decision to enter the transfer portal a week before Christmas despite signing a two-year revenue sharing agreement with Wisconsin, which would kick in this summer once the House v. NCAA settlement (which will legally allow schools to pay athletes directly for the first time) officially goes into effect.
Wisconsin pushed back by refusing to enter Lucas into the transfer portal, which Lucas decided to circumvent entirely by withdrawing from UW–Madison and enrolling at Miami.
Since the House v. NCAA settlement isn’t in effect until the start of July, Wisconsin and other Big Ten schools have been using a revenue sharing framework provided by the conference for agreements like the one Wisconsin had with Lucas. The Big Ten has publicly backed Wisconsin in this matter.
Wisconsin going directly at Miami with accusations of tampering could lead to widespread ramification on college athletics depending on how this lawsuit plays out. Tampering in the age of NIL and the transfer portal is one of those problems that everyone knows is happening and complains about, yet essentially everyone is doing it and there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to combat it.
If Wisconsin wins this legal battle, perhaps it has the potential to curb tampering to some degree — maybe even significantly so. But even if it does, it would still feel like putting a Band-Aid on a crack in a dam. Though schools are soon going to be allowed to provide funds directly to athletes, the “student-athletes” will still not be employees of the universities.
In the end, athletes being recognized as employees in some fashion in which they enter legally enforceable contracts with specific universities seems like the only way for college athletics to escape the Wild West of the NIL and transfer portal era.
This is not to be mistaken for a pining for the bygone era of amateurism. A model that enforced amateurism on the people playing the sports while the NCAA and its member universities, conference commissioners, coaches and broadcast networks raked in the profits of a multibillion-dollar enterprise was brazenly unfair and a clear antitrust violation that college sports was exempted from for years for no real coherent reason.
College sports power brokers refused to give an inch on matters like NIL until forced to do so at long last by the courts. Rather than read the tea leaves and get out front of the shifting tides, they abdicated their responsibility and allowed chaos to take over.
That’s not to dismiss the complexities of upending the athlete compensation model to one where they’d be more akin to employees. Conflicting interests between different conferences and even different schools within the same conference, disparities between the haves and have nots, the impact on non-revenue NCAA sports and Title IX implications make this all quite tricky to navigate. The exact details would need to be ironed out by people far smarter than me.
However, this much should be obvious: a patchwork landscape decided by various lawsuits and court decisions is not going to cure all that ails college athletics.
