NCAA Loses Its Grip
News Flash.
The NCAA has just lost the Ed O’Bannon case. A decision has been handed down by a judge that says the NCAA has been unreasonably restraining trade by preventing the athletes, who perform on the playing fields, arenas and courts, from benefiting from their own names, images and likenesses. In other words, the NCAA, which made multi-million dollar deals with TV and licensing deals with various video games companies based on the entertainment value gained by utilizing college athletes, but who forced the athletes, who did all the work and made all of the profits possible, to do it for free, now have to allow these athletes to be paid. The NCAA didn’t want this decision because they didn’t want to see any of the athletes get compensated with money they felt entitled to control. Put even simpler, the NCAA can no longer exploit the athletes for free any more.
Reaction. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Why am I laughing? You always laugh when the sanctimonious, pompous ass gets his comeuppance. You always like it when the organization that arrogantly hands down unfair, unjust decisions goes down to humiliating defeat. You always like it when greedy Scrooge gets taken down by all the underdog Bob Cratchits of the world. This laughter at the NCAA losing this decision is for all of the athletes who got suspended by the NCAA for borrowing a few bucks from a coach to be able to go home and visit a sickly mother. Or for all of the athletes who tore up a knee and never were able to make a career in pro sports, even though their university and the NCAA made off quite well off of their performances on the field.
The NCAA gets a huge chunk of money, something like three quarters of a billion dollars to televise the entire March Madness basketball tournament every year. The people tuning in to the basketball tournament do this to watch the teams and the players, not to see a bunch of stuffy old men in suits. Now, after fighting all of these years to keep from ever having to “pay up,” the NCAA is finally losing some of their monopolistic grip on their empire.
There will be more developments in this situation as both sides get time to consider the ramifications of the decision. But for now, there is a huge sense of irony that the policing organization for college sports that arrogantly laid down all those penalties to all those universities over the principle that athletes should NOT be paid for their performance, now faces the fact that a court has ruled that their reasons for penalizing them are against the rules of law.
In fact, it’s downright funny.
