Welcome back to Balancing the Brand, I’m your host Adrianna Kilian and this is the podcast where we go beyond college athletes looking at student-athlete mental health and NIL monetary pressure. For today’s episode I am going to be going over NIL rules and court cases surrounding NIL in recent years. 

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With NIL beginning to spread to universities across the country in 2016, collegiate athletics was about to change for a very long time. Student athletes were now going to be paid for their person and image by external businesses and companies. 

O’Bannon vs. NCAA was brought to court in 2015, when former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon noticed that a character in EA’s NCAA Basketball ’09 video game looked a little too familiar. His likeness was depicted as a character in the game without him receiving any residual payment when they were using his personal brand for their own monetary gain even though he wasn’t a current athlete. O’Bannon played for UCLA from the years 1991 to 1995. Numerous players began to realize that they were also not being compensated for their name, image, and likeness being used and thus joined the lawsuit. O’Bannon was the main face on this case against the NCAA and was able to secure almost $60 million settlement to himself and several other athletes apart of the case. However, the NCAA’s rules did not change. 

This case is known as one of the biggest against the NCAA and was really the start of cases against the NCAA regarding NIL. About a decade later Alston vs. NCAA became another prominent case very similar to O’Bannon’s case. However, this one made it to the Supreme Court. 

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Alston vs. NCAA is a case previously mentioned in my episode with ASU’s Alonzo Jones. According to a review done by Emory Law News Center, this case led by active and former Division 1 football and men’s and women’s basketball players, foug  ht against the NCAA - and the eleven D1 conferences that make up the NCAA - due to restrictions on student-athlete benefits and compensation. The court ruled that while the NCAA’s rule limiting undergraduate athletic scholarships and other compensation regarding athletic performance was not to be disturbed, they did vote in favor of altering the NCAA’s rules relating to the limiting of education related benefits that universities may offer to student athletes. 

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In Feburary there comes a day that most graduating high school student-athletes look forward to, National Signing Day. This is when high school athlete officially announce where they are committing to play sports for the following year. When they do so, they sign a Letter of Intent and the Statement of Financial Aid. Whether they realize it or not, both of these documents are contracts that are binding to the school of their choice. The NCAA Bylaws are included in these documents which not only state that the athlete must remain eligible throughout their time at the university in order to continue to receive their scholarship, but also that NCAA Bylaw Section 12.5 is included and must be upheld. 

NCAA Bylaw Section 12.5 states that “promotional activities” or the use of the players “name, picture and appearance is permitted by schools, non-profits and conferences. The athlete would then not be allowed to accept any kind of monetary or material value from the use of their name, image, and likeness. Signing these documents basically meant that you were signing away the rights to profit off your person as so many athletes do today and are getting paid thousands and millions of dollars. Whether the athlete is a walk-on or a player without scholarship or a player with scholarship, the athlete is expected to sign the forms despite there being no date where the rights to name, image and likeness would be returned to the athlete. 

The Bylaw is still in tact today but was adjusted to fit the rise of NIL deals at various universities across the country. It has been adjusted to allow players to receive a form of compensation for promotional activities but it is imperative that the athlete perform some type of acitivity or service in order to receive the compensation. Simply being compensated to play the sport does violate the NCAA’s amateurism rules. 

However, with there being a lack of cost cap on NIL deals, I wonder what changes may come to the NCAA’s ruling on the Bylaw and amateurism rules in the future. 

REFERENCES: 

20-512 national collegiate athletic assn. v. Alston (06/21/ ... NATIONAL COLLEGIATE ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION v. ALSTON ET AL. (2021, June 21). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20-512_gfbh.pdf  

Free sad ominous music download. Tunetank. (n.d.). https://tunetank.com/search/sad%20ominous/  

Maghamez, J. A. (2014). An All-Encompassing Primer on Student-Athlete Name, Image, and Likeness Rights and How O'Bannon v. NCAA and Keller v. NCAA Forever Changed College Athletics. Liberty UL Rev., 9, 313. 

Scotus analysis: NCAA V. Alston: Emory University School of Law: Atlanta, GA. SCOTUS Analysis: NCAA v. Alston | Emory University School of Law | Atlanta, GA. (2021, August 2). https://law.emory.edu/news-and-events/releases/2021/08/scotus-yoo-ncaa-v-alston.html