O’Bannon vs. the NCAA: The complete timeline, results and more

A year after a district court found in the Ed O’Bannon trial that the NCAA’s amateurism rules were breaking antitrust laws, a court of appeals partially affirmed and partially reversed that decision. The circuit court found that the NCAA does break antitrust law, and that it cannot cap the value of a scholarship below the cost of attendance.

However, it reversed the decision that would have allowed schools to pay athletes $5,000 per year in deferred compensation. This could be interpreted as a win for either side (it’s probably great for the NCAA in the short term but better for athletes in the long term), and it’s hard to say whether it’ll be appealed.

A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that the NCAA violates antitrust laws by curbing how much athletes can receive while playing collegiate sports.

The ruling did have some of the same “amateurism is amateurism because amateurism” language we’ve seen from the NCAA in recent years, however.

Next time you grill out you might notice a little something different if you use Kingsford Charcoal: a special bag that takes aim at the NCAA and supports former UCLA star Ed O’Bannon.

Claiming their product “Doesn’t burn athletes,” Kingsford will give $1 for every tweet (up to $25,000) with the hashtag “#PayEd,” referring to the NCAA’s unwillingness to pay athletes for using their likeness, a case that went before courts and was won by O’Bannon.

Texas athletic director Steve Patterson said on Wednesday that the university will start paying athletes $10,000 per year under new NCAA rules. “The money will cover college expenses that aren’t covered by a traditional full scholarship and give each player $5,000 in compensation for the university’s use of his image,” the Dallas Morning News reports.

That is really nothing new, and it’s not a “payment” in the traditional sense of the word. However, $10,000 looks like a large number, and it caused a lot of people to assume that this will start a bidding war in college sports.

First thing’s first: the NBA Draft age minimum is a bad, selfish policy. It essentially forces 18-year-olds into an often gross college recruiting process and delays their entrance into the proper workforce solely to the benefit of NBA front offices, who would prefer to have more data and tape on prospects before choosing them.

Of course, those same front offices once raced to pick high school students high in the first round, eager to land generational stars and in love with potential. There is no evidence the age minimum has decreased the number of bad picks or improved the team-building process at all. Meanwhile, the best prospects in the country end up spending an often shambolic seven months pretending to be students when they plan to join the NBA at first opportunity. The policy forces a warped version of college on players without immediate need for it.

The NCAA will appeal Judge Claudia Wilken’s ruling against the organization in the recent Ed O’Bannon case, an expected move announced by the organization in a press release Sunday.

The ruling was actually fairly favorable to the NCAA despite allowing athletes to receive money from schools for use of their names, images and likenesses. Not much has changed: The NCAA will still be able to control that flow of income, as they can set a salary cap (no lower than $5,000) and can bar athletes from marketing themselves.

Steve Spurrier is a national treasure. He’s such a great hater that we can’t make up Steve Spurrier hatin’ quotes that are better than Steve Spurrier’s actual hatin’ quotes.

Earlier this week he discussed the new SEC Network deal that made his players a grand total of $0. Now that the O’Bannon case has been decided and players are allowed to receive some money, he made his opinions felt again:

As news of O’Bannon judge Claudia Wilken’s decision against the NCAA spread Friday night, the plaintiffs and their supporters issued statement after statement lauding their historic win over the NCAA as a total success.

O’Bannon called it a “game-changer.” One of his attorneys called it “reasonable but significant.” Activist groups like the College Athletes Players Association and Taylor Branch and many fans and former players celebrated the end of an injustice. Why?

Judge Claudia Wilken of the Northern District of California issued a 99-page opinion and injunction, stating that the NCAA can no longer stop schools from giving athletes money based on their names, images and likenesses (NIL), and it is not allowed to impose a salary cap below $5,000. That money can be put in a trust.

However, the NCAA scored a major win in that it can still stop athletes from marketing themselves, since Wilken claimed that is a legitimate pro-competitive rule.

The NCAA announced changes to its “autonomy” proposal on Friday, and it looks like the big conferences are going to get more of what they want. In order to change the rules governing the 65 biggest schools — those located within the Power 5 conferences — legislation will have to be passed in one of two ways:

The NCAA created a handy chart to help you remember how it works:

If you’re new to soccer, then you might have asked yourself, “how is it that England got sent home so quickly?” After all, the club-level English Premier League is one of the best in the world. England have all of the prerequisites to be an international soccer power: a large population that cares about the sport, a sizable economy, and a democratic political system. Additionally, the English claim to have invented the modern game, so they ought to have a leg up based on tradition.

And yet England’s national-level tradition has been early exits. Take it away, Nick Hornby:

The O’Bannon trial wrapped up Friday night in the Northern District of California. Judge Claudia Wilken heard 24 witnesses from both the Ed O’Bannon plaintiffs and the NCAA.

And now she’ll determine the future of college sports. The crux of her decision is whether the NCAA has caused anticompetitive harm through its compensation limits on athletes.

On the final day of the O’Bannon trial, the plaintiffs have submitted their recommendations for how to enable players to receive a bigger cut of the NCAA’s revenue and to take control of their own likenesses. The final decision is up to Judge Claudia Wilken, and the NCAA will surely appeal any losses, but the document gives a guideline of what the plaintiffs envision in a post-O’Bannon world.

Here’s the full document -- the actual proposals begin on page six:

We created a list of people you should be following to stay updated on the O’Bannon v. NCAA college athletics trial, underway in Oakland (Monday-Friday, 11:30 a.m. ET-4:30 p.m. ET). Make sure to follow them on Twitter, or just keep an eye on this page. There’s of course no television broadcast or streaming of the trial, so the widget below is as good as it gets.

We’ll also be adding longer commentary in this StoryStream as the trial develops (and continually bumping this Twitter list to the top of it, to make it easy for you to find).

The NCAA has had some witness issues during the O’Bannon trial, from Big Ten commish Jim Delany accidentally making points for the plaintiffs to the Texas women’s athletic director indirectly providing some damning evidence. Now NCAA economic expert Daniel Rubinfeld has pushed the organization into an even deeper hole.

We’ve seen this coming since the beginning of the trial, when the plaintiffs pointed out that Rubinfeld has called the NCAA a cartel before — the exact opposite of what he should be doing. Because of that, he was already in a bit of a hole, and he apparently decided to grasp at anything to pull him out of it. So the day started with Rubinfeld explaining that the NCAA isn’t really that bad of a cartel.

Dr. Mark A. Emmert is a busy man. Too busy to take in a minor league baseball game, apparently.

Emmert took the stand Thursday. As part of this testimony, he maintained that college players are truly amateurs, and that a court ruling in their favor would destroy that status, converting college sports into pro sports. The problem with that, according to Emmert:

The testimony of SEC executive associate commissioner Greg Sankey at Tuesday’s O’Bannon trial raised the issue of one of the NCAA’s biggest boogeymen: boosters. The organization argues that if athletes are allowed to be paid, boosters could circumvent the system and pay players more to go to certain schools.

Booster payments already happen on a pretty wide scale, despite the NCAA’s preference to just ignore them. But even disregarding that, this NCAA defense banked on Judge Claudia Wilken agreeing that booster payments are relevant to the case -- and that they are, as the NCAA will have us believe, inherently evil:

A common defense of the NCAA model is that if players were paid, small schools wouldn’t be able to afford to keep up. Of course, those schools already can’t keep up — that’s why Alabama, not Troy, gets all the top recruits — but what’s misunderstood is that an NCAA loss in the O’Bannon case wouldn’t necessarily put more of a financial hardship on small schools.

That didn’t stop Conference USA commissioner Britton Banowsky from pushing forward the “small schools will struggle” theory in his testimony at the O’Bannon trial on Monday, claiming that some schools would be forced to drop football if some revenue had to be shared with athletes.

Texas administrators can’t stop talking about the potential compensation of college athletes, but the NCAA probably hopes they do soon. Previously, we fact-checked Texas athletic director Steve Patterson after his comments about the Northwestern unionization effort, and we showed why Longhorns women’s athletic director Chris Plonsky actually hurt the NCAA with her testimony in the O’Bannon lawsuit.

Now, Patterson is back in the news again, having given a forceful interview about the NCAA’s critics to the Sports Business Journal. Make sure to read the full interview — go for the hilarity, stay for the Jay Bilas attack — but here are Patterson’s five most ridiculous quotes and what makes them so wrong.

This trial has now seen three different ways we can calculate how much money the NCAA’s members make.

1. The way that shows almost everyone is broke.

Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany loves the Rose Bowl.

At one point, he refused to support the College Football Playoff, claiming that it could ruin a game deep in tradition. From the New York Times:

Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany is known for saying whatever he wants. Unfortunately, that tendency is hurting the NCAA, the side he testified for in the O’Bannon case on Friday.

In his cross-examination, Delany discussed all the ways the NCAA is currently doing a poor job of integrating athletics and academics — the exact opposite of what the organization needs to prove.

The O’Bannon plaintiffs spent the better part of their cross-examination of NCAA president Mark Emmert showing the hypocrisy of college sports. They did this by presenting evidence of rampant commercialism in the industry. Attorney Bill Isaacson showed Emmert photos of Wisconsin players in front of Vizio ads, Vanderbilt players in front of a Dollar General-sponsored school banner, and even a Jameis Winston trading card on Florida State’s online store.

The goal was to show that athletes are exploited by their schools for commercial gain, even though the NCAA says its rules are in place to protect athletes from commercialism. Emmert didn’t disagree, describing the commercial exploits as “inappropriate” on numerous occasions. In doing so, he deflected blame from himself to the schools.

Remember when NCAA critic Jay Bilas revealed that the NCAA website’s official store was set up to profit off of current amateur athletes?

While the jerseys in question didn’t bear player names, they included the numbers worn by current stars -- who can’t see any share of profits -- and were connected to player names via the website’s database. That was against at least the spirit of the rules, and those results were scrubbed. NCAA president Mark Emmert said he didn’t find the sale of athlete merch appropriate, for obvious reasons.