The latest absurdities in college sports
An overdue judicial smackdown. A flip flopping expert witness. An inconveniently curious Congresswoman. And, of course, more empty blather from the rich men who call the shots. He also dismissed the notion that said stipend was a response to the ongoing federal antitrust lawsuit brought by former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon.”We’ve been working on ty lawson jersey [a stipend] for two and a half years,” Emmert said. “They were talking about that long before I showed up. We don’t need a lawsuit to do the right thing. That’s important for people to know.”First of all, the O’Bannon case was filed nearly five years ago, making the stipend as PR bone toss idea both reasonable and chronologically consistent. (For another example of this strategy, see BountyGate and the rest of the NFL’s reaction to the threat of concussion litigation.) Moreover, Emmert is half right: The NCAA has been kicking around a cost of living stipend for a number of years because of another lawsuit.In 2006, a group of former nhl jersey size chart college football and basketball players sued the NCAA on antitrust grounds, arguing that restricting a scholarship to the cost of tuition, books, housing and meals was an unlawful restraint of trade. Two years later, the NCAA settled the class action case, White v. NCAA, by agreeing to establish a $10 million fund to reimburse college athletes for you guessed it educational expenses incurred beyond their scholarship amounts.Of course,discount nhl jerseys, this isn’t the first time that legal pressure mysteriously has coincided with the NCAA’s sudden magnanimity. In the 1980s, the association relinquished its iron fisted control of televised college football resulting in a bigger,discount nhl jerseys, more lucrative market for the sport after losing an antitrust case that went to the Supreme Court. More recently, a crushing federal court loss forced the NCAA to abandon a series of arbitrary and illegal pay caps it had placed on assistant coaches.As for the in progress stipend that Emmert touted? When the NCAA nhl jerseys cheap Division I Board of Directors approved a measure that allowed schools to give athletes up to $2,000 in additional funds note: did not require, just allowed member institutions voted the plan down. Because of amateurism concerns. Because smaller schools felt nba jerseys cheap they would not be able to afford a voluntary increase. Because those same schools felt it would make it harder for them to recruit. And because, in the not at all condescending words of one Tennessee Tech University mlb jersey size chart professor, “it seems most dubious to give some student athletes what amounts to “tattoo money.”Theoretically, the NCAA doesn’t require a legal revolver to its head to do the right thing, but history suggests that it sure doesn’t hurt.FILE NCAA President Mark Emmert (right) and Chair of the NCAA Executive Committee Ed Ray (left).(Photo: Michelle Pemberton / The Star)Imagine this: You’re an esteemed cancer researcher. So esteemed that you’ve written a college textbook on the subject. For 25 years, said text has cited the well established, causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer. Only now a major tobacco company is being sued. The company hires you as an expert witness for a modest rate, something like $1,200 per hour and suddenly, mysteriously, you begin making the case that smoking does not cause cancer.Would that be a wee bit hypocritical? If not downright dishonest?Enter Daniel Rubinfeld, professor of law and economics emeritus at Cal Berkeley and expert witness for the NCAA in the O’Bannon case.The core of the case which threatens to upend college sports as we know them is simple. O’Bannon and his fellow plaintiffs argue that amateurism is an illegal price fix. How so? As a group, NCAA schools limit financial compensation for college athletes to the cost of an athletic scholarship. Anything above and beyond that like a cash handshake from a booster,discount nfl jerseys 477, or being paid for one’s likeness to appear in a video game results in “ineligibility,” which is another way to say “group boycott.”Acting as a monopolistic cartel,discount nhl jerseys, NCAA schools restrain trade, distort competition and prevent athletes from realizing their tim duncan jersey market value. Such is the conclusion of just about every independent economist who has studied college sports. Of course, the NCAA disagrees, and so does Rubinfeld. In an O’Bannon case report, he claims that the association is actually a “joint venture that achieves procompetitive benefits” in other words, the NCAA is not a cartel, nor does it violate the letter and spirit of antirust law by harming competition. nfl jerseys Which sounds nice. One of those is the OPEC, the friendly oil producing co op who brought you the gas station lines of the 1970s. The other is the NCAA.Here’s what Rubinfeld writes, in a section unironically titled “The Cartelization of Intercollegiate Athletics”: profitability [in college sports] is the result of monopoly power, obtained via cartelization. The cartel organization is the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The NCAA restricts competition in a number of important activities. which would be characterized as cartelization is part of the reason the NCAA and the leagues and conferences . have been profitable as a result of the fact there has been andre iguodala jersey this coordination Rubinfeld is right. “Some” would characterize the NCAA as a cartel “some,” including Rubinfeld himself! Now, you might think that the association would know better than to paul pierce jersey hire an expert witness whose previously published testimony amounts to Mark Emmert did it in the library with a candlestick. custom mlb jerseys You might even think that Emmert and Company would have a burning sense of, well, not exactly shame, but at least reluctance to produce what political consultants and PR flacks alike call bad optics.You’d be mistaken. The same organization whose member schools happily bid up salaries for coaches and athletic directors, while insisting that giving college athletes the same economic rights as everyone else on campus and in society would be ruinously unaffordable. The same organization currently arguing that eliminating amateurism will make college sports less popular,mlb jersey 497, even though its own lawyer argued to the contrary during a 1984 Supreme Court case.In other words, you’d be a fool to assume that the NCAA cares a whit about honesty, consistency or logic. When Bilas pointed out the NCAA online store fiasco earlier this year or called attention to the infuriating case of former Richmond basketball player Jonathan Benjamin or made the case that enforcing amateurism while coaches and administrators drown in the flood of television money washing over big time college sports is just a wee bit unfair he was doing just that: making a case.By contrast, when I call Emmert a bureaucrat with a Gingrich ian coif, during a takedown of the NCAA’s rules protecting college athletes from Candyman and the Hamburglar the supposed evils of commercial exploitation, that’s ad hominem. Totally accurate, but ad hominem.