Source: USA TODAY
Lawyers for the plaintiffs in an anti-trust lawsuit against the NCAA concerning the use of college athletes’ names and likenesses on Friday asked a federal judge to reconsider the part of her class-action certification ruling that is preventing the plaintiffs from seeking billions of dollars in damages relating to past television broadcasts.
And the newly unredacted version of a document that had been filed by the NCAA reveals just how much money would be at stake.
In discussing the damages modeling offered by the plaintiffs’ experts, the NCAA’s filing said the plaintiffs were seeking $3.2 billion in damages for a period from the 2005-06 school year through the 2010-11 school year. According to an excerpt of one expert’s report that was including in the NCAA filing, NCAA Division I athletics departments had $47.8 billion in aggregate revenues for those years.
U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken has granted class-action status to the part of the case in which the plaintiffs are seeking to bar the NCAA from placing limits on the compensation that athletes can receive in exchange for playing sports.
Though that part of the ruling disappointed the NCAA, Wilken’s refusal to grant class-action status to the damages claim disappointed the plaintiffs. Absent class-action status, only the roughly 20 named plaintiffs – led by former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon – will be able to seek monetary damages for the use of their names and likenesses in various marketing activities and TV broadcasts during the period covered by the lawsuit.
In denying the plaintiffs’ bid for a class that could seek monetary damages from the NCAA, Wilken said that the plaintiffs could not identify a feasible way of determining which current and former athletes were “actually harmed” by the NCAA’s compensation limits on athletes.
The judge also pointed out the difficulty “in determining which student-athletes were actually depicted in videogames.” Noting that major-college football rosters have as many as 105 players, the judge said that the videogames’ inclusion of 68 players per team and that NCAA football teams allow multiple players to wear the same jersey number, “makes it impossible to determine” which athletes suffered harm from being in the game “without conducting thousands of individualized comparisons between real-life college football players and their potential videogame counterparts.”
In Friday’s filing, the plaintiffs contend that using preseason rosters of the teams from past years is an “inherently reasonable” way of determining which athletes were harmed and that the plaintiffs’ experts have included in reports filed with the court a file that “contains the names of all class members on the roster of any team that was broadcast or rebroadcast on television from mid 2005 through mid 2012.”
Steve Berkowitz is on Twitter @ByBerkowitz.
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