… From 1981 through 1984, OU and Georgia were partners in a lawsuit that changed college football.
They sued to end the NCAA’s regulation of televised football.
On Sept. 26, 1981, Oklahoma and Southern Cal played football in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. ABC televised the game to 48 states. The Carolinas received the Appalachian State- Citadel game. Appalachian State and The Citadel received the same amount of television revenue from that telecast as OU-USC received.
Most Saturdays, only one game a week was televised, either regionally or nationally. Teams were limited in number of appearances per year. Games such as OU-Texas and Bedlam regularly had to seek special permission for a local telecast and sometimes were denied. Some schools, including Kansas State and Virginia, literally had never had a football game televised.
That same Sept. 26, 1981, Nebraska hosted Penn State. Both were at the height of their glory. That game was not televised.
So OU and Georgia became the names behind the lawsuit that threatened the rigid television policies of the NCAA…
Coats said they learned that NCAA stood for “Never Compromise Anything Anytime. We tried to settle every time we met. OU and Georgia were somewhat uncomfortable. The NCAA had never lost a case.
The Alston ruling
How it started: In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the NCAA, saying that limits on educational benefits was in violation of antitrust law. In a particularly withering opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that, “The NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America.”
How it’s going: Pick any major issue in college football and odds are the Alston decision is looming in the background. From playoff expansion to regulating the name, image and likeness marketplace to putting some limits on transfers, the NCAA is hamstrung by antitrust concerns and the end result has been an effective end to all but the most basic oversight of the sport.
“[The court] decided we were in violation of antitrust, and we’re not going to give you the latitude we gave you before,” North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham said. “So we’re trying to get out of the antitrust issues but retain requirements of Title IX. The free market doesn’t have Title IX as an issue. And how do you handle these programs that generate money and balance that with programs that don’t? It’s a challenge.”
I honestly believe you don’t get Alston without NCAA vs. Board of Regents. What’s amazing about the entire process is that it took the NCAA decades of getting their asses kicked in antitrust suits before the message sunk in. They could have salvaged a lot had they been willing to compromise. Instead, this is all they’ve got now:
The prevailing hope is the federal government will step in and offer some guidance, particularly on NIL. But several commissioners expressed doubt that that would happen soon.
The alternative, Cunningham wondered, is to find a path to collective bargaining. It’s an idea that would’ve been unimaginable in NCAA circles just a few years ago, but that’s how quickly the landscape has changed, and several coaches who spoke to ESPN wondered if a players union was the inevitable path forward.
“That’s one of the outcomes that could happen is some type of agreement between those who participate on the field or the court and those who have control of the contracts and the money,” Cunningham said. “The other option is federal legislation. I don’t know which one of those is going to happen, but it certainly seems as though some type of a different economic model is going to emerge in the next couple years.”
And here’s the thing:
“If they had any concerns, I think some athletic directors were thinking in terms of perhaps overexposure, and I think the NCAA was using that as an argument,” said Vince Dooley, then Georgia’s coach and athletic director. “And it was a pretty good argument. You wondered if it would hurt your attendance.
“It did bring in more people that maybe didn’t have a chance to watch college football, begin to watch it. What it did was added more people that became interested in college football. More fans.”
Which, in turn, meant more money. And more money on top of that. Enough to fashion a result that would have satisfied all sides. Instead, we’ve got the same guys who refused to do anything to clean up the mess they created waiting for a white knight to come riding in to deal with the consequences. That’s primarily because the NCAA is scared shitless of defending another antitrust suit (with good justification, I might add).
“I don’t look at what we’re doing as being outside the bounds of what a lot of our peers are doing,” Miami AD Dan Radakovich said of several high-profile deals for Hurricanes players. “There’s that razor’s edge of pay-for-play versus a student-athlete utilizing their name, image and likeness to move forward a business. Nationally, that ditch has been jumped. We’re in that circumstance when some states don’t have any rules or restrictions. It’s critical we get some federal guidelines to make sure everybody is playing by the same set of rules.”
Well played, everyone.
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