NCAA Loses O'Bannon Case

[peplaw06]

Judge rules against NCAA in O'Bannon case
By TIM DAHLBERG (AP Sports Writer)

College football and basketball players could be in line for paydays worth thousands of dollars once they leave school after a landmark ruling Friday that may change the way the NCAA does business.

A federal judge ruled that the NCAA can't stop players from selling the rights to their names, images and likenesses, striking down NCAA regulations that prohibit them from getting anything other than scholarships and the cost of attendance at schools.

U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken in Oakland, California, ruled in favor of former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon and 19 others in a lawsuit that challenged the NCAA's regulation of college athletics on antitrust grounds. The injunction she issued allows players at big schools to have money generated by television contracts put into a trust fund to pay them when they leave.

In a partial victory for the NCAA, though, Wilken said the body that governs college athletics could set a cap on the money paid to athletes, as long as it allows at least $5,000 per athlete per year of competition. Individual schools could offer less money, she said, but only if they don't unlawfully conspire among themselves to set those amounts.

That means FBS football players and Division I basketball players who are on rosters for four years could potentially get around $20,000 when they leave school. Wilken said she set the $5,000 annual threshold to balance the NCAA's fears about huge payments to players.

''The NCAA's witnesses stated that their concerns about student-athlete compensation would be minimized or negated if compensation was capped at a few thousand dollars per year,'' Wilken wrote.

The NCAA said it disagreed with the decision, but was still reviewing it.

But Sonny Vaccaro, the former athletic shoe representative who recruited O'Bannon to launch the suit, said it was a huge win for college athletes yet to come.

''The kids who are going to benefit from this are kids who don't even know what we did today,'' Vaccaro said. ''It may only be $5,000 but it's $5,000 more than they get now.''

O'Bannon issued a statement calling the decision ''a game changer'' and precisely what he was after when he joined the suit.

''I just wanted to right a wrong,'' O'Bannon said. ''It is only fair that your own name, image and likeness belong to you, regardless of your definition of amateurism. Judge Wilken's ruling ensures that basic principle shall apply to all participants in college athletics.''

The ruling comes after a five-year battle by O'Bannon and others on behalf of college athletes to receive a share of the billions of dollars generated by college athletics by huge television contracts. O'Bannon, who was MVP of the 1995 UCLA national championship basketball team, said he signed on as lead plaintiff after seeing his image in a video game authorized by the NCAA that he was not paid for.

Any payments to athletes would not be immediate. The ruling said regulations on pay will not take effect until the start of the next FBS football and Division I basketball recruiting cycle. Wilken said they will not affect any prospective recruits before July 1, 2016. The NCAA could also appeal, and has said previously that it would take the issue all the way to the Supreme Court.

Former athletes will not be paid, because they gave up their right to damages in a pre-trial move so the case would be heard by a judge, not a jury.

As part of her ruling, Wilken rejected both the NCAA's definition of amateurism and its justification for not paying players. But she did not prohibit the NCAA from enforcing all of its other rules and regulations and said that some restrictions on paying players may still serve a limited purpose if they are necessary to maintain the popularity of major college football and basketball.

''The big picture is the NCAA lost the definition of amateurism it has been pushing for years,'' said Michael Carrier, a Rutgers law professor and antitrust expert.

Wilken was not asked to rule on the fairness of a system that pays almost everyone but the athletes themselves. Instead, the case was centered on federal antitrust law and whether the prohibition against paying players promotes the game of college football and does not restrain competition in the marketplace.

During a three-week trial in June, attorneys for the NCAA said moving away from the concept of amateurism where players participated for the love of the game would drive spectators away from college sports and would upset the competitive balance among schools and conferences.

Several players testified during the trial that they viewed playing sports as their main occupation in college, saying the many hours they had to devote to the sport made it difficult - if not impossible - to function like regular students.

''I was an athlete masquerading as a student,'' O'Bannon said at trial. ''I was there strictly to play basketball. I did basically the minimum to make sure I kept my eligibility academically so I could continue to play.''

Witnesses called by the NCAA spoke of the education provided to athletes as payment for their services and said the college model has functioned well for more than a century. They contended that paying players would make college sports less popular and could force schools to cut other programs funded by the hundreds of millions of dollars taken in by big-time athletics.

The lawsuit was part of a tide of pressure on the NCAA to change the amateur model. Football players at Northwestern University have pushed to be allowed to unionize, and other lawsuits have claimed that athletes have a right to better compensation. This week, the NCAA's board voted to allow the five wealthiest conferences in the country to set their own rules, paving the way for the 65 schools in those conferences to potentially offer richer scholarships and health benefits to players.

Carrier said the outcome might not be scary at all because the money may not be huge and will be paid only after a player's career is over.

''We'll soon see that this isn't the end of the world as we know it,'' Carrier said.

''The irony of this is that a lot of the other changes in college sports going on were made because of this impending ruling.''

 

[jeebus]

Ridiculous

 

[peplaw06]

Care to elaborate...?

 

[peplaw06]

Why the O'Bannon victory is a win for everyone who stopped believing the NCAA's charade
By Dan Wetzel

At the start, this had been about finding someone to stand up and say the excuses were nonsense, the rhetoric was empty, to say the NCAA was just making it up as it went along.

It was about Ed O'Bannon wondering how the NCAA could partner in the release of a basketball video game featuring classic college basketball teams, including his 1995 UCLA squad, featuring a player that clearly was him – "my number, left-handed, looked like me," O'Bannon said – only to claim it wasn't him.

It was about Harry Flournoy, a starter on the historic 1966 Texas Western basketball team, seeing the NCAA, decades later, cash in on the story of the first all-black starting five to win a national title against establishment backlash (including, the players believed, the NCAA itself). They did it by suggesting that somehow Flournoy had relinquished his rights by signing some paper in El Paso way back when.

"Really?" Flournoy said. "Go find it, what paper? I never signed anything like that." Even if he didn't, the NCAA said, they had the power to assume the right to his likeness in perpetuity.

It was about Oscar Robertson seeing an NCAA-partnered trading card featuring him as a freshman at Cincinnati, nearly 60 years ago, with what was supposedly a swath of his "game jersey" attached and wondering not so much why he didn't get a cut of the proceeds, but why no one ever bothered to ask his opinion on the deal, or whether that was actually his jersey.

"The arrogance of the NCAA to say, 'We have the right to do this,' is what troubles me the most," Robertson said.

That was the start of O'Bannon v. NCAA, and for the ones who finally stood up and said enough was enough, the ruling in their favor Friday afternoon by U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken was cause for celebration.

Finally, someone was just acknowledging the charade for what it was.

"I just wanted to right a wrong," O'Bannon said Friday night. "[We're all] celebrating a big victory tonight … a win where justice was served."

That much was true. Wilken rejected so many of the NCAA's classic arguments that often just go around in circles – you can't be paid because you're an amateur and you're an amateur because you don't get paid.

The case had evolved from the early days when this was just about name and likeness rights and turned into a showdown between an entrenched entity and a group of equally committed reformers. It became complicated and nuanced and confusing.

At its core, however, this was about putting college sports leaders' feet to the fire and blowing up many of their base ideals.

Wilken had no time for the suggestion that if players got a cut of the ever-expanding revenue pie, fans would flee. She couldn't follow the NCAA's claim that limiting compensation for athletes somehow enhanced academic performance.

She rejected the idea that anything more than tuition, room and board would upset competitive balance, because in a world of $100 million dollar facilities and rich coaching contracts, there isn't any competitive balance now.

She scoffed at the old saber-rattling theory that allowing schools to offer additional compensation would cause them to run from big-time sports and go Division III.

At one point in her 99-page ruling, she seemed particularly baffled by the NCAA claiming the reason more and more schools upgrade their football and basketball teams to the top division is not because it might result in more money or prestige, but because of a fondness and respect for the rules of amateurism. If they loved amateurism so much, why not drop down to Division III?

"This theory is implausible," Wilken wrote.

She seemed to find a lot of the NCAA's decades-old logic implausible.

So she issued an injunction preventing the NCAA "from enforcing any rules or bylaws that would prohibit its member schools and conferences from offering their FBS football or Division I basketball recruits a limited share of the revenues generated from the use of their names, images, and likenesses in addition to a full grant-in-aid." The NCAA has vowed to appeal.

While it was significant, it wasn't Armageddon for the NCAA. There's a cap on deferred compensation. She didn't mandate pay. She didn't say players could just run out and try to get their own endorsements.

It was a somewhat narrow legal ruling: a victory for the plaintiffs, a blow to the NCAA, but not a knockout. At least, not yet. Wilken still has two additional antitrust suits against the NCAA on her docket, and who knows what else this decision will create. These things can snowball in a hurry and there's huge money at stake. We'll see.

That's the future. This was simply round one, with so many questions and variances still to come. Any analysis that declares with certainty what's coming is folly.

O'Bannon always said he wasn't trying to end college sports, which had been so good to him. Many of the most successful and prominent former athletes were part of the lawsuit after it was initially filed back in 2009.

There had to be limits to the NCAA's reach, however. There had to be fairness. There had to be more than just empty talk justifying college sports barreling toward more and more commercialization while falling back on the intellectually bankrupt concept of "amateurism" – once dreamed up by British aristocrats to keep working-class athletes from beating them in sailing and dressage.

What's to come remains to be seen. What O'Bannon v. NCAA eventually means is yet to be written. This is one part of a multipronged effort that has caused college sports to get serious about reform, even if it's just finally moving on basic concepts that almost any reasonable mind could agree on.

Like that was Ed O'Bannon in the video game. Like Harry Flournoy never gave his likeness away. Like someone should at least have the courtesy to call 75-year-old Oscar Robertson and tell him about a trading card deal.

Like maybe a few extra bucks of spending money, better health care, guaranteed four-year scholarships, money put in a postgraduate trust fund, or whatever else might be in order is reasonable – especially considering how the conferences have now created entire cable TV networks off these guys.

That's the main thing that went down on Friday.

Someone finally said the NCAA's business practices were illegal. They also said they were wrong. And that might mean the most of all.

 

[ZeroClub]

Lots of ways to look at this. Clowney was worth much more than 5K to So Carolina.

 

[peplaw06]

This one breaks it down pretty well... Long read, but worth it.

___________________________________________________________

In The O'Bannon Decision, Truth Wins Out Over Rhetoric
by Andy Schwarz

Let me start by apologizing. Because of my own involvement in the Ed O'Bannon case, and because of past situations in which the NCAA has misquoted my own personal statements as if they represent the official opinions of the plaintiffs in the case, I can't be quite as analytical here as I might like, especially since the NCAA has already announced it will appeal the decision. But I think a few thoughts are in order.

Factually, the opinion handed down Friday strikes a blow against the primary defenses on which the NCAA has relied for decades. The first is that the public would stop watching college football and basketball if athletes were to be paid more than the current scholarship maximum—or, as the NCAA has begun to accept in the last decade, the slightly higher full cost of attendance—for their athletic skill. U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken understood the problems in the survey on which the NCAA relied and agreed that other than that, all the NCAA had offered up were assertions by witnesses that were contradicted when those same witnesses explained that fans love the game, the pageantry, the affiliation with their alma mater, winning, etc:

Thus, the Court finds that the NCAA's restrictions on student-athlete compensation are not the driving force behind consumer demand for FBS football and Division I basketball-related products. Rather, the evidence presented at trial suggests that consumers are interested in college sports for other reasons.

This is a powerful rejection of the core (and never tested) NCAA assertion that "amateurism" drives public demand. This ruling, if it stands, says that "amateurism" as a philosophy is simply price fixing with better PR.

Second, Judge Wilken also rejected the competitive-balance defense, an argument the folks at the NCAA have repeatedly failed to make successfully. They tried in Board of Regents v. NCAA and got shot down; they tried in Law v. NCAA and got shot down; and they tried here and got shot down. Unlike those other cases, here the NCAA had to make a full case for their claim, and they foundered on the fact that for decades, economists have searched in vain for a competitive-balance benefit from the NCAA's price-fixing. It's hard to prove something is true in the face of a (rare) scholarly consensus that it is false.

Judge Wilken's opinion cut through a lot of empty rhetoric. Under the current system, the wealthiest programs receive the lion's share of revenue. If the commitment to competitive balance were so important to the people running the NCAA, the judge wondered, why hadn't they shown a much firmer commitment to leveling the playing field through revenue sharing, sending more money from the power conferences to the smaller schools? Judge Wilken seems to have found that disconnect telling:

The Court notes, however, that the NCAA could easily adopt several less restrictive rules if it wished to increase competitive balance or output. With respect to competitive balance, for instance, the NCAA could adopt a more equal revenue distribution formula. As noted above, its current formula primarily rewards the schools that already have the largest athletic budgets. This uneven distribution of revenues runs counter to the association's stated goal of promoting competitive balance.

Third, the NCAA argued that schools would flee Division I if their commitment to amateurism were put to the test. The other day, I suggested we all adopt the hashtag #MTBSW ("money talks and b.s. walks") to flag whenever a pious but ultimately false argument involving money falls by the wayside. If the injunction goes into effect, and schools cannot collude to prevent payments to athletes (albeit on a deferred basis) above and beyond the cost of attendance, then several of the witnesses' testimony will be put to the test.

Judge Wilken made clear what she thinks that test will show:

The real difference between schools in Division I and schools in other divisions and athletics associations, as explained above, is the amount of resources that Division I schools commit to athletics.

Thus, while there may be tangible differences between Division I schools and other schools that participate in intercollegiate sports, these differences are financial, not philosophical. For this reason, the NCAA's assertion that schools would leave FBS and Division I for financial reasons if the challenged restraints were removed is not credible. The testimony of Dr. Emmert and various other athletics administrators that most Division I athletic programs operate at a loss and would not remain in Division I if the challenged rules were removed conflicts with the clear weight of the evidence.

As one example, Jim Delany asserted that alumni bases would recoil at the thought of paying more than the cost of attendance and would exit Division I. Seeing him and other power brokers within college sports walk that back will be a classic case of #MTBSW.

On the fourth of the NCAA's arguments, it was more of a mixed bag. Judge Wilken almost tossed this claim in its entirety, but in the end she accepted the idea that athletes having too much money their pockets might somehow harm their educations. She mentioned how the absence of rules against the children of wealth having money was inconsistent, as was the general practice of paying other students for on-campus jobs, but she ultimately gave enough credence to this idea that it got the NCAA over an important legal hump, and required the plaintiffs to prove up less restrictive alternatives. She wrote:

It is not clear that any of the potential problems identified by the NCAA's witnesses would be unique to student-athletes. In fact, when the Court asked Dr. Emmert whether other wealthy students — such as those who come from rich families or start successful businesses during school — raise all of the same problems for campus relations, he replied that they did. ... It is also not clear why paying student-athletes would be any more problematic for campus relations than paying other students who provide services to the university, such as members of the student government or school newspaper.

Nonetheless, the Court finds that certain limited restrictions on student-athlete compensation may help to integrate student-athletes into the academic communities of their schools, which may in turn improve the schools' college education product.

Had she not bought into this argument, she might have issued a much broader injunction. Is the last bolded sentence quoted above true? I'll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions, but I will say that generally the primary reason students leave school before graduation is due to a lack of money.

Judge Wilken also attached some credence to the idea that while there's no factual basis to the claim that the current
cap on payment is a driver of consumer demand, SOME level of payment could, in theory, decrease demand:

Thus, while consumer preferences might justify certain limited restraints on student-athlete compensation, they do not justify the rigid restrictions challenged in this case.

These two factual findings—that there might be some harm to athletes if they have too much money while they are students and that if the payments to athletes rose too high, demand for the product might suffer—appear to be the foundation of the narrow injunction Judge Wilken ordered. While she has not set a cap on payments (and don't listen to anyone who tells you she did), she has expressly said that her injunction allows the NCAA to continue to make its own caps. What's different is that the new cap on in-school payments cannot be lower than the full cost of attendance (as opposed to the full grant-in-aid, which is $2,000 to $5,000 lower) and that the cap on additional payments above this level offered before/during eligibility but paid after eligibility cannot be lower than $5,000 per year (as opposed to the current zero).

So: the benefits of amateurism qua amateurism (in its current form as a collective ban on payment of any sort beyond a scholarship) is no longer a valid defense for price-fixing. The process of all of Division 1 coming together and fixing prices below the limits stated above is illegal. If this ruling stands, we will certainly see the most popular schools paying as much as they are allowed to pay (if/when the NCAA imposes a new cap consistent with Judge Wilken's ruling) without harm to their fans' demand for the product. "Fans only watch because athletes aren't paid" will be proven false in the marketplace. But it may be replaced with a new but related non-empirical assertion: "Fans only watch because the payments are reasonable."

Economically, my view is that if there is actually some level of pay above which demand will decline, pay won't tend to stay at that excessive level, even in absence of a cap. Firms pay talent reluctantly; if schools pay, it will be because they believe the revenue benefits of having that athlete on the team exceed the cost. It would be a strange team that would choose to shell out more money knowing it was driving demand DOWN rather than up. In my view, to the extent that there is a point after which compensation drives down demand, we would see a market equilibrium emerge in which prices rise to that level, but not beyond. If a school went beyond it and experienced both higher costs AND lower revenue, they would quickly retreat back to the more profitable, lower-pay level. The market would set the cap without the need for an NCAA-imposed one.

Nevertheless, under Judge Wilken's ruling, without violating her injunction, the NCAA will be able to cap payments at full cost of attendance while an athlete is in school and no more than $5,000 per year on a deferred basis. Interestingly, I don't think her ruling means that the new, higher cap wouldn't also violate the antitrust laws—that question is left for a later day, because her focus was on the restraints that exist now. But in Judge Wilken's ruling, with the evidence before her, she did conclude there was enough evidence—mostly from former CBS Sport president Neil Pilson and survey expert J. Michael Dennis—to support the idea that $5,000 had the possibility of a pro-competitive justification sufficient to withstand the current challenge.

A rich irony is that if this ruling stands, all of the years of committee meetings past, present, and future involving the NCAA's efforts to reform its compensation levels, including this week's so-called "autonomy" vote, will be completely mooted (at least for FBS football and D-I basketball). Judge Wilken ruled that the NCAA and its conferences are forbidden from fixing prices below cost of attendance. The Power 5 can meet and make rules all they want, but if the injunction holds, they've been legally banned from enforcing any rule limiting scholarships below full cost of attendance, period. In fact, all D-I schools, even in small conferences, are now enjoined from capping their men's basketball scholarships at the current maximum. Even the process by which the schools overrode the stipend rule in early 2011 and re-capped scholarships below the full cost of attendance—a collective vote to cap pay below there—is now itself enjoined.

All day Sunday, I was on the road and listened to a lot of college sports talk radio. The hosts, callers, and even the guests coming from the world of college sports seemed to treat the "autonomy" vote as still being a driving force for how big-time college football will look in the future. I would imagine that's wrong. If Judge Wilken's decision stands, no group of NCAA members can set any cap on scholarships below a given school's cost of attendance. So when I heard Baylor AD Ian McCaw suggest on Sirius XM's college sports channel that the Big 12 might pick some middle-ground stipend payment that splits the difference between high-cost and low-costs schools, it's clear the impact of the Wilken decision hasn't quite sunk in yet. No school, whether part of Power 5 or not, can collude with another school to fix prices below the full cost of attendance. Emphasis on FULL.

The ruling also offers up other rulings of interest to the antitrust community. After finding that the markets for athletes' names, images, and likeness were real for each of the products in suit (live TV, rebroadcast TV, and video games), Judge Wilken then concluded that there was no anti-competitive harm in those markets. I don't think this conclusion is consistent with the economic evidence, but the impact of this conclusion was pretty much mooted by her finding that there was anti-competitive harm in the other market proven by the plaintiffs.

In the end, though, the NCAA's long-standing price-fixing was found by a federal judge to have violated the antitrust laws. This is an important win for the forces of competition. We will get to see the college sports world pull a collective "We have always been at war with Eastasia" when they say that this new world of Full Cost of Attendance plus $5,000 per year in deferred payments is entirely consistent with the bedrock principles of amateurism that the NCAA has maintained since its founding. I hope that the public will see how little its love of college sports changes under this system, and that as a result, a still freer—and thus fairer—market than required by the injunction will soon follow. The days of a Fear of a Black Wallet may be ending.

The liability finding was a winning day for Team Market, but the injunction itself will hardly displease Team Reform. Things got better Friday for athletes, for competition, and for America. The only question left to be answered is just how much better.

_____________________________________________________

Andy Schwarz is an antitrust economist and partner at OSKR, an economic consulting firm specializing in expert witness testimony. Follow him on Twitter, @andyhre.

 

[Hoofbite]

The whole thing seemed unnecessary.

Athletes are paid, I've seen it. It just comes in the form of a "reimbursement check".

Also, nobody bought the NCAA game because of fucking Ed O'Bannon anyway. Institutional loyalty drives the sales of those games, not player fan ship. You could put two teams of dickbutts in those uniforms and people would buy the game.

Big waste of time, IMO. If college athletes wanted to officially get paid I wish they would have just said so. Typical gamer doesn't know - or give a fuck - who O'Bannon was. Fans should start putting their hand out because crowd members are too close to their likeness. It'd be just as valid, IMO. Nobody purchases the games to stare at the crowd and nobody buys the game just to look or play as a current member of their universities football team.

 

[CobraKai]

bullshit hoof

remember that nfl game that tried to compete with the nfl with made up players and "legends"? had a decent interface or whatever and noone bought it.

if they sold NCAA and instead of a darkie with dreds wearing #10 who is fast as shit for Baylor they have a white kid wearing 3 they ain't selling shit and you know it.

 

[Hoofbite]

bullshit hoof

remember that nfl game that tried to compete with the nfl with made up players and "legends"? had a decent interface or whatever and noone bought it.

if they sold NCAA and instead of a darkie with dreds wearing #10 who is fast as shit for Baylor they have a white kid wearing 3 they ain't selling shit and you know it.

So you're saying that just because a startup game franchise failed it's definitive proof that the NCAA franchises would fail if demographics in the game weren't a carbon copy of reality?

Not sure I buy that.

I'd also be hesitant to say that the nature of NFL fan hood and collegiate fan hood are the exact same. I don't believe they are.

I don't know what game you're talking about because there's been so many football games (vast majority of which had NFLPA agreements) that have come and gone. I hope you aren't referring to the Blitz series. If you don't know why that game might not be widely popular (I liked it) then there's no need to carry this discussion any further.

Discounting EAs monopoly over the past few years, why weren't the other franchises ever as successful as Madden? They had licensing agreements and player names so apparently it's not just about the roster that made Madden more popular back at a time when there was competition.

 

[CobraKai]

2k5 was very successful.

people still pay for the players. if you bought NCAA as a baylor fan when RG3 was there you want a fast-ass QB with a huge arm wearing 10 black with dreds.

 

[Hoofbite]

2k5 was very successful.

people still pay for the players. if you bought NCAA as a baylor fan when RG3 was there you want a fast-ass QB with a huge arm wearing 10 black with dreds.

Unless you want to make the claim that a Baylor fan would not have purchased the game prior-to and after RG3s time there then what a customer wants AFTER purchasing the game is an entirely separate issue. Would they prefer the game to be as realistic as possible in terms of the roster? Sure, but they aren't buying the game BECAUSE it was a realistic representation of the roster.

When I played sports games, I pretty much always used create-a-character. Not because there's actually a 6'8'' RB with 4.3 speed on Dallas' roster, but because he couldn't be stopped.

I was not - and I don't think most gamers were either - buying those games because of any specific player on the roster. They bought the game because they are fans of football games first and foremost, and fans of their university second.

 

[marionbarberthe4th]

The thing is hoof is that they may care about the team Instead Of the plAyer but they would never care about the team in The first place if the athletes weren't as good as they are.

The sport makes The stars
The stars keep it viable

 

[Hoofbite]

The thing is hoof is that they may care about the team Instead Of the plAyer but they would never care about the team in The first place if the athletes weren't as good as they are.

The sport makes The stars
The stars keep it viable

How far do we carry this regression? Without the university, there's no team for the players to join.

Most of the athletes aren't that good. That's why maybe 300 guys out the thousands possible actually turn pro each year in just football. Fewer than that for the NBA.

The players are not the reason why college sports are successful. My college didn't struggle to fill the stands even though the football team sucked for most of my time there. People support the school, not the player. In fact, any support the players receive is often because of the fan base's loyalty to the school. Fuck, Manziel was likely only attractive to some because he's a Texas product.

Does a successful school get more fan support at the stadium? Probably, but I would doubt the fans of shitty schools buy video games in lesser volume. Shit, for some that's likely the only way they'll see their team win.

 

[peplaw06]

I was a big fucking nerd with college football back in the day. I would spend hours putting the real players names on my rosters. The player characteristics were so detailed you could tell who 99% of the players on the game were. And you could used to be able to purchase downloads of the real names from other people on EBay and shit.

 

[Hoofbite]

I was a big fucking nerd with college football back in the day. I would spend hours putting the real players names on my rosters. The player characteristics were so detailed you could tell who 99% of the players on the game were. And you could used to be able to purchase downloads of the real names from other people on EBay and shit.

Which raises an entirely different point I was going to mention earlier but didn't.

Anyone who's got a boner for player names and likeness will put the effort in to get them. The only way you could stop it would be to completely erase the ability to edit rosters and players.

 

[marionbarberthe4th]

I was a big fucking nerd with college football back in the day. I would spend hours putting the real players names on my rosters. The player characteristics were so detailed you could tell who 99% of the players on the game were. And you could used to be able to purchase downloads of the real names from other people on EBay and shit.

Which raises the question Why would they go through the effort If fans didn't want it?

Then again Deion was always white in madden 64.

 

[marionbarberthe4th]

How far do we carry this regression? Without the university, there's no team for the players to join.

Most of the athletes aren't that good. That's why maybe 300 guys out the thousands possible actually turn pro each year in just football. Fewer than that for the NBA.

The players are not the reason why college sports are successful. My college didn't struggle to fill the stands even though the football team sucked for most of my time there. People support the school, not the player. In fact, any support the players receive is often because of the fan base's loyalty to the school. Fuck, Manziel was likely only attractive to some because he's a Texas product.

Does a successful school get more fan support at the stadium? Probably, but I would doubt the fans of shitty schools buy video games in lesser volume. Shit, for some that's likely the only way they'll see their team win.

You're on the Wrong side of history

 

[peplaw06]

Which raises an entirely different point I was going to mention earlier but didn't.

Anyone who's got a boner for player names and likeness will put the effort in to get them. The only way you could stop it would be to completely erase the ability to edit rosters and players.

They have a couple of options to correct the problem presented by this case....

1. They could pay the players for the use of their likeness, like they do professional athletes when they are in video games; or
2. Make video games with completely generic rosters.... like they can license the logo and colors from the school, but every player is some generic guy.

The latter is what happened with the NCAA football after you played through dynasty seasons. They just made guys up with real random names and characteristics. The way they did the game was a dead giveaway that they were using real players. You have QB #10 at Texas who's tall, black and fast, and you're recruiting James Williams 5 star QB.

The NCAA doesn't want to license players because it takes away from the university presidents' pockets, and they want to continue this ruse that the players aren't "employees." They have to maintain the facade of amateurism.

 

[CobraKai]

Unless you want to make the claim that a Baylor fan would not have purchased the game prior-to and after RG3s time there then what a customer wants AFTER purchasing the game is an entirely separate issue. Would they prefer the game to be as realistic as possible in terms of the roster? Sure, but they aren't buying the game BECAUSE it was a realistic representation of the roster.

When I played sports games, I pretty much always used create-a-character. Not because there's actually a 6'8'' RB with 4.3 speed on Dallas' roster, but because he couldn't be stopped.

I was not - and I don't think most gamers were either - buying those games because of any specific player on the roster. They bought the game because they are fans of football games first and foremost, and fans of their university second.

they buy madden every fucking year because of the player updates. otherwise they could just buy it once and keep it for the next five years until they improve the graphics again because hell the cowboys logo is still there. same for ncaa