taking spots away<\/a>\u00a0from more traditional college players.<\/p>\n\n\tIn briefs authored by Taylor J. Askew, Rakesh Kilaru and other attorneys from Holland & Knight and Wilkinson Stekloff, the NCAA disputes Pavia\u2019s arguments.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe NCAA asserts that the players in Pavia\u2019s group have not presented sufficient evidence to warrant a preliminary injunction. The NCAA contends that without data and empirical analysis showing how the inclusion and exclusion of JUCO players impacts the economics of college sports, antitrust law should not be used to restrain the NCAA from enforcing established rules that attempt to distinguish college sports from minor league sports and professional developmental leagues, which are much less popular with consumers and fans than big-time college sports.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAlong those lines, the NCAA says Pavia\u2019s group has \u201cfailed to establish what the relevant antitrust market is based on college sports as it exists today.\u201d A relevant market is crucial to antitrust analysis since it identifies an area of competition for which antitrust law ought to apply.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe NCAA suggests the players are arguing that it\u2019s unfair to exclude them, but that argument allegedly neglects \u201cthe broader equities at stake,\u201d namely \u201cthe crowding out of incoming freshmen hoping to experience the life-changing benefits of being a student-athlete.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe NCAA also cautions against \u201cthe gradual erosion of longstanding rules\u201d that attempt to align the normal academic trajectory of a college student with how long they can play a sport. To that point, college students usually finish college in four years, sometimes five, and then move on to another stage of life, usually getting a job or going to grad school.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn what the NCAA describes as \u201cnot hyperbole,\u201d it warns that Campbell granting an injunction would be the first domino to fall and could eventually lead to athletes in their late 20s and early 30s populating college rosters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tGiven that universities tend to offer numerous graduate programs, it is possible for a student to study at a university for a long time; these people are sometimes referred to as professional students, meaning someone who never got a job and kept piling up degrees.<\/p>\n
\n\tBut in the 2020s, a college football player as a professional student could earn millions of dollars a year\u2014far more than any average job. The NCAA suggests that is the end game of the Pavia litigation.<\/p>\n
\n\tIf Campbell blocks JUCO seasons counting toward athletes\u2019 D-I eligibility, the NCAA wonders, \u201cwhat will stop a similar flood of lawsuits seeking to discount competition at the D-III, D-II or National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (\u201cNAIA\u201d) levels?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe NCAA says that \u201cif taken to its logical conclusion,\u201d Pavia\u2019s position \u201cwould permit student athletes to compete in, at minimum,\u00a018 seasons of intercollegiate competition: two seasons of JUCO competition, four seasons in Division III competition, four seasons in Division II competition, four seasons of NAIA competition, only then to matriculate to a D-I member institution at roughly the age of 32 with a fresh four-season clock.\u201d (emphasis from the NCAA\u2019s brief).<\/p>\n
\n\tPavia views the NCAA forecast of a 30-something guy playing four years of D-I football as fearmongering and not what he actually seeks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tPavia insists his case is about a group boycott of former JUCO players and asserts that case law is on his side. To that end, he cites several cases where pro sports leagues unilaterally imposed (meaning not collectively bargained) rules to exclude categories of players and those leagues were found to have violated federal antitrust law by engaging in group boycotts.<\/p>\n
\n\tFor instance, in the early 1970s, Spencer Haywood was granted a preliminary injunction against the NBA. At the time, the NBA conditioned eligibility on a player reaching the four-year anniversary of his high school class graduation. Pavia also cited Ken Linseman, who as a 19-year-old successfully challenged the World Hockey Association\u2019s 20-year-old eligibility rule. As Pavia sees it, the NCAA and its members \u201chave done the same thing\u201d by \u201cin effect, establish[ing] their own private government and exclude[ing] junior college players from the opportunity to compete.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tPavia also contests the NCAA\u2019s claim that allowing former JUCO players to compete for four seasons would \u201ccrowd out\u201d high school players.<\/p>\n
\n\tHe points out the NCAA has \u201cno rule\u201d requiring schools to recruit or enroll freshmen, an omission that Pavia suggests undermines the NCAA framing the enrollment of freshmen athletes as a reason to deny an injunction. Pavia also highlights the NCAA\u2019s transfer portal, where colleges recruit current college football players, who are more seasoned than high school seniors, to populate their rosters, meaning the portal \u201ccrowds out\u201d those high school seniors. The NCAA dropped restrictions on student athletes transferring multiple times\u2014some every year\u2014due to antitrust litigation, but Pavia emphasizes \u201cno Court has ever ruled that the NCAA must allow unlimited transfer.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tFor those reasons, Pavia maintains, \u201cthe NCAA has not presented any evidence\u201d that a team without the ability to retain a former JUCO player \u201cwould choose to replace that player with an incoming freshman rather than a transfer.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThere is no timetable for when Campbell will issue his ruling, though it\u2019s reasonable to expect it will be issued within a matter of weeks, not months. Especially after a year and a half of Pavia\u2019s litigation, Campbell is very familiar with the legal issues at play and knows that his ruling will impact not only the eligibility of players in the lawsuit but others who could lose or gain roster spots depending on his decision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A federal judge will soon issue a ruling that\u2014the NCAA contends\u2014could lead to college athletes playing 18 seasons…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":745336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4159,4160,7,49,48,4161,326,2286],"class_list":["post-745335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-antitrust","tag-federal-courts","tag-football","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaa-legal-issues","tag-sec","tag-vanderbilt"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116053373308129268","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=745335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/745336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=745335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=745335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=745335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}