A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the NCAA from enforcing its prohibitions against recruits signing monetary deals with booster groups, delivering a significant blow to the NCAA’s attempts to stop universities and their supporters from paying athletes to play at their schools.
The notion of amateurism has long been a bedrock principle of the NCAA, but Judge Clifton L. Corker said that a lawsuit filed by attorneys general in Tennessee and Virginia had enough merit to stop college sports’ regulatory body from imposing any restrictions on prospects signing name, image and likeness (NIL) deals before joining programs. The court order is applicable to all athletes in all states and is effective immediately.
The injunction is not a final ruling in the case, but the judge’s decision is all but certain to open the floodgates for more recruits to sign NIL deals nationwide without fear of repercussions. Since NIL laws in various states went into effect in 2021, the NCAA has attempted to defend and enforce its own policies, which aim to restrict the use of NIL deals to induce recruits to sign with a particular program, and the fundamental idea that college athletes should not be paid based on their athletic performance.
“The NCAA’s prohibition likely violates federal antitrust law and harms student-athletes,” Corker wrote in his decision.
Saquandra Heath, an NCAA spokesperson, said in a statement that the judge’s decision will make the landscape of rules for college sports more complicated.
“Turning upside down rules overwhelmingly supported by member schools will aggravate an already chaotic collegiate environment, further diminishing protections for student-athletes from exploitation,” Heath said. “The NCAA fully supports student-athletes making money from their name, image and likeness and is making changes to deliver more benefits to student-athletes, but an endless patchwork of state laws and court opinions make clear partnering with Congress is necessary to provide stability for the future of all college athletes.”
NCAA rules currently allow enrolled athletes to sign NIL deals with both individual boosters and collectives, which are groups of boosters who pool resources before signing athletes to contracts. The NCAA does not allow prospective athletes — high-school athletes or transfers — to sign such deals, believing it to be a recruiting inducement.
On Jan. 31, the attorneys general of Tennessee and Virginia jointly filed a lawsuit against the NCAA in a U.S. district court, challenging the organization’s ban on using NIL inducements in recruiting. The suit came the day after news broke that the NCAA was investigating the recruiting activities of University of Tennessee and Spyre Sports Group — a collective unofficially associated with Volunteers athletics — specifically around five-star prospect Nico Iamaleava, who ultimately enrolled at Tennessee in January 2023.
Tom Mars, a lawyer who worked with the Tennessee collective on the case, said the significance of the order could not be overstated.
“This being the first domino to fall, what happens in the other pending antitrust cases now seems almost inevitable. And the NCAA’s lawyers must know that,” Mars said.
The NCAA previously responded to the lawsuit by arguing that the states had no case for temporarily invalidating the NCAA’s rules, in part because Tennessee’s own state law bars NIL inducements in recruiting. The NCAA has also argued that the purpose of injunctive relief from a court is to preserve the status quo, and the NCAA’s rules are already the status quo.
Earlier this month, Corker had indicated that a temporary restraining order might not be necessary but said that the states were likely to win their case against the NCAA.Corker wrote in the court order on Friday that “while the NCAA permits student-athletes to profit from their NIL, it fails to show how the timing of when a student-athlete enters such an agreement would destroy the goal of preserving amateurism.”
The judge agreed with the NCAA in its assertion that maintaining competitive balance is a legitimate endeavor, but said that spreading competition evenly to NCAA-member schools “by restraining trade” is “precisely the type of anticompetitive conduct” that antitrust law attempts to prevent.
Friday’s court order is yet another crack in the foundation of the NCAA, which has been fighting for its future on multiple fronts and myriad courtrooms in a legal environment that has been friendlier to its challengers than ever before.
In the wake of a setback in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2021, the NCAA has faced multiple lawsuits that accuse the organization of violating federal antitrust laws. They are still working their way through various courts. The governing body for college sports has also faced cases that have challenged its rules individually.
In December, attorneys general for seven states, including Ohio, challenged an NCAA rule that bars athletes from playing immediately after transferring multiple times. After receiving a temporary restraining order to stop the NCAA from enforcing the rule, the NCAA agreed to convert the order into a preliminary injunction, allowing all multi-time transfers to play without sitting out through the end of the academic year.
The NCAA is also the subject of a complaint and unfair labor practice charge under the National Labor Relations Act, a case that raises the question of whether athletes should be characterized as employees. A hearing is scheduled for next week in Los Angeles.
As NCAA lawyers continue to argue for the organization’s long standing business model, Friday’s order creates an entirely new legal environment in the recruiting space. Athletes and their representatives can now meet with and sign deals with collectives without fearing an NCAA investigation or the potential loss of future eligibility. Though the preliminary injunction is temporary, it will likely lead to dramatic increases in NIL deals dangled in front of high school recruits and players in the transfer portal to entice athletes to sign with a particular school. Before Friday, NCAA rules allowed coaches and collectives to share information about a prospect’s potential earning power, but they could not sign prospects to contracts before they enrolled. That is no longer the case.
The NCAA has tried to use its dilemmas in the courts and in statehouses for several years to lobby Congress for federal laws to protect how college sports has operated. NCAA leaders want protection from antitrust scrutiny, uniformity in NIL laws and for athletes to be firmly declared to not be employees. There have been numerous legislative proposals, and a double-digit number of hearings, but no bill has made it out of committee.
Several senators and representatives have publicly said that cleaning up the NCAA’s mess is not a major priority.
(Photo: Mitchell Layton / Getty Images)
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