According to the NCAA manual, it is. “The Principle of Amateurism” of the manual states that “[s]tudent participation in intercollegiate athletics is an avocation, and student-athletes should be protected from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.” Further, “[s]tudent-athletes shall be amateurs in an intercollegiate sport, and their participation should be motivated primarily by education and by the physical, mental and social benefits to be derived.”
The logic for the NCAA is that because student-athletes are amateurs in an intercollegiate sport, whose participation is an avocation, its rule against athletes capitalizing on their rights to name, image and likeness is justifiable. To rebut, the plaintiffs continued their efforts to depict the reality behind college sports during the sixth day of the O’Bannon trial.
Previously, former Vanderbilt football player Chase Garnham testified that “I would say that I was an athlete first, a student second.” Building on that statement, the plaintiffs argued that “NCAA and school officials merely pay lip service to academics while running major college sports just like professional ones.”
In addition, the plaintiffs called an expert witness Ellen Staurowsky, a professor of sports management at Drexel University. Staurowsky gained an “expert” status through her paper titled The $6 Billion Heist: Robbing College Athletes. Using some of the NCAA’s own data, she explained that Football Bowl Subdivision (“FBS”) schools set their admissions standards for players far lower than schools in less profitable divisions. She further showed that athletes playing more lucrative sports tend to “cluster[]” around the same major.
According to SI.com, in 2010 then-NCAA vice president Wally Renfro wrote an email to incoming NCAA president Mark Emmert that said “[w]e have a wink-and-a-nod approach to voluntary activity,” acknowledging playing college sports for big name schools in the league is not a hobby, but more like a job. Additionally, several years ago Michigan’s football program was investigated when former players alleged its coach and the staff violated the NCAA’s “20/8-hour” rule that limit the time student-athletes can spend in “athletically related actives” per week. Now do we really believe that Michigan is alone in not following the “20/8-hour” rule?
NCAA fumbles cross-examination in O’Bannon trial
O’Bannon v. NCAA, day six: Determining whether big-time athletes are students first