Sports

Subscribe to Sports via RSS

Missouri’s president recently resigned amid protests about how his institution responded to racist and other deplorable acts on his campus.  A graduate student staged a hunger strike, and players from the Missouri football team threatened to sit out their next game if the president did not resign. 

Some have worried that the threat sets bad precedent, in that they think now a president can be forced to resign based on the racist acts of someone beyond his or her control. I don’t buy that, but more on that later.  Others are upset that it took the football team to make the protests have legs.  I don’t buy this one, either, though I give this one more credence. 

As someone working in an academic environment, I will say that I would be sympathetic if the resignation really happened because of things that were out of the control of the university president. That is, if he were really being held accountable for what was said by an idiot racist student, I’d be supportive of him and think it was wrong he was being forced out. Based on what I have seen, though, the criticisms were valid about the institution’s response…

As a life-long Detroit Lions fan, last night’s loss to the Seattle Seahawks was largely expected.  How they lost was new, though the fact that the Lions lost in a creative way, was also to be expected.  As actor Jeff Daniels said, being a Lions fan is more painful than being a Cubs fan.

In recent years, there is ample evidence that random and uncommon rules have shown up to hurt my already mediocre team. This got me to thinking, though, of the old adage, bad facts make bad law. For the Lions, I think that’s not necessarily apt.  It may be that bad football makes for better football later.   

To understand how one might get there, one needs to know a little what it’s like to be a Lions fan, so here’s a little insight into how life as a Lions fan works: 

I watched the start of the game last night with my ten-year-old son.  Part of the pre-game programming is all of the announcers and studio people make their pick for the game.  The ten or so predictions were unanimously for the Seahawks.  I turned to my son and said, “Well, the Lions will probably…

Ladyvolslogo

As some readers may recall, I posted twice back in November about The University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s decision to drop the Lady Vols moniker and mark from all women’s sports teams at UTK other than women’s basketball.  The first post primarily wondered about university counsel’s consideration of trademark abandonment in the rebranding effort.  The second post unpacked some additional issues raised by the first post and addressed some readers’ and friends’ concerns about my stance opposing the rebranding.

Interestingly, adverse reactions to the branding change, which is effective on July 1 (the beginning of the new academic year at UTK), have not died down since those original posts.  Letters from concerned citizens have been published in the local paper, and the paper even published a recent news article documenting some of the back-and-forth between Lady Vol fans and the campus administration. [Ed. Note: this article may be protected by a firewall.]  I have followed all of this with some interest.  

Honestly, part of me just cannot wait for the university to drop the mark altogether so that I can start using it to mass merchandise retro Lady Vols t-shirts, hats, and other merch.  Entrepreneurial pipe dream?  Maybe.  But…

I had planned to write a post about Delaware LLCs and who has standing to request judicial dissolution, but that post is going to wait.  I’m knee deep in Sports Law exam grading, and so sports is on my mind.  The big thing going on right now is, of course, Tom Brady’s four-game suspension for his apparent participation in having footballs deflated to a psi that was not in compliance with league rules.  

The science on the benefits of deflating footballs is not clear, as noted here.  That, of course, is irrelevant to whether the rules were broken.  Some have argued that the air pressure rules are stupid, especially given that the league not long ago change the rules to allow each team to prepare their own footballs for use on offense. Andy Benoit of SI.com explains, 

With football being so much about strategy, the more comfortable the ball is for a quarterback and his receivers, the more entertaining the game becomes.

The NFL already agrees with this. Why do you think officials and ball boys go to such lengths to try to keep a football dry during a rainy game? Or, bringing it back to the

…

So, Duke is the 2015 NCAA Men’s Basketball champion. As a Michigan State basketball fan, this was at least mildly gratifying because the Spartans final losses the past two seasons have been to the eventual champion. (MSU’s final two losses this season: Wisconsin and Duke.) Hardly the same as winning the whole thing, but after a loss, one takes what one can get. 

This semester I am teaching Sports Law for the first time, and it has been an interesting and rewarding experience. As our recent guest, Marc Edelman, recently noted, there is a lot going on right now in college sports (there probably always is), with questions about paying NCAA players and players’ rights to unionize, among other things, leading the way.  

I am a big fan of college sports, and I generally prefer college sports to professional sports. I don’t, however, have any illusion that big-time college sports are, in any real sense, pure or amateur. (For that matter, I don’t know what “pure” means, but I hear complaints that colleges sports are “no longer pure,” so it appears there is some benchmark somewhere.)  College sports are a modified form of professional sports or, as the term I used to hear from time to time in other contexts, semi-pro sports.

What College Sports Are

College sports, in the simplest sense, are highly talented young people competing on behalf of educational institutions in exchange for the opportunity to pursue a mostly funded college education, if they so choose and can make it fit in with their athletic obligations.  The athletes are compensated for their efforts with opportunities that are varied and wide ranging, depending on the athlete and the institution for which they compete.  

Obviously, the experience for the high-profile college athlete — generally football and men’s and women’s basketball — is different from that of the less-watched sports, such as gymnastics, track, and golf.  But in all instances, the athletes represent their institution on and off the field, and they all have significant obligations that come along with their participation on their team. (Not all athletes have full or even partial scholarships, which can vary the obligations, though often all athletes have similar requirements.)

(To read more, please click below)

Smart

If you pay attention to college sports news, you know that Shaka Smart is leaving VCU to coach men’s basketball at the University of Texas.

As a professor, my interest, of course, is in the coaching contract.

Like most coaching contracts, Shaka Smart’s contract with VCU includes a buy-out provision, which is currently $500,000. (The buy-out was set at $600,000, with a $100,000 reduction per year. This is the second year of this VCU-Smart contract, hence the $500,000 amount).

More interestingly, the contract includes a provision that requires a home-and-home series with VCU and Smart’s new team or payment of an additional $250,000 to VCU. Smart took VCU to the Final Four in 2011, so in 2013 when this new contract between Smart and VCU was signed, VCU knew that Smart was one of the most sought after coaches in the country. As such, this seems like an excellent (and creative) clause to include; if Smart left VCU, he would likely be headed to a top-program and games with that top-progam could be quite valuable.

All of the above has been reported in other outlets. What I haven’t seen reported (though I obviously haven’t read all the…

Many thanks to Marc Edelman (Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, City University of New York) for guest blogging with us in March.

His posts are linked to below:

March Madness Is Coming — And Legally Speaking, It Is Madness

Should Law Professors Abstain From Online NCAA Tournament Pools?

NCAA Claims To Put Education Ahead of Profit. Really?

The “Daily Fantasy Sports” Marketplace Is Booming, But Is It Legal?

Over the past few weeks I have posted extensively on how gambling laws treat commercial NCAA Tournament pools.  However, March Madness pools are not the only form of online sports gaming proliferating on the Internet.  Indeed, play-for-cash “daily fantasy sports” contests have recently become big business.  Even the National Basketball Association is now a shareholder in one of these ventures (FanDuel).

With the legal status of “daily fantasy sports” still relatively unsettled, it is my pleasure to announce the online publication of sections 1-4 of my newest law review article “Navigating the Legal Risks of Daily Fantasy Sports: A Detailed Primer in Federal and State Gambling Law.”   This article explores the legal status of “daily fantasy sports” in light of both federal and state gambling laws, and explains why the legal status of such contests likely varies based on both contest format and states of operation.

The full version of this article will be published in the January 2016 edition of University of Illinois Law Review.  In the interim, I welcome any thoughts or comments.

Last week, NCAA lawyers went into court seeking to reverse the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California’s ruling in O’Bannon v. National Collegiate Athletic Association.  In that case, the district court had held that the NCAA member colleges illegally restrained trade under Section 1 of the Sherman Act when they colluded among other things, to keep college athlete compensation below the full cost of college attendance. 

Among the NCAA’s many legal arguments in seeking reversal was their claim that college athletics is exempt from the Sherman Act because amateurism, according to the NCAA, is driven by economic motives and not commercialism.  Although previous court decisions from the Third and Sixth Circuit seem to side with the NCAA’s argument on that point, other circuits have long rejected this contention and analyzed NCAA conduct in labor markets under the traditional Sherman Act.

Nevertheless, even to the extent there exists a split in the circuits on this important issue, it seems extraordinarily disingenuous for the NCAA lawyers to even make the argument that it prioritizes education over economics when considering the economic realities of the ongoing NCAA men’s basketball tournament.  In the past ten days alone, the NCAA has…

Last week, I wrote sports and the problems that could arise from a myopic focus on winning.

I promised to attempt to tie that post to business this week, but because I am running to a lunch meeting and then to the Belmont v. Virginia NCAA tournament basketball game viewing party, I am going to keep this short.

(Also, please indulge a little more bragging about my school. Before the game even begins, I am already incredibly proud of our basketball team. Belmont won the academic bracket for the NCAA tournament teams this year, which is based on academic measures like Academic Progress Rate (APR) and Graduation Success Rate (GSR)).

Anyway, I think there are a number of parallels between sports and business. Sports, done the right way, can teach many valuable lessons, such as the importance of teamwork, diligence, unselfishness, strategy, preparation, etc. In fact, team sport participation was one of the things I looked for when interviewing for law students when I was in practice and it is something I look for now when interviewing research assistants. 

As mentioned in last week’s post, sports can lead participants off-track if there is a myopic focus on winning that…