Just at the time when the NCAA administrators need desperately to begin to repair their tattered image and gain back a modicum of respect from the general public, they continue in a downward spiral by appearing absolutely foolish in their arguments during the opening days of the long awaited Ed O’Bannon trial.
Attorneys for the NCAA, led by a guy named Rohit Singla, at times sound like characters right out of Franz Kafka, who was heavy into surrealism. That might explain their analogies between unrelated folks like Johnny Manziel and Toyna Harding. Excuse me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that getting just a little bit weird, even for the NCAA?
Harding and associates actually injured her principal competition, Nancy Kerrigan back in 1994 when they hired a thug to break her knee cap. How nice. What the hell that has to do with Johnny Manziel, who was two years old at the time, evaded everyone in the courtroom and raised doubts as to just what the strategy of the NCAA lawyers was all about, if anything.
The NCAA keeps arguing that paying student athletes would destroy competition in college athletics saying that the move would be highly unpopular with consumers. By consumers the probably mean sports fans, who mostly just want to be entertained and for their team to win!
But the O’Bannon case is not about play-for-pay in the first place. It’s about the NCAA and electronic gaming companies making millions, if not billions of dollars off of games which feature the images of current and former college athletes while the athletes themselves receive nothing at all, not even after they have graduated from college and are no longer under the jurisdiction of the NCAA.
Several respected writers have presented models of just how paying college athletes would work, but no one of them seems to hold the complete solution to this sticky situation. Don Remy, chief NCAA lawyer said, “I think coming out of here it’s becoming clearer and clearer that with their model we would become more professional than perhaps even some of the professional leagues.”
How do you get to be more professional than professional? Who knows, just one more example of the twisted logic under which the NCAA is suffocating. One thing is abundantly clear, concessions will have to be made by both sides if this thing is going to be worked out peacefully and the NCAA remains unmovable through it all.
