Suchergebnisse

Kansas fans are still sad and a little bitter over the lost 2020 NCAA men's basketball tournament. KU was 28-3 and ranked #1 in both the AP and USAT coaches poll and in Ken Pomeroy's more sophisticated stats-based system. Indeed, in Pomeroy's system, the gap between #1 and #2 was about as large as the gap between #2 and #8. The team was riding a 16 game winning streak, last losing to Baylor -- a team that ended the season ranked #4 and #5 in the two polls and then won the 2021 championship. The Baylor loss was avenged (on the road) as the 12th game in the winning streak.The team also lost the very first game of the season by 2 points to Duke at Madison Square Garden, which ended the year ranked #8 and #11. Their third loss was on the road by 1 point to Villanova in December. 'Nova ended the year ranked #10 in both polls.It was a really good Kansas team and KU likely would have been the favorite in the tournament. Still, despite eagerly wanting another championship, I've likely taken the 2022 team too far in this bracket:
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Case name: Shawne Alston, et al. v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, et al., No. 19‐15566, No. 19‐15662 (9th Cir. 05/18/20).

Antitrust litigation against the NCAA has focused on its members' collusive restraint on athlete compensation at levels below marginal revenue product. The recent O'Bannon v. NCAA and In Re NCAA Grant-in-Aid Cap Antitrust Litigation have both prescribed a relevant market for "college education" where schools compete for athlete labor by offering tuition and fee or cost-of-attendance offsets. This article argues that this unitary definition conflates two separate products, academic education and athletic participation, that NCAA members offer as a bundled tie. The NCAA has mandated purchase of the tied product, academic education, as a pre-requisite for access to intercollegiate athletics participation, the tying product. Paradoxically, the NCAA has then argued that this bundled tie, which this article argues violates the Supreme Court's three-pronged 'quasi' per-se rule prohibiting tying arrangements, represents a claimed 'pro-competitive justification' by integrating athletics and academics. This article offers evidence that this tying arrangement serves no legitimate pro-competitive purpose under the NCAA model of amateurism. Rather, it extracts consumer surplus, enhances dominant cartel members' market power, and forecloses competition not only from non-members but also from smaller NCAA member-schools. As such, the NCAA model of amateurism violates antitrust law governing tying arrangements and should be enjoined.

Over the last few years, many NCAA Division 1 universities have begun offering athletic scholarships to progressively younger student-athletes. To its credit, the NCAA has begun considering rules that would prohibit the practice until a recruit's junior year. This Article studies the problem of early recruiting and concludes that the NCAA's proposed legislation will probably do little to change existing practice. While publicly-known informal scholarship offers may become scarce, clandestine understandings will probably rise, quite probably in ways that increase pressure on recruits while giving them even less certainty about the decisions they make. This will happen because the competitive nature of Division 1 NCAA sport creates strong incentives for institutions to skirt, evade, or even flout the relevant rules, especially when NCAA will have difficulty detecting violations of the rules. The Article then argues that the NCAA cannot truly reform early recruiting by merely prohibiting the extension of early informal offers. Instead, the NCAA should consider allowing early formal, binding commitments while regulating them in ways that make them less desirable for institutions. This can be done by forcing institutions that make early offers to guarantee those scholarships for additional years, depending on the youth of the recruit. Offers to juniors would be for a 2-year guaranteed scholarship, sophomores for 3, and freshmen for 4. Recruits who accept these offers would be bound under something like the present National Letter of Intent system. They would be of course making premature decisions about college, but they would get genuine certainty in return. This would, on the whole, be fairer than the existing system.

The economics of the NCAA Division I men's basketball league are peculiar because it fails to hire the best college-aged players and does little to enhance competitive balance within the league. The league's policy decisions and its ability to remain economically viable, despite its short-sighted governance decisions, are discussed.