Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this in the newsletter before, but I didn’t enter college to study journalism. As a high schooler, I was reasonably smart and enjoyed writing and arguing, and I wasn’t particularly good at math. I assumed that meant there was only one career option for me: becoming a lawyer.
I was pretty serious about it, spending money I didn’t have on practice LSAT books and whatnot, until I picked up an internship working at the Ohio Attorney General’s office. I was assigned to the antitrust department, where I helped with market research, document review and moving boxes of printed emails around.
Any mystique I might have felt about the American legal system quickly evaporated once I discovered that document review for antitrust cases was boring as hell. My greatest accomplishment working in that office was recruiting the next batch of interns (who would later actually become high-powered lawyers). I swore off the law, especially writing about the minute details of litigation surrounding economic market power. Surely writing about sports would be more interesting, right?
Surprise! Now it seems as if studying the intricacies of litigation surrounding economic market power makes up most of my job as, uh, a sports business reporter. Except now, I only get to bill $9 a month, instead of hundreds of dollars an hour. At least I don’t have to wear a suit and tie to work.
Despite actual college football games happening as I write this newsletter, major college sports lawsuits continue to drop. On Thursday, the SEC filed a lawsuit against LSU and Lane Kiffin in federal court, seeking an injunction that would prevent LSU from playing football players who were previously on NFL practice squad rosters.
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Sportico’s Michael McCann, the hardest-working writer in the sports law game, had the most informative analysis I read on Thursday. What’s interesting to me is that this particular complaint appears to meaningfully differ from typical player eligibility lawsuits on antitrust grounds:
Filed by Robert W. Fuller, R. Thomas Warburton and other attorneys from Robinson Bradshaw and Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, Thursday’s SEC complaint argues that LSU and Kiffin have violated the SEC’s First Amendment right of expressive association. They have allegedly done so by recruiting NFL players who finished college earlier this year and want to return to school.
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The SEC argues that LSU and Kiffin have made it a “deliberate and coordinated campaign” to recruit players who signed NFL contracts with the Cleveland Browns, New Orleans Saints and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Some of these players, the SEC contends, have been practicing with the LSU football team.
Similar lawsuits have been filed in state courts all over the country, including in Louisiana. In fact, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey was in Louisiana on Thursday, testifying in one of those cases. Then ruling in that case, published late Thursday night, granted eligibility for dozens of athletes, including multiple who were previously on NFL rosters. How the SEC plans to respond is not clear at press time.
Setting aside the specific legal question here for a second, lest we forget, today is Friday, Sept. 4. LSU plays Saturday, as in tomorrow. What happens if there isn’t a formal resolution to its dispute with the SEC before kickoff? How does one determine the most responsible approach to risk management in such uncharted waters?
I’m not wasting much mental space thinking about what would happen if the SEC straight up kicked LSU out of the league over rule violations, something that hasn’t really been done in major college football since, what, Michigan in 1908? I don’t have any reason to believe that’s a legitimate option, despite the bylaws or what state attorneys general might write.
But I am interested in where the courts (and which courts) eventually land on the latitude conferences have in enforcing rules about eligibility — and what sort of internal punishments leagues are willing to enforce against powerful members for breaking those rules. SEC leadership was happy to let everybody know it’s considered making its own rules, after all, since the big ol’ NCAA, with all of its poors, just takes too long. Is the conference actually serious about that?
I guess we’re about to find out.
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Schools like BYU, West Virginia, and Georgia Southern are using Waypoint to drive new revenue for their athletic department.
Here’s what else we’ve been working on:
Nielsen published a list of the highest-performing college football TV markets …and it’s almost completely mid-sized markets in the Midwest and South. What does that mean for future TV negotiations, from the Power 4 to the Unisun?
Chicago State played its first football game ever on Saturday, a loss to Division II Roosevelt. I went to the game and wrote about what I saw, why Chicago State is doing this and how it differs from other recent “expansion teams.”
The start of college football season means a bunch of new concession items are hitting stadiums. I wrote about some of the best (pretzel swords at UCF, boudin crawfish nachos at LSU) and the not-so-great (the Arizona Wildcats’ burger from hell).
And I’ve been adding a ton of new stuff at Extra Points Library. I’ll have a longer Library Card newsletter about it next week, but yesterday, we crossed over 16,000 PDFs uploaded into the system, from tons of college basketball game contracts (men and women), stadium hospitality deals, assistant coach contracts, D-II budgets and much, much more.
I can afford to update our software packages, travel to sporting events, pay freelancers, file FOIAs and do everything else we do around here because of your support. Ad revenue is very important, as is Extra Points Classroom and Extra Points Library, but it’s paid subscribers who really pay the bills around here.
You can have access to everything I write, plus all of our games, with a premium subscription. It’s just $9 a month, and we offer big discounts for institutional/departmental group subscription packages, classrooms, government offices and more.
Thanks for reading, everybody. Have a great three-day weekend, and I’ll see you on the internet on Tuesday.
