Fuck the NCAA meta thread

[Beau Vine 53999]

theathletic.com

 

Quote

On the morning of February 23, Tim Nevius, a 37-year-old former NCAA investigator, walked into the kitchen of his parents’ house in Sarasota, Florida. His dad’s first question: Had he seen the bombshell story?

A few hours earlier, the world of college sports was sent into hysterics after Yahoo! published documents detailing alleged payments from a sports agency to star basketball players around the country. There was $43,000 to North Carolina State’s Dennis Smith, some $26,000 to Isaiah Whitehead at Seton Hall—and on and on. The paper trail was part of a widening FBI probe into the sport. “These allegations, if true, point to systematic failures that must be fixed and fixed now if we want college sports in America,” NCAA President Mark Emmert would say.

The Yahoo! report would have been seismic for Nevius when he worked at the NCAA from 2007 until 2012. The NCAA’s 400-page rulebook has existed for the last 70 years to explicitly forbid these kinds of payments—and Nevius’ job was to enforce it. He once investigated some of the biggest names in college sports, like the football powerhouses at Oregon and the Ohio State. During one hearing about an agent’s involvement with a men's basketball player at UConn, Nevius clashed with legendary Huskies coach Jim Calhoun over phone records. “You’re calling me a liar. I’ve never been so insulted in my 36-year career,” Nevius recalls Calhoun screaming at him. “I mean it was a cool job,” he adds.

Last month, though, his reaction was different. Sure, he’d read the story, he told his dad, but mostly he’d just shrugged. “I was brainwashed for a long time,” Nevius says.

Indeed, Nevius is a rare breed. He has gone from enforcing the NCAA’s rulebook to speaking out against it. In recent years, he has worked on a lawsuit that aims to blow up amateurism; last year he testified in front of California lawmakers about the need for increased protections for player safety; and recently he opened a law firm dedicated to helping players caught in the crosshairs of the NCAA.

As the FBI’s investigation has prompted renewed soul-searching in college sports, lawsuits continue to attack the NCAA’s business model and everyone from LeBron James to a growing chorus of sportswriters have questioned the organization’s mission, Nevius stands as proof that minds can change. Even inside the famously intransigent NCAA.

 

A one-time utility infielder at the University of Dayton, Nevius was hired by the NCAA a year out of law school. He was steadily climbing the rungs of the enforcement division when everything changed in the spring of 2011. Nevius was dispatched to Columbus, Ohio, where a scandal was mushrooming at Ohio State. Football players—including star quarterback Terrelle Pryor—had been trading championship rings and other memorabilia for tattoos at a seedy local shop, Fine Line Ink, and head coach Jim Tressel had just resigned.

Once on campus, Nevius was tasked with determining the amounts that players paid for their tattoos versus their sticker prices. The discounts were the so-called “extra benefits”—the violation of NCAA rules—that the players would need to pay back. He set up shop in a conference room inside Ohio Stadium and spent hours interrogating a parade of players, including Pryor, leading Buckeyes rusher Dan Herron and wide receiver DeVier Posey. Nevius ran through his questions about the tattoos: How big were they? Color or black and white? Where? One player rolled up his sleeve to give Nevius a look at a tattoo on his bicep. Another turned around in his seat to lift up his shirt to reveal a large tattoo on his back. “Getting a really shitty tattoo for 20 bucks instead of 40 was what we were spending a lot of time on,” Nevius says.

As the investigation unfolded, Nevius found himself combing through players’ bank records. He learned that they were selling items at the tattoo parlor because they needed the money for gas and food. The so-called largesse the players were accused of included a trip to an arcade. “It turned out these players needed money for basic stuff that any college kid would expect to have,” Nevius says.

The investigation also led Nevius to a former Buckeye named Jermil Martin, who he tracked to an apartment in a rougher neighborhood in Columbus. Martin was working at a fast food restaurant and as Nevius conducted a lengthy interview, Martin’s girlfriend sat next to him and his toddler son played with a truck on the floor.

Martin recounted how he had been full of such hope when he was recruited but had transferred after not getting much playing time. His disappointing college football career hadn’t led anywhere. Martin had been close to someone at the tattoo parlor, and he had been given a deal on a used Chevy Tahoe that turned out to be a lemon. As Martin spoke, tears welled in his eyes.

“I left the interview with a pit in my stomach,” Nevius says. “It was a feeling of who are the rules really protecting? The whole case was over $14,000.” He continues: “It was absurd. I started questioning the whole mission.”

Back at NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis, Nevius was unsure what to do with his new feelings, but he knew better than to mention them. “The groupthink was too strong,” he says. He recalled how early in Emmert’s tenure the association had unveiled a new marketing slogan—“One Team, One Future”—complete with an expensive laser light show. Afterward, staffers returned to their desks to find their computer backgrounds had been changed to feature the new slogan.

Another time he and his colleagues discussed a former UCLA linebacker named Ramogi Huma, who was publicly advocating for more safety protections and benefits for athletes and sought a meeting with the NCAA’s Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, which was made up of a group of players. “We brought the request to the students but in a totally biased way so they would say no,” Nevius says. “We wanted the athletes to think he was irrelevant, even though he was actually trying to help them.”

Nevius adds: “You’re just bombarded with what amounts to propaganda there. There wasn’t a lot of debate.”

Nevius is not the first person inside the NCAA to lose faith in its mission. That distinction belongs to J. Brent Clark, a former investigator who left the NCAA and testified before Congress in 1980 about the capriciousness of the enforcement staff. Famously billed as a star witness, Clark instead pushed the bounds of credulity in his testimony and was forced to apologize. (He erroneously accused Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, then an NCAA investigator, of “accepting the service of a young lady.”) Then there was Walter Byers, the NCAA’s first executive director, the man who built the modern NCAA. Decades later, he was forced out of the job and in 1995 wrote a memoir denouncing amateurism.

Perhaps most famously, there is Sonny Vaccaro, the former Nike executive who had the genius idea to pay college coaches to outfit their teams in Nike shoes as a marketing technique in the 1980s. He quit that job and has spent the past two decades railing against the ills of the NCAA and amateurism.

Nevius’ journey has been far quieter and in many ways less dramatic. In 2012—a year after his trip to Columbus—Nevius left the NCAA to pursue a master’s of law degree at Columbia in New York. But it wasn’t the statement of purpose it might seem today; he actually left the door open to returning. “Nothing had manifested in me that I really had to do something about college sports then,” he says. But at Columbia, an advisor suggested that with his sports background he should reach out to Jeffrey Kessler, a Columbia law graduate who has represented the NBA and NFL players unions since the 1980s. Nevius pitched Kessler on adding a college sports group that could represent schools under investigation by the NCAA to his practice. Kessler hired him in 2013.

Soon, though, the scope of the new job would change dramatically. In early 2014, a more radicalized Huma spearheaded a union drive by the Northwestern football team. To turn up the pressure on the NCAA even higher, he looked for a law firm to file a monster antitrust lawsuit (The National Labor Relations Board said the players could not unionize in 2015). The case was revolutionary, seeking to remove all of the NCAA’s restrictions on paying athletes, and, if successful, would allow high school recruits to sell their services to the highest bidder. Huma chose Kessler’s firm to file the case.

Suddenly, and almost by accident, Nevius was an integral part of a case that sought to bury his former employer. Around that time, one ex-colleague sent him a note calling him a turncoat. (“It wasn’t meant to be threatening,” he is quick to add.) As much as the case was ideological for Kessler—he had argued the case in federal court that brought free agency to NFL players in the early 90s—it became a learning experience for Nevius. The economic experts showed him that the NCAA operated like a cartel by capping players’ wages. He also saw detailed accounts of how much money was flowing through college sports. (During discovery, Kessler’s team had to ask the court to compel the Big Ten to turn over financial documents connected to the Big Ten Network, which Fox paid nearly $3 billion to start.) “It was the first time I saw the other side of the argument and really understood the depth of the hypocrisy,” he says.

According to Kessler, Nevius’ greatest asset was his familiarity with the notorious NCAA rulebook. ”It’s byzantine,” Kessler told me. “Tim helped us untangle it.”

As the case was covered in the press, Nevius began to field calls from athletes around the country who were looking for help. One Power Five football player called to say his coach was asking players about their sexual exploits—and bragging about his own in front of players. Another player had been locked in the team’s locker room during a practice. It was an effort, the player told Nevius, to force him to transfer because the coach couldn’t take away his scholarship.

“I’d ask them how they found us,” Nevius says. “And it was just Googling college sports lawyer. The NCAA wasn’t doing anything to help them.”

 

Kessler’s case is expected to go to trial this year, but Nevius will not be a part of it. He surprised his boss in 2016 when he announced he would take a sabbatical, and he spent much of the next year and a half traveling the world—South America, Southeast Asia and Europe—and thinking seriously about other career paths. “I had to decide what I wanted to do with my life,” Nevius says. “But I’m compelled to try to change college sports.”

By the time Nevius returned home, Kessler was fully staffed on his case, so he looked for other avenues for advocacy. (Both Kessler and Nevius insist there was no bad blood between them that caused Nevius to leave.) He helped Huma draw up a companion document to the National Letter of Intent that college recruits can force schools to sign. In the future, the pair hopes athletes will require schools to contractually guarantee them health and safety protections, and stricter scholarship guarantees.

Last April, Nevius testified before the California General Assembly in support of a bill that he and Huma helped write. It would create a commission to oversee health and safety in college sports and have the teeth to punish schools that don’t follow the guidelines. The bill passed the Assembly and is expected to be taken up by the state Senate this year. “Tim was literally the muscle behind the NCAA rulebook,” Huma says. “For him to be speaking, it’s a powerful symbol.”

Recently, Nevius started his own New York-based firm to represent players under investigation by the NCAA, particularly in eligibility and transfer cases. The work isn’t as radical as Kessler’s case, but Nevius is unsure a court will open college sports up to a free market. “I’m working within the system more than I’m trying to tear it down right now,” he says. He plans to continue speaking out on issues like stronger guarantees from schools to pay medical bills during and after college and for players to be able to sign endorsement deals. (Of the FBI investigation, he is less dismissive than many other NCAA critics, many of whom believe the rulebook is the crime, not the payments. “If it scares some of these people trying to turn these kids into meal tickets, that’s a positive thing,” he says.)

When I asked Nevius if he felt guilty about the enforcement work he did at the NCAA, he was adamant that he didn’t. “I don’t cringe thinking about being an investigator,” he says. Instead, he views his career as a progression. He learned things as a college athlete, then as an investigator and finally working with Kessler. I asked if that evolution could serve as a blueprint for others: fans, school administrators, even NCAA officials. That elicited a chuckle, as Nevius noted the strongest reform put forth by most school presidents and conference commissioners in the wake of the FBI probe has been to abolish the NBA’s one-and-done rule. “It says something that the first thing they do is blame someone else’s rules,” he says.

Nor does he believe, despite the headlines, that there is much appetite for real reform outside of some sportswriters and plaintiffs’ lawyers. “I wish I were wrong, but most fans know this is how college basketball works—illegal payments, shady agents, all of it—and they don’t care,” he says. “It might even be part of the intrigue. The NCAA is going to make a billion dollars this month (on the NCAA Tournament) and no one is going to stop watching.”

But, he adds, “That doesn’t mean I’ll stop trying.”

 

[TrashMaster G 17387]

Interesting article.  Thanks for posting.

So, here's a thought, without trying to go all Cloak Room (or whatever the surly equivalent is):  It seems to me that the NCAA and the NRA are suffering from similar organizational issues.  Their public faces are pictures of intransigence in the face of popular calls for change and evolution in the way that they operate, loudly claiming to stand on principle while the backroom operations are absolute cesspools.  People are tiring of the hypocrisy and the obstinance.

[Hefeweizen 5307]

I actually see the NCAA as a force doing harm to athletics. 

Bureaucracy almost never serves what it regulates. 

[Beau Vine 53999]

I have said this many times before...

The International Olympics Organizing Committee is one of the most corrupt organizations in the entire world.

Yet even they, 20+ years ago, realized that the concept of amateurism is a stupid, indefensible, morally-banrkupt charade to attempt to pull off when you're a billion-dollar organization.

 

I seriously don't understand how people like Mark Emmert and Jim Delaney and Larry Scott sleep at night.

[TrashMaster G 17387]

1 minute ago, Beau Vine said:

I have said this many times before...

The International Olympics Organizing Committee is one of the most corrupt organizations in the entire world.

Yet even they, 20+ years ago, realized that the concept of amateurism is a stupid, indefensible, morally-banrkupt charade to attempt to pull off when you're a billion-dollar organization.

 

I seriously don't understand how people like Mark Emmert and Jim Delaney and Larry Scott sleep at night.

FIFA gives the IOC a solid run for their (bags of) money.

[tx ind 6999]

The fact that they’ve done nothing to rapelor is all you need to know.

[Beau Vine 53999]

This is a big deal because Kessler is the guy who won the court case that created NFL free agency, and he has worked with basically every players' union for every major sports league.

 

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The NCAA will have to return to court to defend its new limits on the compensation college athletes can receive for playing sports, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken set a trial date of Dec. 3 for the lawsuits, which seek to prevent the NCAA and a group of major conferences from confining athletes to receiving scholarships covering tuition, fees, room, board books and incidental costs of attending college.

Both sides had asked Wilken for a summary judgment ruling in their favor without a trial.

In a 36-page opinion, Wilken granted each side some of what it was seeking, but not all.

She set a non-jury trial of no more than 10 days that would take place in the same Oakland courthouse where Wilken oversaw the Ed O’Bannon antitrust case in which she found that the NCAA’s compensation limits in effect at that time violated antitrust law.

 

The plaintiffs in the cases are asking Wilken to issue a permanent injunction that would apply to Division I men’s and women’s basketball players and to football players at Football Bowl Subdivision schools.

The cases were filed separately in different parts of the country. However, because of their similarity they were put through pre-trial proceedings together in front of Wilken, who had been assigned the first of the two cases.

That case began on behalf of former West Virginia football player Shawne Alston, and is being led by Seattle-based attorney Steve Berman. Alston remains a named plaintiff, but the initial case was consolidated with other suits involving athletes in other sports. According to a revised filing of the suit in July 2014, it now seeks to cover Bowl Subdivision football players, Division I men’s basketball players and Division I women’s basketball players. Although the NCAA and 11 conferences are named as defendants, other Division I schools and conferences are alleged to have been co-conspirators.

 

In addition to the injunction, this case also sought damages based on the difference between the value of a scholarship under the NCAA’s former rules and the value of a cost-of-attendance-based scholarship. But those claims are part of a $209 million proposed settlement to which Wilken granted preliminary approval in March.

The second case, being directed primarily by New York-based attorney Jeffrey Kessler, was filed on behalf of plaintiffs led by former Clemson football player Martin Jenkins, former Wisconsin basketball player Nigel Hayes and current Wisconsin football player Alec James. It covers football and men's basketball players in the power conferences

 

[Bone3421 716]

TL;DR

[kopp0e 1135]

On 3/27/2018 at 10:47 AM, Hefeweizen said:

I actually see the NCAA as a force doing harm to athletics. 

Bureaucracy almost never serves what it regulates. 

You notice the football brands are more likely to be penalized than elite basketball brands, as witnessed by the FBI probes...

[nnm 36087]

 

[Richard Kimball 1492]

On 3/27/2018 at 11:26 AM, Beau Vine said:

I seriously don't understand how people like Mark Emmert and Jim Delaney and Larry Scott sleep at night.

Yeah, I'm five years late, but it's still obligatory...

[TrashMaster G 17387]

Holy necrobump, batman!

[nnm 36087]

31 minutes ago, TrashMaster G said:

Holy necrobump, batman!

No need to start a new thread for every thought (texAgs). I just searched for NCAA and this seemed like the right thread for the topic in the bump post. 

[Evil Bill Obrien 3188]

41 minutes ago, TrashMaster G said:

Holy necrobump, batman!

[LTtxfan 48966]

Thread needs more posts...  FUCK THE NCAA