The NCAA News - News and Features

The NCAA News -- December 20, 1999

1990s: A decade of litigation

From restricted earnings to initial eligibility, many off-the-court issues ended up in court

BY KAY HAWES
STAFF WRITER

The NCAA's charge at the beginning of its history -- to make football safer -- meant that the Association was in the business of regulation from the very start.

As the Association's role in intercollegiate athletics expanded, so did its rules-making authority. Over the years, NCAA member institutions adopted a variety of legislation intended to maintain a level playing field, enhance student-athlete safety, curb recruiting abuses and establish championships.

The Association established enforcement procedures, developed academic standards for eligibility and adopted legislation that governed everything from football television contracts to financial-aid limits.

With so many regulations -- governing everything from the baseball bats used in NCAA championships to the number of coaches an institution could hire for its basketball teams -- there were bound to be legal challenges.

Whether anybody envisioned a decade quite like the '90s is something else again.

Coming into the 1990s, the NCAA was no stranger to lawsuits, having already appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court twice, a notable feat since the court must choose from among hundreds of cases each week to decide which ones it will hear.

As more people began turning to litigation to settle disputes, the NCAA's time in court -- to assert and affirm its governing power in intercollegiate athletics or to defend a decision made by its members -- became immense.

Antitrust cases increase

A primary NCAA legal battleground in recent years has involved antitrust. An especially visible case was decided in September 1981 when a federal court ruled that the 1982-85 NCAA Football Television Plan, which spelled out the regulations governing NCAA member institutions' appearances on television during the regular season, violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. The NCAA appealed the decision, but the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately agreed with the lower court.

The seed of the football television decision had been sown years earlier in a 1975 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving the Virginia State Bar Association. In that case, the courts began to apply antitrust laws to associations, a change that would impact the NCAA many times over the next two decades.

One prominent antitrust case did go the Association's way. After the NCAA voted to offer women's championships in the early 1980s, a move that effectively closed the doors of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), the AIAW filed suit alleging antitrust violations. The AIAW lost the case in 1983.

The next major antitrust case did not result in a favorable decision for the NCAA, however.

In 1990, as part of a report from the Special Committee on Cost Reduction, a "restricted-earnings" coaching position was first proposed. In January 1991, the NCAA membership created the position. The legislation limited such coaches' earnings to $12,000 during the academic year and to $4,000 during the summer.

Proponents of the restricted-earnings position touted its cost-cutting features and also said it would offer opportunity to young graduate students, and perhaps even minorities, who were seeking to enter the coaching ranks.

What actually happened, however, was that the positions were not filled by individuals entering the profession. Established coaches -- now restricted to $16,000 annual income -- sought to change the legislation, claiming that the salary restrictions were not enough to provide a living and constituted restraint of trade. After attempts to change the legislation failed, many of the coaches in such positions joined forces to sue the NCAA.

In May 1995, a federal judge ruled that the NCAA violated the Sherman Antitrust Act with the rule. As a result, the NCAA lifted the earnings restriction on the position.

In May 1998, the same judge awarded $67 million to the coaches, trebling the actual damages as required under antitrust law. The NCAA appealed.

In March 1999, the plaintiffs and the NCAA settled the case for $54 million. The NCAA agreed to drop its appeal of the decision and pay the plaintiffs in cash.

Charles T. Wethington Jr., president of the University of Kentucky and chair of the NCAA Executive Committee, said the Association remained convinced that it had not violated antitrust laws. Even so, he said the Association's leadership realized the time had come to settle.

"The Executive Committee was prepared to continue the appeals process," Wethington said. "However, there comes a time when you must weigh your opinions and judgment of the law against the best interests of the common good.

"This has been a long and, unfortunately, divisive issue that has pitted employee against school and sometimes friend against friend."

Another large antitrust suit followed in 1998 when Easton Sports, a baseball bat manufacturer, alleged that the NCAA had violated antitrust laws in establishing new standards for bats. Ultimately, Easton dropped that suit when the NCAA modified its proposal for bat standards to reflect additional information.

Title IX

Before the 1990s, Title IX was seen as an institutional issue and not an NCAA issue. Few questioned whether the NCAA itself was subject to the federal legislation. That changed in March 1996 when Renee M. Smith alleged that the NCAA's refusal to waive a graduate-school competition rule amounted to a violation of Title IX. Smith alleged that the NCAA disproportionately granted more of such waivers to men, thus excluding her from competition based on her gender.

In March 1998, a U.S. appeals court ruled that Title IX applied directly to the NCAA because the Association receives dues money from institutions that receive federal aid. The Association appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled February 23, 1999, that the NCAA is not considered a recipient of federal funds just because it receives dues from member schools that do receive federal funds.

"We have consistently said that the NCAA should be in compliance with Title IX on a voluntary basis and have worked to achieve compliance," said Cedric W. Dempsey, NCAA president, noting that the Association did not oppose the spirit of the law.

Initial eligibility

When the NCAA Presidents Commission sought to improve academic standards by strengthening the Association's initial-eligibility rules in 1992, a Pandora's box of potential litigation was opened.

While many in athletics hailed the tightening of academic standards, others said those same standards would limit opportunity for minorities and the learning disabled. Both of those issues are being actively litigated, in a variety of cases, in the courts right now.

The most well-known initial-eligibility case so far is the one filed by Tai Kwan Cureton and Leatrice Shaw, which alleged that they were unlawfully denied educational opportunities as freshmen because of the NCAA initial-eligibility rules, which establish minimum SAT and ACT score cutoffs.

On March 8, 1999, a U.S district judge ruled that the NCAA's initial-eligibility legislation (Proposition 16) did have a disparate impact upon African-Americans.

On March 30, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted the NCAA's motion to reestablish Proposition 16 until the appeal of the district court's decision could be heard.

"We asked for a stay in part so that the orderly process of discussion and deliberation about initial-eligibility standards -- properly conducted within the framework of higher education -- can continue," said Graham B. Spanier, chair of the Division I Board of Directors and president of Pennsylvania State University.

Spanier also said the NCAA was likely to review Proposition 16 even without the litigation.

"There are passionate voices within the Association and elsewhere that point to the impact of the current legislation on African-American prospects," he said. "Those voices have not gone unheard or unnoticed.

"Almost everyone, however, believes that academic integrity is extremely important and that some uniform standard for initial eligibility is necessary."

It is likely that both the Third Circuit and the NCAA will address the issue of the standards sometime in the next year.

Other significant issues

Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, the NCAA found itself in court defending its right to carry out many functions asked of it by the membership, including whether or not it could suspend a coach, whether it could establish a maximum logo size on student-athlete uniforms or whether it has the right to apply its enforcement process to its member schools.

In the 1990s, the NCAA successfully battled several state "due-process" laws, which compromised the NCAA's ability to enforce its rules.

One notable suit that was resolved in the 1990s involved former University of Nevada, Las Vegas, men's basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian. In December 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the NCAA did not violate the constitutional rights of Tarkanian, then the men's basketball coach at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, when it recommended that the school suspend him for two years as the result of an infractions case. A decade later, in April 1998 -- after the case had journeyed through a legal maze -- Tarkanian and the NCAA ended a 26-year legal dispute with a $2.5 settlement paid to Tarkanian, by then the men's coach at California State University, Fresno.

In settling the case, Dempsey cited the length of time the case had gone on, the cost of continuing, and the request by a federal judge to mediate the issue.

"The settlement does not repudiate NCAA enforcement procedures," Dempsey said. "We believe in the enforcement procedures that were in place in 1976, and we believe in them as they exist today."