- The big news of the past week for college basketball and college sports in general was the decision by U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken to rule in favor of Ed O’Bannon (and 19 other plantiffs) in a 99-page decision. The ruling essentially means that players could be in line to get a share of the billions of dollars generated by college TV and video game deals. While we are still in the early stages of this case (and issue) it might be the most strong rejection of the NCAA’s amateur model we have seen yet. The ruling doesn’t necessarily mean that the players will be getting money any time soon, but instead removes restrictions on issues pertaining to a player’s likeness. The NCAA is obviously not thrilled about this decision and plans to appeal. Lester Munson has a pretty easy-to-read recap of the issues in what is a fairly complex case for those of us not in the legal field (or inclined to read 99 pages).
- Of course the next question is how much would a player be worth in the “free market”. There will be all kinds of numbers thrown around by people coming up with formulas to figure this kind of thing out. One figure that seems to have caught on a bit is that the average player is worth $212,080 based on calculations by Neil Greenberg of The Washington Post. We don’t claim to have PhDs in math, but the numbers seem a little suspect especially one that claims that the average player is worth nearly 40% as much as Dakari Johnson. The average player may have had a bigger impact on his team that Johnson does on Kentucky, but there is no way that the average program brings in anywhere close to the money that Kentucky does (or that the average team turns a $2.5 million profit).
- Speaking of big money, Maryland finally settled with the ACC for a sum of $31.4 million in order to exit the conference. The battle, which has been going on since November 2012, was one of many involving schools looking to exit conferences on the conference realignment carousel. The ACC had initially demanded full payment of a $52 million, which led Maryland to file a countersuit for over $150 million. With Maryland already an official member of the Big Ten for nearly one and a half months it seems fitting that at least one more of these suits was settled before Maryland actually competes in its new conference. Now if we can just get rid of any more conference realignment we might be onto something.
- By now you have probably seen the “most hated team state map” that has been floating around. We aren’t going to take the time to really pick apart this analysis (summary: a lot of states hate Duke–not as many as you might think–and then there are a bunch of regional rivalries). The one thing we would point out is that the map would have benefited a lot from increased fidelity because many of these areas of hatred are probably based around certain cities (like where rival schools are located). If you are looking for a little more nuanced breakdown of some of the results, check out Jeff Eisenberg’s analysis of the hate map.
- There were also a couple of significant pieces of transfer news this past week. Colorado State added Grambling transfer Antwan Scott, who led them in scoring with 15.7 points per game last season. The addition of Scott is even more significant because he is eligible to play immediately with a graduate student transfer waiver. The other news is still somewhat in limbo as Cody Doolin, who transferred from San Francisco after a falling out with the team, was able to get his senior year of eligibility back, but is still waiting on the NCAA to rule if he is eligible to play immediately for UNLV.