The NCAA Is Too Busy Paying Legal Expenses To Pay Athletes

The National Collegiate Athletic Association likes to claim that it and its member schools don't have the money to pay college athletes, despite the fact that the industry brings in billions of dollars each year. In recent years, both the association and its members have found a way to at least somewhat legitimize that claim: they're simply spending lots of the money that could otherwise go to players on legal expenses.

Ironically, the bulk of those costs involve fighting lawsuits that would: a) allow athletes to be paid; b) hold the NCAA responsible for keeping those same athletes safe.

Cases in point? The association will be shelling out $46 million in legal fees to the lawyers for former college basketball star Ed O'Bannon, who brought a successful antitrust suit against the NCAA; $75 million to settle a class-action concussion lawsuit brought on behalf of former athletes; and $20 million to settle a case involving the use of player names, images and likenesses in college football and basketball video games.

But wait, there's more! According to its 2013 tax documents, the NCAA paid for $13.8 million in legal services in just that fiscal year, and it paid chief legal officer Donald Remy $717,000 all by himself. All of the above added together, which is only the money we know about, comes out to around $155 million—enough to pay all 15,000-plus scholarship athletes at the highest levels of college football and basketball around $10,000 each.

Of course, there are more expenses coming.

Despite the resolution of the O'Bannon case, the NCAA is still being sued in federal antitrust court. Its post-2013 tax returns are bound to show additional expenditures. Just last week, reports indicated that the association likely will pay major money to settle a potentially explosive wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of Derek Sheely, who collapsed and died during a football workout at Division II Frostburg State.

Sheely's case stands out among the other NCAA lawsuits in that it features the association's most hypocritical argument: That it does not have "a legal duty to protect student-athletes," despite the fact that it was founded to make college athletics, and football in particular, safer.

The NCAA very clearly does not want to address this issue. Not only does it face losing, it faces a public relations nightmare in which it will attempt to explain every day why it should be neither responsible nor accountable for the health and safety of college athletes, especially college football players facing significant brain trauma risks. In an effort to build up this defense, the NCAA has deregulated medical rules, placing liability on individual schools, and has studiously declined to create punishments for teams that disobey its concussion protocol.

"The NCAA finally issued some guidelines, but these aren't rules, they're not mandatory," National College Players Association president Ramogi Huma said. "And of course the NCAA has mandatory rules. We know the NCAA is a very punitive organization when they want to be."

This is true: the association takes an aggressive, invasive approach to making sure that the money coursing through major college sports reaches coaches and administrators instead of athletes, but is decidedly more laissez-faire when it comes to making sure that athletes don't end up with lifelong brain damage. As Missouri senator Claire McCaskill noted, this should call into question the NCAA's entire existence.

The association knows this, so it will pay up. After all, the NCAA is not lacking money. It's lacking justifiable arguments.

There is no reason the association should be able to absolve itself of its original purpose. There is no reason an organization that exists to provide governance and oversight should get to be blameless because of lack of governance and oversight. No matter how many legal briefs Remy and the NCAA file, there is no way to explain in plain English with a straight face that it is vital to "protect" college athletes from "exploitation" by denying them a fair portion of the vast sums their labor generates, all while arguing that it isn't vital to protect those same athletes' brains.

You can't blame the Sheely family for settling. Doing so will ensure that they get at least some of the recompense that they deserve for the pain and suffering they've been through, without the stress and financial strain of a trial. Still, it's hard to imagine there won't be future suits against the NCAA, as more parents lose children due to a lack of health and safety oversight. And it's hard to imagine the association won't keep writing checks and racking up billable hours to make those suits go away.

The NCAA and its member schools could take a harder stance on concussions. They could liberalize their economic restrictions on athletes. They could funnel resources into both areas, and live with having less money and control. Instead, they're spending millions to protect the status quo.

And why wouldn't they? When you don't have to pay your disenfranchised workers a market wage nor be accountable for their occupational injuries you can afford the best legal outcomes money can buy. The next time a college sports administrator cries poor, remember where some of that cash is going.

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