A federal prosecutor in Connecticut on Thursday sided with the Ivy League and its eight member institutions in court by reversing a lawsuit alleging that their contract to not give Ivy League players payment constituted an antitrust violation.
The core problem with Choh &, Kirk v. Brown University et al., U. S. District Judge Alvin W. Thompson explained in his 36-page order, is that the case does n’t adequately identify a relevant market for antitrust scrutiny.
While Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale offer “athletically and academically high-achieving students” the chance to graduate from an elite college and play Division I sports, Thompson stressed that other universities offer a similar mix of highly-selective admissions and D-I sports, but athletes at those schools can land athletic scholarships.
In their briefs, the judge listed the schools that the plaintiffs and defendants mentioned. In alphabetical order, those schools are: UC Berkeley, Duke, Georgetown, Michigan, Notre Dame, Rice, Stanford, UNC Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt and Virginia. A top athlete with strong academic credentials could choose to attend one of these prestigious, non-Ivy colleges, receive a scholarship, and participate in D-I sports.
Because other top schools could fit into the market targeted by the plaintiffs, it’s “impossible”, Thompson wrote, to evaluate whether Ivy League schools have sufficient market power to deny athletes of scholarships and other athletics-based aid “without losing athletically and academically high-achieving student-athletes to other excellent schools”.
Thompson argued that another flaw in the complaint is that while the Ivy League has a certain identity that combines “academic and athletic excellence,” that identity falls short of creating a market for antitrust review. Other D-I conferences describe themselves as unique and special, but that does n’t make them a standalone market.
Although Ivy League athletes ca n’t land athletic scholarships, Ivy League schools provide substantial aid—sometimes full rides—to students, including athletes, with financial needs.
The plaintiffs can appeal Thompson’s decision to the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
A Division I conference will be presented with an intriguing challenge in this case. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch cautioned that individual conferences have a wide discretion under antitrust law when adopting amateurism rules in NCAA v. Alston, even though the NCAA and its members lost. ” Individual conferences”, Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion, “remain free to reimpose every single enjoined restraint tomorrow—or more restrictive ones still”.