Sonny Vaccaro knew nothing about the law. He did know a lot about college sports and was sure the athletes who were driving millions of dollars in revenue to their schools should be paid.
Michael Hausfeld knew nothing about college sports, but it didn’t take long for the attorney who built his reputation challenging oil companies and Swiss banks to conclude the way the NCAA was doing business looked illegal.
“I went to him and said, ‘I think these (athletes) are getting screwed,’” said Vaccaro, the former sports executive perhaps best known for helping Nike sign Michael Jordan out of college. “Then (Hausfeld) said to me something that really wasn’t on my mind. He said, ‘Well, now you gotta find me a guy who’s gonna sue.’”
Searching for an entry point to challenge a system they viewed as unfair to college athletes, Vaccaro and Hausfeld found it in former All-America basketball player Ed O’Bannon, the MVP of UCLA’s 1995 national championship team. He signed on as lead plaintiff of a lawsuit in 2009 after seeing his image in a popular video game from EA Sports authorized by the NCAA that he was not being paid for.
O’Bannon challenged the NCAA’s right to make money off the use of athletes’ names, images and likenesses and other plaintiffs in the antitrust case included Oscar Robertson and Bill Russell. Vaccaro was there in 2014 when they won.
“I just wanted to right a wrong,” O’Bannon said then.
The games went away; EA Sports didn’t want to risk further legal exposure. But after a 10-year hiatus, the college football version of the game has returned with great fanfare. EA Sports said more than 2.2 million users had played College Football 25 even before its official broad release last week.
The athletes in the game are clearly identified — and they are being compensated.
O’Bannon case impact
A decade after that court ruling, the NCAA’s longstanding collegiate model of amateurism is pretty much dead, with the association and five major conferences agreeing in May to a $2.8 billion antitrust settlement that includes a plan to share revenue with athletes.
The settlement announcement and the return of EA Sports within weeks of each other was a coincidence, but symbolically it couldn’t be more appropriate.
“We knew from the very beginning that we were going to be undertaking a challenge to the concept of amateurism as it was masqueraded by the NCAA,” Hausfeld recently told The Associated Press.
O’Bannon’s complaint was born from playing EA’s college basketball game and noticing a nameless avatar suiting up for UCLA that looked and played an awful lot like him. Because of the lawsuit in his name, O’Bannon has become synonymous with the demise of the NCAA and the unmasking of big-time college athletics as a billion-dollar industry running on unsalaried labor.
It’s not a legacy O’Bannon actively embraces, and he declined an interview request by the AP.
“I knew something had to be done,” he told Sportico in May. “I figured once people began to look under the hood of NCAA rules, they’d realize those rules really didn’t add up. Why can’t a video game company pay college athletes to be in a video game, when that same company pays NBA and NFL players? It just doesn’t make any sense.”
