Welcome everyone to our CLE today, the Evolution of College Sports Law, SCOTUS and Beyond. My name is Daniel Lust. I'm one of the hosts of the "Conduct Detrimental Sports Law Podcast." I am a practicing attorney in New York. I am also the sports law professor at New York Law School. Today, I am joined by two of my team members over on "Conduct Detrimental," where we cover everything at the intersection of sports and law. First, Taryn Sharma, a recent graduate of Minnesota Law School Taryn, how's it going?

Hey Dan, doing well. Yeah, recent as recent can be. I just graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School. This past Saturday, I'll be taking a position at a Minneapolis based firm, practicing M&A and corporate work there upon passing the bar. And I'll also be teaching our brand new sports and NIL clinic class at the University of Minnesota Law School this fall.

Very exciting, and sitting next to you virtually is Brendan Duggan, a recent, oh, I'll say you recently finished your 1L year at Brooklyn Law School. So Brendan pleasure to have here.

Yeah, really excited to be here. I'm a rising 2L at Brooklyn Law School. I was a previous student athlete myself. I played volleyball at NYU and I also worked at overtime while I was in college, a sports media company, and I'm really excited to be here and talk everything NIL and college sports law today.

So the reason, so I guess I'm the elder statesman in the room being the ripe old age of 34. We thought it was important to have some younger presenters for this particular topic because the world of college sports is changing in a way that we've never really seen before. So the next 100 years of college sports are actually being shaped right now in the state legislatures. Maybe even the federal government, maybe Congress, and for roughly a hundred years, college sports was backed on this thing called amateurism, which was this concept that athletes did not and should not be paid because we wanted to preserve their amateur status. And we wanted to protect their educational rights and not make them seem like professional athletes. That is being turned on its head as we speak. So Taryn, Brendan certainly gonna be a lot of fun today to break that down. Now, before we get into it, Brendan, you said you played volleyball. I can confirm, you are a very tall individual. What do we say? We wanna say six, seven?

Yeah, six seven.

If we were doing this in person, I think people would say like, "Oh, obviously that guy played sports at some level." Did you make any money during your time playing volleyball at NYU?

I did not, and I could not.

'Cause I was gonna say that was a trick question because if you did, you would be in prison. You would be in sports law jail because for again, 100 years of college sports, that was not allowed. And now very much a different world athletes. Our top athletes are making eight figures. So it's not a fake number, it's a real number. And we have boosters paying people above the table. Maybe some still beneath the table, but everything's trying to be brought above board. So our agenda today, we're gonna try to go over those past 100 years. We're gonna look forward into the next 100, Taryn, were you saying something?

Yeah, no, I was just gonna say, imagine if this was all an elaborate ruse to bring down former NYU volleyball player, Brendan Duggan, that we had set this entire thing up to get him to cop to taking money while he was playing.

Listen, we know that still you can be punished retroactively. So Brendan, just everything you say, can and will be used against you in the court of sports law. Okay, Taryn, let me hand it over to you. Let's talk a little bit about what we planned to cover today. A lot of, we said a hundred years, previous a hundred years, next a hundred years. By my rough math, I was a philosophy major, not a math major. That's 200 years of content that we're gonna try to get into in one tight hour. So Taryn, I will hand it over to you.

Yeah, absolutely. So for many years, the NCAA prohibited student athletes from being compensated, like we mentioned because of their so-called amateur status. In this course, we examine landmark cases that look closely at the NCAA and their involvement and potential antitrust violations. We also look ahead to the future of college athletics within this new name, image, and likeness era.

Okay, and on that, obviously what we try to do, again, a lot here, we try to go over our objectives. So Brendan, our junior member in the room, give us our learning objectives. And we'll be teaching you the class today because obviously, maybe you were taking some hypothetical money while you're playing NYU volleyball, no, I'm just kidding, but let's go over what our audience should learn today, our learning objectives.

For sure, we have three real learning objectives today, today, we're gonna take a step back and look back to examine the background and history of the NCAA's legal battles. And as part of the history of the NCAA, we're gonna explore the definition and concept of amateurism, a term that has remained extremely important. And lastly, we are gonna look ahead and consider the future landscape of college athletics and particularly the future of NIL, which as Taryn mentioned, the name, image, and likeness era in college sports.

 Okay, so before we, oh, go ahead, Taryn.

Yeah, before we get too far, Dan, I was wondering, could we get some definitions of these terms? I'm hearing NCAA, NIL, amateurism. Can you give us a little bit more on those?

I can and you read my mind as I was about to do something similar. So the NCAA, people that are around the sports space, that means National Collegiate Athletic Association. That's a fancy way of saying the governing body that controls college sports. Now it's not a perfect definition because college football, as bizarre as it sounds, is not controlled by the NCAA. They're actually a separate entity. So, but by and large, when we refer to NCAA, we are talking about the powers that control the behind the scenes, which you get punished for, practices, that's what we mean by NCAA and Brendan and Taryn, we're gonna say the term NIL a lot, really towards the last half of our presentation today, it is not a term that's exclusive to college sports, but if you're a sports fan, you're gonna hear it a lot early and often, name, image and likeness, NIL. I can tell very quickly if someone understands the space by the way they refer to it, some people will call it NIL or NILs. And I'm like that person doesn't talk to a lot of people in the space. And then sometimes I hear people saying like, let's talk about those NILs. And I'm like, "No, that's not how acronyms work." No, yeah, so we were gonna refer to it as NIL, if you wanna call it name, image, and likeness, that is also fine. Amateurism, Taryn as you explained, is probably the other concept we're gonna talk about a lot today. Again, that was for many, many years, the NCAA's defense towards really helping athletes earn any form of compensation and say, "Hey, we're trying to protect amateurism. We do not want anything resembling free agency in college sports. We might be making millions of millions of dollars, if not billions off of these athletes, but we don't want to give it to them for their own good." Which is a very different world we're looking at in 2022. And I'll say it, I think it's a little bit of this concept of athlete empowerment. It's kind of player empowerment with guys like LeBron James, really kind of having athletes controlling the sport that has now made its way to college sport. So if you are someone that is a civil rights activist, you certainly have to be happy seeing that now for a hundred years, right? The only people on a college campus that could not make money off of their talents are what we'll call their name, image and likeness were college athletes. They would be thrown in sports law jail. Obviously Brendan did not get thrown in sports law jail, but you go through our history of college sports, maybe most infamously, Reggie Bush, one of the high profile player out of USC was determined later after he had already won the Heisman Trophy, which honors college football's best player, found out that some of his family members were given, I'm gonna say benefits, but at the time was called impermissible benefits. And then he lost his Heisman Trophy. He was kind of like disgraced college football player. And I'm like, "What did the guy do? The guy accepted money?" Like, I don't know, it's not that big of a deal. So yeah, certainly the world has kind of been spun on its head. Okay, guys, I'm gonna jump back a hundred years unless anyone else has anything to add before we dive into it?

Yeah, just that I think that people should care about this. Even if you weren't the biggest sports fan, this is a space that involves these multi-billion dollar deals. And then within that, the primary labor source can't really touch that money. So we're looking at both the economics of it, but also is that fair to have the, again, the primary labor source, the players, the student athletes, not be able to profit directly from the work that they're putting in and all the while universities with their administrators and their coaches getting larger and larger pieces of the pie because these contracts, these television contracts keep increasing.

Definitely, and I also wanted to ask you, Dan, why would you say all of this matters? So how would you contextualize NIL and this new era of college sports, how would you say from 30,000 feet above? Why does this matter?

It's a great question, it's a fantastic question. And it's a question that I have to, you know, I teach mind sports all class at New York Law School. And I explain, listen, again, actually to Taryn's point, a lot of people are pro sports fans. There's a subset of pro sports fans that are college sports fans. And maybe I think all three of us are in that Venn diagram, we like both, but if you are a college foot sports purist or college football purist, whichever you pick, these two worlds are merging and you kind of have to understand it. College sports has been a multi-billion dollar industry for years, but that wasn't always the case, right? It really became this kind of animal because of the first case we're gonna talk about that's the case called Board of Regents. And if you follow the law back in the eighties, you could see what college sports would become, which we'll get into. So following sports law, a little credit to sports law, following sports law would've told you that college football was going to be a billion dollar industry within 20 years. I dunno if you can, you couldn't really buy a stock in college sports or college football in particular, but the growth of college football as the main revenue generator in college sports has really helped all sports across the landscape. And now, again, we're jumping ahead a little bit, but the second time that the NCAA has gone to the Supreme court in really this matter, talking about compensation, Board of Regents occurred in the 1980s. And now this case, NCAA versus Alston, the 2021 case, which we'll get into, started talking about in its concurring opinion with Justice Kavanaugh, really comparing student athletes to employees and schools to employers. So again, we're dropping hints of what the next 30, 40 years of college sports are gonna look like. So that's why it matters. Again, we could talk about what happened in the past, but we want to kind of project what goes forward. And that's what you do with these big SCOTUS opinions. Fortunately, we got two to talk about today. So we're gonna talk about the main one, Board of Regents, the case in the middle, that's the Ed O'Bannon case, which we'll call the video game case. And then we're gonna go to NCAA versus Alston. That's our second Supreme court case. And then we're gonna talk about the future. So we're certainly gonna have some fun today. Okay, so I think we've done enough table setting here. So let us move to the history of college sports. Now in 1938, this is where our story begins. The University of Pennsylvania, maybe the first hint that we had that college sports were gonna be a massive business. In 1938, the University of Pennsylvania televised a home football game. Big deal, Brendan, Taryn, do you think it was in black and white or in color?

I mean, I know it was probably in black and white.

Why did you say, "I know it was probably?" Taryn, you've gotta say it confidently. Because color TV was not invented yet, Taryn, you gotta be a little more assertive than that.

It had to be really high level too 'cause we're talking Ivy League Football. So I bet a lot of those players that played in that game and on that Penn season went on to be NFL superstars.

Yeah, little known fact. And maybe some of our viewers will know this. The Ivy Leagues were a powerhouse and all things called sports early on. So not such a shock. Maybe it's a shock today. Why is UPenn bringing a televised home football game. Back then, those were the powerhouses. So from 1940 to 1950, all of UPenn's home games were televised. And essentially in 1951, a three person NCAA panels, first, Taryn, we're gonna talk about the NCAA here. They had a television committee and they presented at they association's annual conference and they found that television had an adverse effect on fan attendance and could quote seriously harm the nation's overall athletic and physical system if not brought under control. So here's the NCAA basically saying, "UPenn, you guys are making a lot of money. You guys are making a lot of money on your own. We don't love that, we gotta come in and control." Is this a similar thing in turn, Brendan to do? Are we gonna hear about this again?

Yeah, absolutely. The entire history of the NCAA is attempting to implement some sort of control. Whether you go back to the sanity codes or this, it's all about the home office controlling what everyone can do to varying degrees of success.

Yeah, I would definitely say it's a common theme throughout this course and throughout this next hour, we're gonna see the NCAA feeling like they're getting their toes stepped on and wanting to step up to kind of overcompensate for that.

Okay, so, I'm gonna fast forward about 30 years, but just know Brendan and Taryn, you touched upon it. The NCAA takes over and they say, "You know what? You guys can't do your television deal separately, that's not gonna happen." And UPenn, you can redo the history books. And I did a fun, deep dive for an article. I wrote once upon a time, but UPenn basically said, "Well, like we're still gonna keep our own television contract." And then all of UPenn's opponents for that year mysteriously said, "Well, we're not gonna play you if you have your own television deals." And looked a little bit like some form of a group boycott if you're an antitrust lawyer, your ears should be percolating or peeking up. And all of a sudden UPenn caved and they're like, "Okay, we won't do our own television deal." So for the next 30, some odd years, the NCAA had full control over all television. And for those 30 years, my parents grew up in that era. I'm sure everyone's parents did here. There was one national spotlight game. There was a complete absence of college football, this is not like what we see on television in 2022, where at any given moment on a college football Saturday, you'll have like 10 games on. Maybe there's too much college football, but it's very different. That's not the landscape that we saw during that 30 year period. So what happened,? In the 1984, the case went all the way up to the Supreme court, which maybe was the first time a lot of the country was hearing about, it's a case called NCAA versus Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma and University of Georgia Athletic Association. Now that was a case. And I'm gonna fill in the gap a little bit. Some of the college football powerhouses said like, "This is kind of crazy that we are the college football blue bloods, Oklahoma, Georgia," right? Teams that competed for the national championship for many years during that timeframe. "Why is the NCAA controlling our rights, the NCAA, which is made up of hundreds of schools, schools that aren't competing for the national championship, schools that are not spending as much resources on athletic facilities and coaches and whatnot. Like why are we splitting our revenue with them? Does that make sense to anybody?" So what they did, these schools formed what we call the college football association and they saw the NCAA negotiating with one television network. And they said, "You know what? We're going to secede from the NCAA. Not from games, no, no. We still wanna play our games within the NCAA, but we're gonna actually secede from the NCAA, just in terms of our television contracts. And you guys are gonna go talk to ABC, congrats. We're gonna go talk to CBS. We're gonna create a bidding war. It's gonna be great. It's gonna great for you guys, it's gonna be great for us." You know who didn't think it was great, Anybody have any answers? The NCAA all at once team, there's gonna be a common theme here. Get ready, when I call on you, it is probably be to make fun of the NCAA. The NCAA said, "No, we do not appreciate that." They filed the lawsuit to stop Oklahoma and Georgia in these schools from the College Football Association, from negotiating a separate contract. And they received an injunction to block them from doing that. So what we had is a battle, NCAA versus Board of Regents, University of Oklahoma and University of Georgia. So that's the case, I'm fast forwarding a little bit, but NCAA versus Alston, a case that went to Supreme court, and again, in 2021, this case was cited everywhere because that was the only case for 40 years that talked about college sports at the Supreme court level. So now, why we're both citing to it? Well, the NCAA lost that case and the NCAA was very clear. They said, "Well, listen, if you possibly allow the College Football Association to exist in negotiating television deals, the world of college sports will end. I don't know how we're gonna control all these separate television contracts." How is that possibly going to end? So the holding very clearly said that the court held in favor of the universities, holding that the NCAA's broadcast restriction violated the Sherman and claim Antitrust Acts. So they said the NCAA was exerting too much control over television rights. But here's the important thing. Again, this is the case that dealt with television rights. It was not particularly with respect to athlete rights, but in the holding, Justice Stevens did remark that there were going to be some incidents or some type of conduct that could be protected under the NCAA's guidance of amateurism, right? Protecting college athletes, protecting college sports from resembling a field that looks like professional sports. So that particular line, which in our fancy legal world will call dicta, right? Because obviously the NCAA law, so that could not be binding on the court. The NCAA has always kind of helped that. So again, I'm gonna kind of set up our framework here. The next time there's a case that really forces the issue of college sports. At least that we thought was important enough to talk about today is a case maybe 30 years later, right around there. And it's a case that many said, well, the NCAA's gonna feel pretty good 'cause they have that line from Stevens, amateurism. It's protected, some things are gonna be protected. So for 30 years, no one really wanted to challenge the NCAA on that particular chip, at least so much so that the Supreme court didn't wanna touch upon it. But here's the thing. And this is our big takeaway. The NCAA very clearly said, "If we lose this case, college sports will die. They will not exist anymore. They will cease to exist." And again, Taryn, Brendan, was the NCAA correct? The did college sports die in 1984?

No, obviously not. But yeah, I really want to stress that how insane it is. Basically you had 40 years where the NCAA's decisions and opinions were almost untouched because of this little bit that's tacked on the end of the opinion, this small paragraph which talks about the critical role that the NCAA has, that it needs ample latitude. NCAA lawyers, lawyers representing the NCAA, went back to that well for four decades and even up till the Alston decision to justify all sorts of anti-competitive behavior that the NCAA undertook, and it's all because of just that one basket of lines. So to me, that's the most stunning thing. And as we'll see, we'll hopefully move past that.

Okay, so let's set the stage appropriate for our next battle. Actually, Brendan, I'm gonna turn it to you. Can you give our viewers, our listeners, a little bit of an understanding of the college sports video game landscape that existed in the two thousands and we're not gonna have any spoil alerts, but just the college sports video game landscape.

Yeah, sure. So up until recently, there was been a recent like absence of NCAA football games and other video games that involved name, image and likeness, but that wasn't necessarily the case back in the eighties and the nineties. And the case that we're about to talk about involves a UCLA basketball player that saw his own basically replica of himself on a video game without his permission and where it went from there. But for a really long time, NCAA Football was a very popular video game. And while it's important to note that there was popularity and people loved playing the game, this wasn't a opportunity that led to any type of compensation for the athletes that were created to replicate real life athletes.

So Brenda, I'm gonna make fun of you a little bit because I guess you weren't old enough to understand the true era. it was a game NCAA Football, the NCAA Football was the greatest game of all time. March Madness

I didn't play video games as a kid. I'm a be

Oh, as a kid, as a kid, I'm not gonna ask how old you are because that'll date myself, but Taryn, I'm looking at you. We're not so far in age apart, can you tell our audience how big of a deal the NCAA Football game in March Madness franchises were? That was my childhood.

Yeah, massive. While Brendan was busy growing or whatever, I was busy cranking out the hours on the dynasty mode of the NCAA Football and March Madness Series. And then 2K also had their own games, which were fantastic as well. But I remember the first system that I ever got on my own was the PlayStation 2. And the first game that I ever got was I think it was March Madness 2002, Duke star, Shane Battier was on the cover.

Good cover.

Yeah, and I spent hours just building up my dynasty and winning national championship after national championship with like, I don't know, like Western Carolina or something like that, just like a goofy thing, creating all of these players, even my fiance, her brother, they would spend like so much time building these players like a big offensive lineman named Arida Spuds, he was just like a big guy. And they would like recruit these players. It was so much detail, these were the most fun games. And because you were building your own programs and always battling for these recruits, obviously there were no impermissible benefits in the game, but every season was new and it was really, really exciting, so.

So let's set the stage. So now we kind of give a little spoiler the case that we are gonna be talking about, it's called Ed O'Bannon versus NCAA. It's US of Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit's 2015 case. So to Taryn's point is very interesting. Obviously we have some sports fans listening to this. If you go back through the history of NCAA Football video games, EA Sports, and I guess 2K to some extent, we're all making these games. They had one thing in common. The cover athlete was always a graduating player that was going to be playing in the pros at the time that this the cover came out. And why is that? 'Cause they really couldn't compensate a particular like let's say a Tim Duncan who played four years over at Wake Forest. They couldn't give it to Tim Duncan, even though we knew he was gonna be the first overall pick when he came out because he was still playing. So I dunno, the guys that were getting put in the cover were guys that didn't need the money because those were guys getting huge signing bonuses from the draft. But legally, the NCAA did not allow you to earn a single penny off of your name, image and likeness. So, I don't wanna bury the lead too far, but in turn, I want you to talk about the legal league behind this case. Ed O'Bannon is a very important player in this particular case. Ed O'Bannon was a, I'd say, suffice I'd say, a star basketball player at UCLA, a lefty center. He's a guy, and hopefully no offense to Ed, but I don't think his professional career was quite what he dreamed it was going to be. So he's a player that if he was able to earn a living as a college athlete, like we're seeing athletes earn in 2022 and beyond, I'm sure he would've made a good chunk of change. And when his career didn't last as long at the professional, as I'm sure he wanted to, I'm sure he was a little kind of, he's thinking about this issue a lot. "I could have made more in my lifetime." So Taryn, I know you know the story, set us up for the facts, the factual scenario that led to this lawsuit. I think that is very important here. And I think this lawsuit more so than Board of Regents, one that we just talked about, led us down this path to NIL that we're sitting here today.

Yeah, let's not undersell O'Bannon. O'Bannon was the 95 most outstanding player. UCLA won the National Championship that year. And he was the best player on the team in the final four. So a very, very good college player. Like you mentioned, pro-career didn't necessarily pan out. So I believe he was actually working at a car dealership. He goes over to a buddy of his house and his friend's son is playing a video game and it's a college basketball video game, NCAA Basketball 09, which is the EA Sports game. And so Ed is like, "Okay, all right. I'll sit down on the couch for a minute and watch him play." And the kid shows him that Ed's avatar is in the game. It's a lefty, black skin. He's wearing number 31 and playing for UCLA. And it it's basically exactly O'Bannon And so the kid then says, "The worst part of this is you're not getting paid for any of it." And so that kind of gets the gears spinning in O'Bannon's mind, he's like, "Yeah, this is wrong, the NCAA is profiting off this, EA Sports is profiting off of this. And the college players are seeing $0. And even now that I'm done and I could take advantage of my name, image and likeness rights, I'm still seeing nothing." So the plaintiffs led by O'Bannon is class action challenge, the NCAA's rules that restricted athletes from profiting off of this name, image, and likeness, specifically this basketball video game had used O'Bannon's likeness without his permission, which is key. And so the athlete plaintiffs argued that the NCAA's rules were an unreasonable restraint on trade in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Yeah, I think and honestly, let's keep in mind one particular detail. This is a case that is going on in California, why? Because of UCLA. I think that's pretty important to this narrative as we're going to see with Alston in a little bit. Okay, so I guess here's an interesting footnote, right? So Taryn, right? It's safe to say NCAA lost that case as well, correct?

Yes.

And the general holding is, I don't know if you want to parse it out and apply it to the real world, that you guys NCAA, you can create a video game with EA Sports. You can make a college football game, but if you do, you're going to have to compensate the athletes. So Taryn, Brendan, what did the NCAA do with that video game after this holding? I don't just having trouble remembering, what did they do?

Is discontinued? And if you wanted to get a copy of any of those video games today because they're deadstock, they sell for like a hundred dollars on eBay, which is amazing, these games before this decision came down, probably like two, $3. And now they're astronomical in terms of their price 'cause there's no supply.

So you guys nailed it, right? At a certain point, the NCAA decided, we're just not gonna make the video games, we could and we could pay our athletes, basketball, football, but they did not. So from, I think it was 2015 up until the present, 2022, there are no officially licensed video games that exclusively cover the sports. I know there's some crossover with Madden having some playable teams in it, but by and large, it's not the same thing. Now, here's the issue. Another issue that we're gonna be looking kind of the next hundred years of college sports, right? You can create a video game that has the schools in it, right? But that doesn't have playable versions of the characters, what the NCAA got in trouble for doing is, and Taryn, you explained, Ed O'Bannon was not necessarily in the EA Sports video game, but a player bearing a striking resemblance, it was lefthanded African American player on this classic UCLA team. Like obviously that's who they were meaning to refer to. And I remember growing up Eli Manning, who was the quarterback for Ole Miss, they had his Jersey number, a player when you took off his helmet, looked a lot like Eli Manning, had a lot of his attributes. He like, he was not fast, he was pretty accurate. And he had a rating that was akin to Eli Manning who eventually was the first overall pick in that draft. So the only thing that the players argued in O'Bannon was missing, was the actual name, but they were still using essentially their image and their likeness to make money. Now for the last seven years, the NCAA could have made another game with these exact schools, right? And just having random generated avatars that didn't resemble the players at all. They have not done that. I think we're hearing some inklings that that actually will happen moving forward and Taryn, what is interesting and I see you, for those not watching on video, Taryn's crossing his fingers. Like he really wants it to happen. What is interesting is there's something, this maybe half legal, but I guess we'll talk about legal and legal workarounds. What you can do in these video games, you can have a license with the schools, right? Or you could just have generic schools that have no schools have no resemblance. As long as the features are customizable, you can download something that's called a Mod, it's called modification, but Mod for short, Roster Mods, and you can really edit the entire school's jerseys, logos, players names, coaches names, to create a landscape that looks exactly like college sports. Now you might be saying, if you wanna do that power to you, it takes a ton of time. Might take hours, might take weeks, but when you can download Mods, all it takes is one person. And that link to hit the Reddit forums and then everyone can download it. Then all of a sudden you have a college game that is fully playable, the EA Sports, the video game manufacturers, or whoever's making the particular video game. They're gonna say, "Well, we didn't actually make a player's name, image and likeness. We just created video game and the users did it. So what is it our fault? So we're operating in a legal gray area when it comes to video game rights, compensation. So that's really our next battle to be fought. Okay, so we've spent certainly a lot of time talking about the video game. Again, the definition we talked about it earlier is this concept of amateurism. Brendan, do you wanna explain that for our listeners here?

Yeah, definitely. I think amateurism is one of those kind of buzzwords that the NCAA really relies on and it's definitely remain integral to the NCAA throughout its years, and especially in this O'Bannon case. There's no formal definition of amateurism on the NCAA website. They have a page that says, quote: below some situations that may impact a prospective student athletes amateur status. But I would argue like, what does that really mean? And it's not even confirming that it will impact a prospective student's athlete amateur status that just that it may. One interpretation of amateurism is that an amateur is typically someone who does not have a written or verbal agreement with an agent, has not profited off above his or her actual unnecessary expenses or gained a competitive advantage in his or her sport. Again, this first kind of idea of not having a written or verbal agreement with an agent, that's pretty clear to me at least, that's pretty black and white, but these ideas of not profiting above his or her actual unnecessary expenses or gaining a competitive advantage in his or her sport, what does that mean? Does that mean on the field, in the classroom, financially? I think it's just a very broad idea that can be interpreted in various ways. And then if we're looking at the role of amateurism in the O'Bannon case, so the NCAA argued to the district court that restrictions on student athletes compensation are, quote: necessary to preserve the amateur tradition and identity of college sports. And I think this is a theme that we're continuing to see all the way back from the UPenn case to the Board of Regents case. Basically the NCAA is using this term and this concept of amateurism as a way of preventing student athletes from getting paid. And it's certainly a traditionalist approach around preserving past traditions. And I think also implicitly there's this concept or this theme that the NCAA is apprehensive to change or to evolve. And I think, again, going back to the O'Bannon text, part of the NCAA's argument, the NCAA goes a step further and they say that amateurism is quote: a core principle since it's founding and also a key driver of college towards popularity with consumers and fans. And if we step back and think about what they're really saying here, to me, it sounds like they're almost saying the reason fans love college sports isn't to witness future superstars that they're alma mater or just cheer on and support their alma mater or favorite colleges, keeping in mind that some US states don't have professional sports franchises. So they take major pride in their local college sports teams, but they're basically saying the real reason fans love college sports, excuse me, is because student athletes are amateurs. To me personally, that doesn't really add up. I think if you went around asking a hundred fans why they're excited or love Alabama Football or Duke Basketball, I'm sure the word amateur or concept of preserving the tradition and identity of college sports wouldn't come up once, or if it did, maybe just once or twice, I think going back to the O'Bannon case, the district court rejected the NCAA's claim that it had a longstanding commitment to amateurism. And instead they pointed out that this definition of amateurism, which remains unclear today, is malleable and changes over time in significant and contradictory ways, quote. And the court used examples of tennis players being able to accept up to $10,000 in prize money before enrolling in school and student athletes accepting Pell Grants that boost their total financial aid package. And this led the court to conclude that amateurism was not truly a core principle of the NCAA, but almost to me, it seems like using amateurism as a guise to represent something and using that as kind of just a buzzword to fill in what they're trying to kind of give people a word that they can use and lean on as an excuse.

Yeah, that term that they, amateurism with no real definition, what the court says is that it's malleable, right? So it can be bent to the will of the NCAA and that allows them to apply it when they feel necessary. And that inconsistency and that contradiction is really what the court was looking at in terms of you can't have a core principle that you can't define. And so a lot of people get frustrated with the NCAA and rightfully so because they're selective in their enforcement and they're not necessarily consistent in what they hand down. And the reason is because they don't have a true definition for amateurism. It's just whatever comes to mind at the time.

So, eventually Taryn, let me give it back to you. The holding in O'Bannon it's very kind of specific. You want to close us out in O'Bannon before we move into our next chapter?

Sure, yeah, so the district court found for O'Bannon and they held that the NCAA's rules and regulations operated as an unreasonable restraint of trade. Those are key words for the Sherman Antitrust Act, and therefore violated antitrust law. The Ninth Circuit Court affirmed in part and reversed in part.

So, that's kind of important here. And again, I alluded to the fact that we went through California is certainly relevant to this. So again, the NCAA is trying to control athlete rights. The court is saying it's an unreasonable restraint trade, therefore violation of Antitrust. And again, for our antitrust law beginners, right? The NCAA's basically being called a monopoly to some extent. There is no competing version of the NCAA. Maybe we'll see that in the next couple years, but you don't have to talk. This doesn't have to be a college sports exercise, right? We can talk about Microsoft and Apple. We can talk about any type of perceived monopolies. Be it Google, you go down the list. The NCAA, there is no competitor. And is there no competitor because of what the NCAA's doing? No, it's unclear. Today, 2022 moving forward, depending on when you're listening to this, there's a lot of conversations for the first time really again, since maybe 1984, the College Football Association, that there might be what we call a breakaway league that maybe the ASCC or the Big Ten, those are two of the more powerful college football conferences, they might separate and form their own league because the law is encouraging them to do so, which is a little bit of a spoiler as to what we're gonna cover in Alston. But Taryn, I think you have one more point before we move on.

Yeah, so the key things that we should take from O'Bannon is that this court and the judge is Claudia Wilken, who we'll see again with the Alston case. But she is saying that when the regulations that the NCAA has proffered actually serve pro competitive purposes, like that's fine, uphold them, but when the NCAA is not actually acting within the bounds of what amateurism and they're just being more restrictive than necessary, the courts should not shy away from striking down those policies as they violate the Sherman Act. So this really opens the door for the first time in this post Board of Regents era, where courts are willing to take down the NCAA and say that, "Okay, we can't just defer to this dicta argument that they've been making for so many years, they can be held accountable."

Okay, so Taryn, I like that explanation. So this is snapshotting time. As Taryn's giving that explanation, we are in 2015, and I think everyone kind of sees the writing on the wall, right? And I talk to kind of both about it and all of our listeners. Okay, the EA Sports should just create a new video game and pay the current athletes and have current athletes on the cover, right? Why not have commercials with current athletes? Let's do when you have a March Madness, you know, you have big March Madness ratings. I don't know, advertise the current athletes who sponsor the game. Could not do that, and they decided not to do that. So I think us in this space, the legal space, the academic space, I don't know, we knew the college athletes were getting paid at some point. We just expected it to happen. And then, remember guys, California, its 2015 holding, Ed O'Bannon is a UCLA athlete. That's fancy for University of California, Los Angeles. UCLA is like the main basketball school through the history of all time, right? Lew Alcindor, you can go back as far as you want. Now, what happened was, guys nothing. The NCAA didn't do anything. What they did, right? Imagine this, imagine there's a giant can and is in the middle of a deserted road, and what they do, they kick the can and they say, "We are not dealing with this. We are not gonna pass anything. We're not gonna pass any laws. We're not gonna look at athlete compensation." It's almost like it didn't exist. It's like the scene from "Dumb and Dumber" guys when they put their fingers in the ear and they went, "La la la la la la la la, we can't hear you, we don't hear those rumblings." So what happened? Okay, nothing, right? Again, nothing, absolute crickets. there's barrels of, what are those called bales of hay that roll around in those scenes with the deserted towns, right? That's what we're talking about. So the NCAA compensation department, no one's there. They're like, "Eh, it's fine. Not a big deal, we'll worry about it later." So again, nothing happens. And so again, NCAA doesn't do anything. What we saw at the end of 2019. So fast forward, about four years, the California Legislature passes something called the Fair Play to Pay Act. And that was, and if you could believe this, right? A bipartisan bill that had unanimous support from the left and the right. We do not have many bipartisan issues in our country. It doesn't matter when you're listening to us. I'm sure there's still not gonna be many bipartisan issues. And we found one, we found one, paying college athletes was something that everyone wanted done. And it was so obvious that California doesn't, and why did California do it? 'Cause they saw O'Bannon And then we're like, "Athletes gonna get paid." Nothing happened for four years. So California passes this and it's our first of our many NIL laws across the country. Fast forward, we have over half the states in our country that now have them, but it started on the backs of California. And California's NIL law is very similar to one that we saw passed across the country. And it essentially said, "Listen, schools are not going to pay the athletes any type of salary. The NCAA's not gonna pay them any type of salary. But if athletes can get some type of marketing deal from some third party, like a car dealership or like the local nail salon, whatever it is, some local business, they should be allowed to do it. So they're essentially saying, who's gonna argue with this. If you can create a new stream of revenue that wasn't going to the school and this someone wants to pay you directly, let it happen. So California passes it and everyone had a panic attack. I remember I wrote an article at the time that you had Ads, it's some athletic directors. I don't wanna use my acronyms here. They said we are not gonna schedule games against California schools. It's gonna be so unfair because they're gonna get every single top athlete because they're all gonna go to California. It's gonna mess with the balance and power structure. And California is like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, everybody, hold on guys. We're gonna make our effective date. The date that this law is gonna take place, it would pass, Governor Newsom signed it into law on LeBron show called "The Shop." He signed it in very fancy, big kind of movement, right? And he signs it into law. But guys, California said, "This does not go into effect until 2023." So they said, "NCAA, listen, clock is ticking. You got four years to figure this out." So big day, all politicians across the country get excited. Like, "Whoa, look at this bipartisan bill over hear. We gotta get our own version of NIL law. That sounds kind of cool. And guess what? If these California schools think they're getting all the top athletes, no, no, no. They're gonna come to our state." So you had states, we're gonna start with Florida, a number of other states in the Southeast part of the country and said we are going to pass our own name, image and likeness law. So Taryn, Brendan, you ready for the hot seat? I got a question for you. Are you ready for this?

Yep.

Are you familiar with a 1L term called copy and paste?

Only heard about it once or twice?

Once or twice. Okay, that was a trick question because I was gonna prosecute you for plagiarism if you said yes. So not allowed in law school, not allowed really in any form of academic, but we had a loose understanding of what copy and paste was, Florida and a number of other states, basically they didn't copy and paste, but they took the basic principles of California, basically kept everything the same. The general gist, right? That the schools aren't paying, the NCAA's not paying, but would they changed, Florida and a number of these schools, I mentioned Florida in particular, Florida was the first to change the effective date of their law, their version of Fair Pay to Play. They made that date July 1st, 2021. So they said, "California, we're applauding you, we are clapping, we love what you did not applying quite enough pressure to the NCAA. We're speeding this timeframe up." So, giving a little bit of background here, the NCAA said, "Okay, we got it, we see the California's passing law, Florida's passing laws. Other states are passing laws, we gotta work on it. So we're gonna start creating our NIL, our name, image and likeness guidelines before July 1st happens, we're gonna be ready to go. We're dedicating a ton of people to the cause, we're writing this," I've always told the joke like this, "Gigantic phone book, it's gonna be a million pages. We're gonna have everything buttoned out. It's gonna be amazing, it's gonna be the greatest." So go from the end of 2019 to let's say, March 31st of 2021. Now, we have a case. Now, I kept alluding to this case, NCAA versus Alston, that date March 31st, 2021 is the date where this case, NCAA versus Alston was heard at the Supreme Court of the United States. I don't wanna spend too much time on the background, but I think it's important to see how we got there. Actually let's do another pop quiz, guys. Does anyone know Sean Alston, where he played his college sports and what sport he played? Taryn.

West Virginia.

West Virginia, what sport did he play?

Football.

Okay, and this was a case at the district court level that was in what state?

California.

Interesting, interesting. How does a West Virginia running back end up filing a lawsuit in California? Well, it's a fancy term us lawyers, law students and law professors, we call forum shopping. They saw the writing on the wall from the O'Bannon case. They, I'm sure sensed, right? They're talking to their politicians around 2019, like, "Hey, there's a lot of moving here to pay college So they file that case in California and Taryn, you mentioned our famous judge. So go ahead, give us our connection here, our time.

Yeah, Claudia Wilken, the same judge who had presided over the O'Bannon case, also presided over the NCAA V Alston case or the Alston V NCAA case before it moved up. So clearly the attorneys who were representing Sean Alston had read the O'Bannon case, they were plugged in, and they knew that this judge was more favorable to their perspective.

Right, so, I mean, I think, and again, not to too much in the weed just 'cause we are relatively short on time, but the NCAA was pretty, I think they felt pretty confident in other circuits. So they had won some other cases in different circuits towards middle America. We don't need to get into the details of those cases, but the Supreme court will take a case when there is a circuit split. So once Alston wins at the circuit court level, we have a battle that is heating up at the top. SO NCAA versus a Alston, let's get into it relatively quickly and make sure we have enough time for the future of college sports section. Okay, so the facts again, the plaintiffs current and former Division I athletes, including our West Virginia running back are our lead plaintiff, Sean Alston. They file a class action lawsuit against the NCAA, challenging the current interconnected set of NCAA rules that limit the compensation they may receive in exchange for their athletic services. Now this is actually academic related compensation. So it is not this third party marketing, we'll say non athletic based compensation. It is academic compensation. So they argued there shouldn't be any caps on academic compensation. The case goes up to the Supreme court and I wanna just make sure we spend sufficient time on it, but it's a case that the NCAA many thought would argue. We would like an antitrust exemption. You remember that comment that Justice Steven said back at Board of Regents, that there were going to be sometimes where we should be given ample leeway to create some laws that should be protected by amateurism, protecting our student athletes. Basically the Supreme court said absolutely not. That is not happening. And a unanimous 9-0 decision. The Supreme court held that the NCAA's restrictions that prohibited student athletes from earning compensation on academic related purposes were in violation of Antitrust Law. So anyone thought maybe the NCAA was going for Hail Mary. And we're gonna talk a little bit about the timing here. The Supreme court very firmly, affirmatively shut that door. So again, just to go over timing, oral argument occurs on March 31st, 2020. So us in the space, we go, "Okay." If the NCAA wins and they get that antitrust exemption, that's probably gonna really help curtail the NIL era, which was set for July 1st, 2021. Remember that date? So April 1st, that's the day after oral arguments, July 1st. You got about three months and people that follow the Supreme court know, sometimes it takes more than three months to get a decision. So we're like, "When is this decision gonna come out?" Obviously we've buried the lead. And if you've been listening to this, and if you're following college sports landscape, you know that obviously the plaintiffs won. That decision as fate would have it, came out on, I think June 20th of 2021. So 10 days prior to the onset of the NIL, this decision comes out, which eviscerates the NCAA. Now very important here, guys, in Justice Kavanaugh's concurring opinion. He has a very famous line that's been quoted up and down, might be even quoted more than the actual, at least in our sports law space, quoted more than the actual full opinion, but he ends his concurring opinion and he says, "The NCAA is not above the law." So what did the NCAA do? And this is gonna set up our next next year in change of college sports. The NCAA, remember that fictional phone book I was telling you that they've been working on for 18 months and they're like, "We're gonna figure everything out. And don't worry, and if you're in a state that doesn't have a NIL law, we got you covered 'cause we're gonna have these guidelines and everything's gonna be set." And I spoke to a couple, myself personally, I spoke to a couple schools that were really relying on the NCAA doing the work for that small schools that didn't have an NIL coordinator. They thought, "Okay, we're gonna get the NCAA's guidelines, we're ready to go." The NCAA, in that 10 day period, prior to July 1st, they said, "You know what, that phone book, that giant phone book and I'm holding it in my hands right here, I'm throwing that in the giant garbage. It is not gonna exist anymore." And the NCAA got concerned, right? That they were going to be doing something that affirmatively acted as some type of antitrust violation, a restriction on athlete compensation. So they threw the book out and they said, "Okay, July 1st, if you're in a state that has an NIL law that legally allows you to pay your athletes, congrats, you could pay your athlete. In those other states, you guys thought you were gonna be disadvantaged that you couldn't pay your athletes and we would punish your athletes," like the Reggie Bush, Like we talked about that example. "No, no, no, we are gonna waive any violations that you could be punished for getting paid." So on July 1st, throw in your metaphors here. Wild, Wild West, Pandora's box, taking the toothpaste out of the tube, everything, all bets were off. The NCAA said, "You know what? We are wiping our hands of this. We are no longer in control of this problem to the will Smith 'Wild Wild West' music." So that is what happened on July 1st. And then Taryn and Brennan, you ready for this? Are you ready for this? Can anybody tell me what the NCAA did in terms of enforcement of NIL for the next, we'll say a year, a year and a couple months?

They said that they would look into things and then I'm not sure if they ever did.

Brendan, can you answer the rest of Taryn's question? Did they do anything as a result of looking into things?

I was gonna, yeah, I was gonna say, I don't think they've really done anything since then.

Well, I have one correction, when you say I haven't really done anything, I'll go one step further. They have done absolutely nothing. They have done nothing. So again, when I call on you guys, usually it's gonna be to make fun of the NCAA in some way, shape or form. So they did not do anything, but probably at the advice of legal counsel who looked at that opinion and said, "I think the Supreme court is inviting people to sue you. If you do anything, if you do anything to resembling some type of restriction." Okay, so again, we're in a constant flux in the space, but hopefully this presentation is a capsule in time. We looked at the Board of Regent's case it was taught for our law schools for close to 40 years and still will be because it's an important case. Okay, so let us turn over to our next chapter here. We're now in the NIL era again, that stands for name, image, and likeness. So Brendan, as we are recording this, we're about a year into the era, a little bit less, kind of explain what has going on in this wiki, wiki wild era, the name, image and likeness era, whatever you want to call it, that has occurred since July 1st, 2021, when the NCAA throughout that book.

Yeah, so I think like you said, the Wild Wild West it's been this past, like 10 to 11 months were almost coming up on one full year now, there's been a lot going on. We've seen some major six and seven figure deals. We've seen a lot of athletes capitalizing, a lot of top athletes that you would hear about before the NIL era even started, they're capitalizing off of their name, image and likeness. And one thing I did wanna point out is, it's not just the Alabama QB or the Duke point guard, but it's every athlete D1, D2, D3, they can now be paid for working summer camps. They can get paid for tutoring, autographs, memorabilia, personal training or offering advice to high school athletes being recruited, capitalizing offside hustles, social media channels, and probably most lucratively, like we mentioned, some brand deals. So major headlines, we've seen the Cavender twins, they recently transferred to Miami for basketball. They are reportedly nearing a million dollars in estimated NIL deals right on July 1st, 2021. Their deal with Boost Mobile went live and was advertised in Times Square. And they've worked with WWE champs and many other major brands. In Miami, there was an attorney and businessman, John Ruiz. He owns MSP Recovery and his product, the LifeWallet, he claimed that he set aside 10 million for NIL deals with Miami athletes to advertise the LifeWallet. And then we have Paige Bueckers, she was the first athlete to sign a major brand deal with Gatorade. So we're now seeing major players like Gatorade and Nike also who I think were hesitant at first to get in on NIL deals. And I think all of this kind of leads to where we're at today and looking kind of at the future of NIL and where we're going after one full year in. And I think to me, the future seems a little bit unclear and I'm gonna pass it off to Taryn to talk a little bit about where the uncertainties lie and why they are unknown and uncertain.

Yeah, just to make it clear to everyone. So the rights that the student athletes now have in this NIL era, are rights that students always had. So if I were a student and I were funny or something like that, and I wanted to set up a YouTube channel, that would be fine. I could make money for my YouTube channel because of the work that I was doing there. But there was a punter at UCF on the football team, and he had a major following on YouTube and the NCAA made him either choose to stop playing college football or shut down his YouTube page. And so when we talk about these rules, like I know that some people aren't happy at how there's no like clear guidelines right now because the interim policy is a bit of fuss. But in terms of giving student athletes the equal rights, that seems like something that is worth pursuing. So again, there's not a ton of clear guidelines right now. We've got the interim policy, but there's no word on how that's gonna be enforced right now. And you've got states that are repealing their state policies because they might be more restrictive than the very bare bones interim policy that the NCAA put out. So, it'll be something to see in the next couple of years if we get a national policy, the NCAA has been very vocal about trying to get a federal policy. And Dan, do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, we're gonna see this play out. And I think, as we're recording this certainly, this field is very much influx. So the NCAA after 10 months, a little bit of a tug of war, we'll kind of get into in our few remaining minutes we have here. The NCAA has not done really anything, right? And then we have a fancy map. If anybody wants to look at it, there's different states across our country passing different laws. So, I joke that it was a copy and paste, but now it's not, now it's gotten pretty complex, right? And Taryn, you mentioned certain states like Alabama, writing an NIL law and then all of a sudden they realized maybe it's advantageous for us to not have an NIL law, because then we could do whatever we want, because remember guys, it's not illegal, so you're not gonna get arrested to pay college athletes. So, the NIL law was thought that would help get recruits. And now maybe no NIL law is more advantageous. So I use this example with my students in my class that I teach, but I said, if you wanted to give me a math and I said, okay, give me the drinking age in every single state across the country, the map would be 21 years of age in every single state, because we have a national law on the books. So NCAA has done nothing for close to a year. Now you're having conference commissioners now pleading with Congress to say, "Hey, please pass the national law. this map has read, it's got green, it's got yellow, it's got orange. Everything's all over the place. It's very hard for our athletes and our agents." And really, like, I dunno, from a competitive level, from a parity level, if you're gonna have conference championships that are fought across state lines and a national championship fought across state lines. It's not really fair to have everybody competing under different set of rules. So the NCAA did nothing for close to a year. So now commissioners of these various conferences, powerful conferences, the ACC, which I mentioned, one of maybe the most powerful conference in college sports is petitioning Congress for a bill. So then, they want a federal bill that's gonna make that map a nice, you know, like the version of the 21 drinking age, it's the same exact thing. And at that same exact time, again, I talked about a tug of war. The NCAA is waking up from their slumber, kind of, and they're saying, "We're gonna start punishing people. I know we talked about looking into things, but now we're gonna punish people, moving forward, these are the definitions that we're gonna punish people." So the NCAA is trying to fight for power over the years, and we've talked about three cases. The NCAA keeps taking on loss after loss, after loss. And they're saying, we know lawsuits will come. We understand that lawsuits will come and we are prepared to fight them. And I think the writing on the wall is, we're gonna fight them to try to exist. The NCAA might not exist if we don't do anything, might have breakaway leagues, you might have something else. But, the NCAA is kind of competing against the federal bill in a sense, because if the federal bill comes in, and the NCAA loses one more aspect of their power. Okay, so, some other terms, that people are looking for, collectives, right? I don't think we spent that much time talking about it, but that was some of these fancy way that these boosters, boosters are large donors to particular programs. They would create entities. Like they'd create an entity and they sometimes, they'd use a preexisting entity. And they said, "You know what? I'm not giving money to the star recruit who I want to transfer to the school. I want to come to the school as a star high school player, the entity is doing it." So any type of prohibition against a booster giving money, well, I gave money to an entity and the entity then gave money to the athlete. So a lot of this legal fiction, the entity said, "Essentially we feel uncomfortable with how people are skirting around guidance and that's the world that we live in." So again, the next hundred years of college sports are gonna be shaped based off legislation. That's now being passed across the different states, how the NCAA's responding to it, and maybe perhaps, right? How the federal government will respond. So in our remaining time that we have today, we're running to up short on time. Taryn, I'll give it to you, the future of college sports, where do we go from here in terms of litigation and really the college sports landscape.

Yeah, so what I'm looking at specifically, the general counsel of the NLRB, Jennifer Abruzzo put out a memo last year about her view that student athletes are employees of the institutions where they're working. So I'm interested to see if future challenges that could consider allowing the unionization of student athletes or to establish actual employer, employee relationships between institutions and the student athletes could bear fruit for these student athletes going forward.

Brendan, how about you? Final thoughts?

Yeah, I definitely think giving athletes employee status is definitely something to look out for, but another thing that sticks out to me and maybe this is just because I was a former student athlete myself is, how is NIL and in the future of NIL and the college sports landscape, how is that gonna affect as far as athlete performance and putting pressure on these players? We know that there was a UMiami quarterback who signed a big NIL deal right after July 1st, last year. And I think he got injured before he could even start playing, or he had a really tough season. And then Oklahoma quarterback, Spencer Rattler, he had a lot of NIL deals and there was questions about whether, and he didn't play very well. He got benched and now transferred to, I believe South Carolina. It's gonna be interesting to me to see how these NIL deals affect how students athletes perform on the field, affect if they enter the transfer portal and affect if maybe they should have spent more time in the weight room or learning the playbook, or developing chemistry with their teammates versus trying to go out and get every deal. So I think it's gonna be a balance that each student athlete is gonna have to think about what works best for them. Dan, you wanna finish up.
Yeah, yeah. So, my students call me Professor Lust but the listeners here can call me because I'm gonna tell you the next two case that we're gonna be talking about. Taryn, I have a good joke here and then, so this employer, employee distinction, that's certainly gonna be fought. It's actually being fought right now in Pennsylvania courts as we speak. And the other issue is, what exactly entitles players to NIL rights? Are they entitled to a piece of the television revenue? Are they entitled to merchandise sold to the store? Are they entitled to a piece of tickets sold for their particular games? And if they are, how does that impact college sports? We can just sprinkle a little bit of dynamite on these college athletic departments that exist because they get the football revenue and they space that across all the smaller sports, be it wrestling, rowing, golf, and tennis, those sports don't traditionally make money, but they survive on the money made by football and basketball and they get sprinkled out. So again, that money seems to be spread horizontally, if that money then, television revenue, goes vertically to football players or basketball players, all of a sudden that pie of money that's gonna go to the rest of the college sports teams is much less. So, right now we're talking about a lot of bipartisan issues, paying athletes in their particular sport and eliminating other sports is much, much more controversial. So my, again, Those are our next two issues, the true definition of what NIL entitles athletes to, and this employer, employee distinction. So I think that'll about do it for today. Again, we are all team members at the conductdetrimental.com. We have the "Conduct Detrimental Sports Law Podcast," covering all issues at the intersection of sports and law for Taryn, Brendan and myself, we appreciate everyone viewing today and stay tuned for more CLE and some fun educational seminars from Conduit Detrimental and  Quimbee.