EA loses NCAA license

[sickrubik]

http://www.ncaa.org/wps/wcm/connect/public/ncaa/resources/latest+news/2013/july/ncaa+will+not+renew+ea+sports+contract

NCAA will not renew EA Sports contract

The NCAA has made the decision not to enter a new contract for the license of its name and logo for the EA Sports NCAA Football video game. The current contract expires in June 2014, but our timing is based on the need to provide EA notice for future planning. As a result, the NCAA Football 2014 video game will be the last to include the NCAA’s name and logo. We are confident in our legal position regarding the use of our trademarks in video games. But given the current business climate and costs of litigation, we determined participating in this game is not in the best interests of the NCAA.

The NCAA has never licensed the use of current student-athlete names, images or likenesses to EA. The NCAA has no involvement in licenses between EA and former student-athletes. Member colleges and universities license their own trademarks and other intellectual property for the video game. They will have to independently decide whether to continue those business arrangements in the future.

Here's hoping this a trend and EA loses NFL's license.

[Paelos]

The NCAA is going down, and everyone knows it. My only hope is that the plaintiffs take it the distance.

[Ingmar]

I doubt the NFL license will move, this has more to do with EA and the NCAA being the target of a lawsuit over student names being in the games, etc., which is not an issue that exists with the professional leagues.

[sickrubik]

Don't take my dream of a non-madden NFL game away from me. :(

[koro]

Don't take my dream of a non-madden NFL game away from me. :(

This just means we're going to see no NCAA games from anyone, period, rather than seeing NCAA stuff from someone else.

[Rendakor]

Don't take my dream of a non-madden NFL game away from me. :(

This just means we're going to see no NCAA games from anyone, period, rather than seeing NCAA stuff from someone else.

This. If 2k were interested in making college sports games, they would have been making a college basketball game all these years.

[Khaldun]

Hopefully this is a prelude to the NCAA losing the NCAA license.

[eldaec]

What is an NCAA?

[satael]

What is an NCAA?

Probably some sports association or something for a sport that noone outside of USA (and maybe Canada) plays 

[Merusk]

Wow, nobody outside of the US plays Soccer, Hockey, Baseball, Tennis, Basketball, swims or does anything competitive when in college?  No wonder we do so well in the Olympics. 

[satael]

Wow, nobody outside of the US plays Soccer, Hockey, Baseball, Tennis, Basketball, swims or does anything competitive when in college?  No wonder we do so well in the Olympics.  

I said probably since it was clearly an american association since I had no idea what it was and everyone else seemed to. Add to that the fact it's something EA would pay to license and it's probably something limited to USA that's not universally recognizable like NBA or NHL.

edit: it seems it's short for National Collegiate Athletic Association so I was wrong in thinking it was some specific sport.

[Merusk]

 

[Nebu]

What is an NCAA?

A money laundering agency.

[HaemishM]

Actually, EA Sports is STILL going to make a college game next year, it just won't have the NCAA license. Or it won't be EXCLUSIVE to EA. Meaning 2k or someone else is free to make a deal with the NCAA.

As for the NFL, there have actually been lawsuits about using the likenesses of retired players similar to the NCAA lawsuit. The NCAA lawsuit is more egregious because the kids never received any sort of monetary compensation for playing (officially) other than having their schooling paid for by scholarship. I hope the lawsuit fucks the NCAA in the ass for good but it won't.

EDIT: And lest I forget, FUCK EA.

[Ingmar]

Meaning 2k or someone else is free to make a deal with the NCAA.

Not unless things change very drastically. There is not going to be a NCAA blanket license given out most likely; the litigation they're facing over the entire concept is probably going to kill it, unless they figure out a way to cut the players in, and that's a can of worms that they aren't going to be willing to open.

There's a better than zero chance of seeing something even dumber like SEC 2015 or whatever though. As a game maker you'd have to negotiate with every single school and conference individually for their licenses (maybe they already have to though?)

[Paelos]

The courts are going to unscrew that can lid for them.

[K9]

Wow, nobody outside of the US plays Soccer, Hockey, Baseball, Tennis, Basketball, swims or does anything competitive when in college?  No wonder we do so well in the Olympics. 

Yeah, you're doing almost as well as North Korea! 

[HaemishM]

EA has already said they will be doing a college football game in 2014 that isn't using the NCAA but is using the schools, uniforms, etc. thanks to a deal with some other outfit that isn't the NCAA but is maybe a college athletics licensing agency.

[Paelos]

They'll run it through the CLC (Collegiate Licensing Company)

[HaemishM]

That's the one.

[Kageru]

Wow, nobody outside of the US plays Soccer, Hockey, Baseball, Tennis, Basketball, swims or does anything competitive when in college?  No wonder we do so well in the Olympics. 

I assume we have college sports but I don't think it is considered that interesting to people not directly involved in it. The idea of sports scholarships, semi-pro teams and it being a licensable IP might be mostly a US thing. Though of course scale plays a factor as well.

[Samprimary]

Even if you don't care about sports like at all, you owe it to yourself to know of the tale of the NCAA. It is a very brilliantly evil thing. Very, very profitably and brilliantly evil.

[Yegolev]

What's evil about a sport league that doesn't pay it's players?

[HaemishM]

You forgot "and actively punishes those who manage to get paid anyway."

[Paelos]

What's evil about a sport league that doesn't pay it's players?

Collusion and not paying taxes.

[Segoris]

There was a very entertaining TV production based on the NCAA story back in 2011, it was called Crack Baby Athletic Association .

[Shrike]

Even if you don't care about sports like at all, you owe it to yourself to know of the tale of the NCAA. It is a very brilliantly evil thing. Very, very profitably and brilliantly evil.

I wouldn't go so far as say eevvvvvvvvvvilllllllllllleee. It is incredibly corrupt and certainly amoral, however.

[Yegolev]

The funny thing to me is how many people get on a gravy train of some sort and then manage to fuck it up by doing stupid shit, such as not paying taxes.

Is there a concise article on this that I can read in about ten minutes?

[Samprimary]

Even if you don't care about sports like at all, you owe it to yourself to know of the tale of the NCAA. It is a very brilliantly evil thing. Very, very profitably and brilliantly evil.

I wouldn't go so far as say eevvvvvvvvvvilllllllllllleee. It is incredibly corrupt and certainly amoral, however.

six of one, half dozen of the other — or rather, you're describing the baseline for traits that cause me to describe an entity as evil.

In this case you're talking about an institution not founded on evil precepts nor motivations, maybe, but still, today, oh man.

setup:

“I’M NOT HIDING,” Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach.”

Vaccaro’s audience, the members of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, bristled. These were eminent reformers—among them the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, two former heads of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and several university presidents and chancellors. The Knight Foundation, a nonprofit that takes an interest in college athletics as part of its concern with civic life, had tasked them with saving college sports from runaway commercialism as embodied by the likes of Vaccaro, who, since signing his pioneering shoe contract with Michael Jordan in 1984, had built sponsorship empires successively at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. Not all the members could hide their scorn for the “sneaker pimp” of schoolyard hustle, who boasted of writing checks for millions to everybody in higher education.

“Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?”

Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

William Friday, a former president of North Carolina’s university system, still winces at the memory. “Boy, the silence that fell in that room,” he recalled recently. “I never will forget it.” Friday, who founded and co-chaired two of the three Knight Foundation sports initiatives over the past 20 years, called Vaccaro “the worst of all” the witnesses ever to come before the panel.

But what Vaccaro said in 2001 was true then, and it’s true now: corporations offer money so they can profit from the glory of college athletes, and the universities grab it. In 2010, despite the faltering economy, a single college athletic league, the football-crazed Southeastern Conference (SEC), became the first to crack the billion-dollar barrier in athletic receipts. The Big Ten pursued closely at $905 million. That money comes from a combination of ticket sales, concession sales, merchandise, licensing fees, and other sources—but the great bulk of it comes from television contracts.

the wiiindup

Today, much of the NCAA’s moral authority—indeed much of the justification for its existence—is vested in its claim to protect what it calls the “student-athlete.” The term is meant to conjure the nobility of amateurism, and the precedence of scholarship over athletic endeavor. But the origins of the “student-athlete” lie not in a disinterested ideal but in a sophistic formulation designed, as the sports economist Andrew Zimbalist has written, to help the NCAA in its “fight against workmen’s compensation insurance claims for injured football players.”

“We crafted the term student-athlete,” Walter Byers himself wrote, “and soon it was embedded in all NCAA rules and interpretations.” The term came into play in the 1950s, when the widow of Ray Dennison, who had died from a head injury received while playing football in Colorado for the Fort Lewis A&M Aggies, filed for workmen’s-compensation death benefits. Did his football scholarship make the fatal collision a “work-related” accident? Was he a school employee, like his peers who worked part-time as teaching assistants and bookstore cashiers? Or was he a fluke victim of extracurricular pursuits? Given the hundreds of incapacitating injuries to college athletes each year, the answers to these questions had enormous consequences. The Colorado Supreme Court ultimately agreed with the school’s contention that he was not eligible for benefits, since the college was “not in the football business.”

The term student-athlete was deliberately ambiguous. College players were not students at play (which might understate their athletic obligations), nor were they just athletes in college (which might imply they were professionals). That they were high-performance athletes meant they could be forgiven for not meeting the academic standards of their peers; that they were students meant they did not have to be compensated, ever, for anything more than the cost of their studies. Student-athlete became the NCAA’s signature term, repeated constantly in and out of courtrooms.

Using the “student-athlete” defense, colleges have compiled a string of victories in liability cases.

and we're off

The late Myles Brand, who led the NCAA from 2003 to 2009, defended the economics of college sports by claiming that they were simply the result of a smoothly functioning free market. He and his colleagues deflected criticism about the money saturating big-time college sports by focusing attention on scapegoats; in 2010, outrage targeted sports agents. Last year Sports Illustrated published “Confessions of an Agent,” a firsthand account of dealing with high-strung future pros whom the agent and his peers courted with flattery, cash, and tawdry favors. Nick Saban, Alabama’s head football coach, mobilized his peers to denounce agents as a public scourge. “I hate to say this,” he said, “but how are they any better than a pimp? I have no respect for people who do that to young people. None.”

Saban’s raw condescension contrasts sharply with the lonely penitence from Dale Brown, the retired longtime basketball coach at LSU. “Look at the money we make off predominantly poor black kids,” Brown once reflected. “We’re the whoremasters.”

and one more section, just to include as an in-sum thing

NCAA officials have tried to assert their dominion—and distract attention from the larger issues—by chasing frantically after petty violations. Tom McMillen, a former member of the Knight Commission who was an All-American basketball player at the University of Maryland, likens these officials to traffic cops in a speed trap, who could flag down almost any passing motorist for prosecution in kangaroo court under a “maze of picayune rules.” The publicized cases have become convoluted soap operas. At the start of the 2010 football season, A. J. Green, a wide receiver at Georgia, confessed that he’d sold his own jersey from the Independence Bowl the year before, to raise cash for a spring-break vacation. The NCAA sentenced Green to a four-game suspension for violating his amateur status with the illicit profit generated by selling the shirt off his own back. While he served the suspension, the Georgia Bulldogs store continued legally selling replicas of Green’s No. 8 jersey for $39.95 and up.

A few months later, the NCAA investigated rumors that Ohio State football players had benefited from “hook-ups on tatts”—that is, that they’d gotten free or underpriced tattoos at an Ohio tattoo parlor in exchange for autographs and memorabilia—a violation of the NCAA’s rule against discounts linked to athletic personae. The NCAA Committee on Infractions imposed five-game suspensions on Terrelle Pryor, Ohio State’s tattooed quarterback, and four other players (some of whom had been found to have sold their Big Ten championship rings and other gear), but did permit them to finish the season and play in the Sugar Bowl. (This summer, in an attempt to satisfy NCAA investigators, Ohio State voluntarily vacated its football wins from last season, as well as its Sugar Bowl victory.) A different NCAA committee promulgated a rule banning symbols and messages in players’ eyeblack—reportedly aimed at Pryor’s controversial gesture of support for the pro quarterback Michael Vick, and at Bible verses inscribed in the eyeblack of the former Florida quarterback Tim Tebow.

The moral logic is hard to fathom: the NCAA bans personal messages on the bodies of the players, and penalizes players for trading their celebrity status for discounted tattoos—but it codifies precisely how and where commercial insignia from multinational corporations can be displayed on college players, for the financial benefit of the colleges. Last season, while the NCAA investigated him and his father for the recruiting fees they’d allegedly sought, Cam Newton compliantly wore at least 15 corporate logos—one on his jersey, four on his helmet visor, one on each wristband, one on his pants, six on his shoes, and one on the headband he wears under his helmet—as part of Auburn’s $10.6 million deal with Under Armour.

It's really amazing. Words fail to capture how crazy this all is.

These are all sections from an excellent article which I suggest be read in full - http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/308643/

[Paelos]

It's an evil empire. That's a pretty accurate viewpoint of the NCAA in that article. There was no moral basis in anything they've done, and they retconned their way into treating players as greedy for wanting true benefits from their employment.

EDIT: If the legal case doesn't get them, but the IRS will at some point. The more and more money that keeps circling this thing, the less likely the IRS is to not want a cut. As it stands, they operate as tax-free entities. But they don't operate that way in reality at all.

[K9]

These are all sections from an excellent article which I suggest be read in full - http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/308643/

This was a great read, thanks.

[Samprimary]

:D

thanks, just happy to have any context in which to share it.

because, alongside the (equally fascinating) issue of subconcussive impact trauma in football, I think it's the most important thing in sports worth reading up on.

[Margalis]

It's interesting how public opinion has turned on the NCAA. The old Salon sports guy used to beat this drum a lot and back then he was nearly a lone voice. Now it's hard to find many NCAA defenders.

[Samprimary]

They had done an excellent job cultivating the mythos that they were preserving something noble, for the sake of sports. When the illusion faltered, it wasn't too long before it collapsed outright.

[Paelos]

It was a house of cards, but frankly they've done it to themselves. They've botched so many investigations in their role, they just come off as totally incompetant at enforcing their own rules.

Miami
Oregon
Ohio State
Penn State
North Carolina
Alabama
Auburn
USC
Syracuse
Baylor

These are just a few of the investigations in the last decade or so, and they all had wildly different results. There was no consistency, and there was a public perception of impropriety in almost every case that was outright ignored with a slap on the wrist. The only example of a team getting the hard end of the stick was USC, and that was probably the least egregious.