For decades, student-athletes have asserted that colleges and universities have benefitted from their participation in collegiate athletics, while the student athletes themselves receive nothing in return. A college scholarship certainly has value; however, student-athletes have pushed for more, using the court system for the past 15 years to advance their cause, and the entire sports landscape is still trying to figure out what is legal and what balance to strike.

Before getting to the challenges brought by student-athletes over the past 15 years, we should look back at how we got here. Courts had consistently set precedent that student-athletes should not be compensated. For example, the Texas Court of Appeals ruled in 2000 that a student-athlete football player, who had suffered paralysis as a result of playing in a collegiate football game in 1974, was not entitled to reimbursement for medical expenses. See Waldrep v. Texas Employers Insurance Association, 21 S.W.3d 692 (Tex. App. 2000). In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case between the NCAA, college sports governing body, and the University of Oklahoma. The University of Oklahoma brought an action pursuant to the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act after the University of Oklahoma joined a collection of powerhouse universities in the College Football Association to negotiate television contracts. The NCAA asserted that it was solely responsible for negotiating those contracts and threatened to ban any colleges from participating in any NCAA sports if the schools continued to band together. See The Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, 546 F. Supp. 1276 (W.D. Okla. 1982), 707 F.2d 1147 (10th Cir. 1983); cert. granted, 464 U.S. 913 (1983). While the main ruling found that the NCAA violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, the line that endured to the detriment of student-athletes came from Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stephens, writing for the majority, who stated, “In order to preserve the character and quality of the product, athletes must not be paid.” See National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Board of Regents, 468 U.S. 85 (1984).