White, Polak, Harris v National Collegiate Athletic Association ("NCAA")
Students File Lawsuit Challenging NCAA Financial Aid Restrictions
Three former college athletes filed an antitrust suit in the federal district court in Los Angeles against the National Collegiate Athletic Association ("NCAA"). The lawsuit challenges an agreement under which the NCAA and its member schools have imposed a maximum cap on the amount of athletics-based financial aid, or "grant-in-aid" ("GIA"), support available to student athletes competing in major college sports. Under this agreement, the amount of the GIA is artificially fixed at an amount that falls far short of the full "cost of attendance" (or "COA") at NCAA member institutions. The lawsuit alleges that this agreement is an unlawful restraint of trade in violation of the federal antitrust laws.
The suit is brought as a class action on behalf of all football and men's basketball players at major Division I schools. The students claim that major college football and men's basketball are lucrative and profitable businesses, with the NCAA and its member institutions taking in hundreds of millions of dollars each year as a result of the efforts of the student athletes. The students further allege that the NCAA has enforced an agreement to short-change student athletes by imposing an artificial cap on the amount of financial aid a student athlete may receive in the form of an athletic scholarship, or GIA. The students claim that this artificial cap has imposed significant hardships on many student athletes, and that competition among NCAA schools would result in student athletes receiving GIA's covering the full COA if the artificial cap were eliminated.
The named plaintiffs and class representatives are Jason White, who played football at Stanford; Brian Polak, who played football at UCLA; and Jovan Harris, who played basketball at the University of San Francisco.
