EA Sports says it would be 'very interested' in rebooting NCAA Football

[JonLP24]

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“I’d definitely would like to see it come back,” Robinson told 247Sports. “If they were to do a pool and asked kids if they want to be on NCAA football and if they want to bring NCAA back, a lot of kids would say yes although they wouldn’t get paid.”

About that … The story of NCAA football’s demise is a tale well worn at this point. Lawsuits over athlete likeness, including the landmark proceedings of Ed O’Bannon, ended the game’s circulation with the 2014 version. The courts ruled EA Sports had used athlete likeness without permission or compensation. EA Sports eventually paid out $60 million in settlements to athletes who appeared in its games between 2003-14, according to CBS Sports.

Thus ended NCAA Football for the modern generation. The NCAA did not renew its licensing agreement with EA, and though recent Madden games have featured colleges – EA individually licenses the brands from the schools – there has been little movement toward a new flagship college football game.

That could change soon.

The NCAA made a quiet yet potentially momentous announcement May 14 that it would create a working group to examine the issue of likeness in college athletics. Currently, athletes lack the right to monetize their name or brand. If the NCAA choose to alter its rules and allow athletes to capitalize on their image, it would potentially open an avenue for the return of NCAA Football.

https://247sports.com/Article/NCAA-football-video-game-return-college-football-athlete-likeness-132110322/

Do it NCAA and end the monopsonic rule.



Monopsony in College Athletics—Posner
The most common type of cartel is an agreement among competitors not to sell their product below a fixed price that will generate monopoly profits for the parties to the agreement. But another type of cartel, termed monopsonistic (from the Greek words for “one” and “purchasing of food”) rather than monopolistic (one seller, versus one buyer in a monopsonized market), is an agreement among competitors not to pay more than a fixed price for a key input, such as labor. By agreeing to pay less, the cartel purchases less of the input (and perhaps of lower quality), because less is supplied at the lower price (and suppliers may lower quality to compensate, by reducing their costs, for the lower price they receive).

The National Collegiate Athletic Association behaves monopsonistically in forbidding its member colleges and universities to pay its athletes. Although cartels, including monopsonistic ones, are generally deemed to be illegal per se under American antitrust law, the NCAA’s monopsonistic behavior has thus far not been successfully challenged. The justification that the NCAA offers—that collegiate athletes are students and would be corrupted by being salaried—coupled with the fact that the members of the NCAA, and the NCAA itself, are formally not-for-profit institutions, have had sufficient appeal to enable the association to continue to impose and enforce its rule against paying student athletes, and a number of subsidiary rules designed to prevent the cheating by cartel members that plagues most cartels.

As Becker points out, were it not for the monopsonistic rule against paying student athletes, these athletes would be paid; the monopsony transfers wealth from them to their “employers,” the colleges. A further consequence is that college teams are smaller and, more important, of lower quality than they would be if the student athletes were paid.

One might ask why colleges choose to collude on the student athlete dimension rather than on some other dimension, such as tuition—agreeing to minimum tuition levels, or maximum scholarships. The answer I think lies in my earlier point—the “justification” (specious though it may be) that paying student athletes would corrupt the educational process, an argument that draws on a tradition of admiration for amateurism even in adult athletic competition, as in tennis until 1968. Efforts to fix the price for a college education would encounter sharper antitrust challenges—and indeed the Ivy League schools were forced by antitrust litigation to drop their attempt to limit competition in scholarship aid, a form of price fixing—in effect colluding on tuition discounts, which is what a scholarship is.
https://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/04/monopsony-in-college-athleticsposner.html