For the most part, college sports haven’t been included in the fantasy sports explosion. The has a NCAA’s rat’s nest of rules and regulations designed to preserve student athletes’ amateur status; these would seem to preclude fantasy sports providers from using athletes’ names and likenesses in a fantasy game… in much the same way that college sports video games generally identify players using positions and numbers only.
That changes this year, with CBS poised to roll out its first fantasy football league “where you can choose your favorite players by name.” A basketball version is expected to follow.
The new league has drawn a tremendous amount of criticism from academia. Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics Exec Dir Amy Perko was quoted as saying. "Based on what I've read about the league itself and what I've seen on the (CBS Sports) Web site, I think it's clear that the CBS program is in violation of (the NCAA's) amateurism rules." But after the last meeting of its executive committee, the NCAA seemed resigned to the fact that the rules would need to change to accommodate the games, and not vice versa.
Licensing and Fantasy Sports
How did this happen? A series of court decicisions have essentially stated that including player names and performance statistics is the same as printing a box score in a newspaper – the information is in the public domain. Before that ruling, big fantasy sports operators like CBS, ESPN and Yahoo paid a license fee to the unions in each sport.(For a more specific discussion of the case, as well as other decisions that led up to it, check out the always-informative Sports Law Blog.)
Now, you don’t have to be Johnnie Cochrane to connect the dots from there. If professional player names and performances are public domain information, so are the names and performances of college athletes. It doesn’t get much more public than a game played in front of 100,000 screaming fans in Ohio State’s “Horseshoe” or played at Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium in front of ESPN’s cameras.
What Happens Next?
It’s not hard to imagine that there will be additional litigation on this issue. The professional unions can’t stand the idea that they aren’t getting a cut of the ever-growing fantasy sports pie. Academics will continue to object to yet another example of crass commercialization of student athletes… and they’ll do so without irony, which shows remarkable nerve. And the NCAA won’t take this sitting down, because this will inevitably lead to yet another discussion as to whether or not college athletes get their fair share of the enormous revenues they help to generate. (The NCAA never comes off particularly well in that discussion.)In the meantime, expect to see an explosion of new Fantasy College Sports games. CBS won’t hold a monopoly in the space for long.
