O'Bannon Plaintiffs Trial Brief

Last night, the plaintiffs in the O'Bannon v NCAA lawsuit filed their trial brief. This document outlines the plaintiff's legal strategy in making its antitrust claims against the NCAA, its member schools, its conferences, and its vertical business partners.

In fact, the introduction reads, and we quote:

The [antitrust plaintiffs] will prove at trial that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (“NCAA”), its member schools, its conferences, and its vertical business partners have conspired to deprive college athletes in Division I men’s basketball and football through the licensing of those athletes’ names, images, and likenesses (“NILs”) in television broadcasts, rebroadcasts, game clips, and videogames. This anticompetitive conduct is sacrosanct to the NCAA—it is a condition of NCAA membership, a condition of eligibility for college athletes, a condition of doing business with the NCAA, and codified in the NCAA rules prohibiting payment or the promise of future payment to college athletes for any purpose. Predictably, the world’s leading economists—including even the NCAA’s chief expert—agree that the NCAA is a textbook cartel. And the evidence of conspiracy gathered during discovery is overwhelming.

If you are interested in downloading the entire plaintiff's trial brief, you may do so here. Note: if and when the Sports Law Blog is able to obtain a copy of the defendant's trial brief, it too will be posted on this site. The trial is scheduled to begin on Monday, June 9th in front of US District Court Judge Claudia Wilkin in Oakland, California.