Sports Law Blog Information

It is with great excitement that I share the first draft of my newest law review article, "A Short Treatise on Amateurism and Antitrust Law: Why the NCAA's 'No Pay' Rules Violate Section One of the Sherman Act."

This article is intended to serve as roadmap for challenging NCAA rules that prevent student-athlete pay.  The article is currently under review by several law journals.  Reader feedback is both encouraged and appreciated.

Rick Reilly's column today, Selling Johnny Football, provides an interesting perspective on Johnny Manziel's trademark lawsuit filed in Texas against a man who was selling T-shirts that read, "Keep Calm and Johnny Football."  It was reported that Texas A&M's compliance office recently received a ruling from the NCAA that an athlete can keep earnings (a damages award) obtained in a lawsuit.  Why the NCAA thinks it must first give an athlete permission before he can sue someone for stealing his intangible property rights and keep the damages award if successful is beyond me.  Would an athlete also need the NCAA's permission to sue someone for stealing his wallet or computer?

But in any event, Reilly raises the point in his column that now that the NCAA has given its "blessing" for Manziel to enforce his legal rights against those profiting off his identity, he should go after the NCAA and Texas A&M now.   Reilly asks:  "How can the NCAA see the evil in some citizen cashing in unfairly on Manziel's name but not when it does it?  How can Texas A&M send out more than 60 cease-and-desist letters to people selling Manziel items, as it says it has, and not accept one itself?" 

Last Thursday marked the five year anniversary of the thirteen commissioners of Miami-Dade County approving a plan to spend $347 million in taxpayer money to build a new 37,000 seat retractable-roof ballpark for the Miami Marlins -- a decision that I have previously criticized on Sports Law Blog here.

In acknowledgement of this event, I wrote an article on Thursday for Forbes SportsMoney that posed the question of whether an empty Marlins Park will create backlash against sports stadium subsidies for other teams.

In the article, I noted the following:

The Marlins stadium deal is such an easy target because in no other case has the recipient of huge subsidies so brazenly turned around and slashed team payroll to lowest in the league.  Furthermore, the Marlins stadium agreement only required the team to pay nearly a third of the building costs, while it awarded Marlins ownership 100% of stadium-related revenues -- not exactly what sounds like an equal partnership.

On Sunday, Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria fired back -- taking out an advertisement in each of the major Miami newspapers -- defending both his ownership style and the Marlins Park deal itself.  Presumably, Loria's response was based in part based on my Thursday article in Forbes.

Among other things, Loria told the Miami-Dade community:

The ballpark issue has been repeatedly reported incorrectly and there are some very negative accusations being thrown around.  It ain't true folks.  Those who have attacked us are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.  The majority of public funding came from hotel taxes, the burden of which is incurred by tourists who are visiting our city, NOT the resident taxpayers.  The Marlins organization also agreed to contribute $161.2 million toward the ballpark.

Nevertheless, Loria's letter is easy to rebut -- even based exclusively on the facts in 'his' advertisement.  For example, the fact that the ballpark was paid for with tourist taxes shouldn't matter because the tourist taxes could have just as easily been spent of public projects such as schools and hospitals, new public housing programs, or even as a way of maintaining the community's existing public works projects while lowering the community's overall tax base.

In addition, Loria's purported $161.2 million contributed toward the ballpark is not a mitigating factor because the ballpark deal allows Loria to keep all of the revenues from selling naming rights to the stadium -- a revenue stream that overnight reasonably could offset much, if not all, of the $161.2 million investment.  Moreover, even if Loria does not sell these naming rights himself, the value of this right will clearly be factored into the Marlins ultimate sale price -- further increasing the Marlins owner's return on investment.

I am not sure the purpose of Jeffrey Loria's recent advertisement, but I fully encourage continued dialogue on the topic.  While I believe his arguments with respect to the stadium are without merit, I at least commend him for keeping the conversation about sports stadium subsidies firmly in the public eye.

With due respect to the many great sport law and sports business conferences held each year -- and there are some excellent ones -- the best one is the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (March 1-2). I'm honored to be a panelist at this year's event; this is my fifth year in a row as a panelist and each year it gets better - a credit to the conference's organizers, Daryl Morey and Jessica Gelman. I'll be on the Beyond Reason: Sports Labor Negotiations panel on Saturday March 2.

The conference is sold out, but at the following link you can register to watch many of the panels on-line. I always gain a ton of insight at this conference, which this year features as panelists Adam Silver, Michael Lewis, Mark Cuban, Stan Kaster, among many others, and has an awesome set of panels.

If you aren't attending, the webcast is a must-watch if you're interested in our industry.

Many spectators were hurt in yesterday's Daytona race because of a collision. A high school sophomore took a video of the crash and fans screaming and trying to get help. NASCAR wanted the video taken off YouTube, which for a while removed it but then put it back up.

Do we have a legal right to see this video? I explore in a new column for Sports Illustrated | SI.com. Here's an excerpt:

But only about 12 seconds of Anderson's 1 minute, 16 video is actually of a NASCAR race; the rest centers on the crash and fans scrambling for cover from flying debris. NASCAR's ownership over this latter part of the video is questionable, since "facts" and "news" are not subject to copyright protection and the First Amendment safeguards public access to them. The NBA knows this quite well. Back in 1997, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the NBA could not claim copyright in its stats and scores, which Motorola had broadcast through a wireless paging device known as SportsTrax. The reasoning? Facts and news are not copyright protected. 

It could be argued that at about 13 seconds into Anderson's video, the race transformed from a copyright-protected NASCAR event into a not-copyright-protected news event. Fans screaming and fleeing for cover is not part of any race, but is certainly newsworthy. On the other hand, NASCAR might contend that because crashes are (unfortunately) not uncommon in NASCAR races, a crash should be considered a continuation of a copyright-protected NASCAR event. This is a difficult area of law and highlights how legal protection for "sports events" and "news events" may not always be the same.

To read the rest of the column, click here.  Here's the video:

My longer treatment of the infield fly rule, The Economics of the Infield Fly Rule, is now available on SSRN and forthcoming in Utah Law Review. The abstract is below. Comments welcome.

 No rule in all of sports has generated as much legal scholarship as baseball’s Infield Fly Rule. Interestingly, however, no one has explained or defended that rule on its own terms as an internal part of the rules and institutional structure of baseball as a game. This paper takes on that issue, explaining both why baseball should have the Infield Fly Rule and why a similar rule is not necessary or appropriate in seemingly comparable, but actually quite different, baseball situations. The answer lies in the dramatic cost-benefit disparities present in the infield fly and absent in most other baseball game situations.

The infield fly is defined by three relevant features: 1) it contains an extreme disparity of costs and benefits inherent in that play that overwhelmingly favors one team and disfavors the other team; 2) the favored team has total control over the play and the other side is powerless to stop or counter the play; and 3) the cost-benefit disparity arises because one team has intentionally failed (or declined) to do what tordinary rules and strategies expect it to do and the extreme cost-benefit disparity incentivizes that negative behavior every time the play arises. When all three features are present on a play, a unique, situation-specific limiting rule becomes necessary; such a rule restricts one team’s opportunities to create or take advantage of a dramatic cost-benefit imbalance, instead imposing a set outcome on the play, one that levels the playing field. The Infield Fly Rule is baseball’s prime example of this type of limiting rule. By contrast, no other baseball situation shares all three defining features, particularly in having a cost-benefit disparity so strongly tilted toward one side. The cost-benefit balance in these other game situations is more even; these other situations can and should be left to ordinary rules and strategies. 

Fellow sports lawyers, the Sports Law Blog has been a leading site for delivering cutting edge commentary and insight in the field of sports law.  As this leading site celebrates its 10th Anniversary in November, with the support of our Editor-in-Chief Michael McCann, we decided it was time to expand our efforts to brand and promote the tremendous talents of our contributors.

A natural first step was to generate a Twitter handle and feed for ourselves.  Thus, today, we are happy to announce the launch of the official "The Sports Law Blog" Twitter feed -- @InsideSportsLaw.  The goal is to generate additional attention to both the information we post on our website, as well as promoting the industry's leaders in the field of sports law--our writers.

While the use of this Blog, the newly created Twitter account, and other related future efforts will evolve over time, we hope that our efforts to offer both insight and commentary on the world of sports law remain unparalleled.