Ed O'Bannon is pleased with Judge Claudia Wilken's ruling on his historic lawsuit, but that does not mean he feels his mission is complete.
The former basketball player at UCLA spoke with the media for the first time since Wilken ruled in his favor. Though she capped what student-athletes may earn at $5,000 above the full cost of their scholarship, O'Bannon felt the ruling was a win for his cause.
"What we did is just a small amount of change," O'Bannon told ESPN. "This is just the tip of the iceberg. I think that a lot of change is going to happen. This is just the beginning."
In a 99-page ruling, Wilken sided with O'Bannon and the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit who sought an injunction to bar the NCAA from imposing bylaws to limit what student-athletes can earn. Wilken essentially broke the NCAA's model of amateurism, but did not grant the plaintiffs' request to allow student-athletes to receive endorsements while in school.
"My biggest thing has been change," O'Bannon said. "These rules have been in place for a hundred years and there has been no change. Times have changed, the economy has changed, the players themselves have changed, the salaries of the coaches have changed. Everything has changed except for how a player is compensated. And whether [they're paid] while they're in school, or whether it's once their eligibility is up, that part of the game has to change."
The NCAA is planning to appeal the decision, as Wilken anticipated, so she ruled that her decision would not be stayed while they do so. However, the changes are not likely to go into affect until the start of next year's college football season.
"I think O'Bannon wins in the sense that the judge sided with him on antitrust malices for the most part," Michael McCann, director of the sports and entertainment law center at the University of New Hampshire School of Law, told the Associated Press. "But it's not the slam dunk victory that will radically change college sports the way some critics of the NCAA were hoping."
Now the NCAA will await the result of their appeal to the National Labor Rights Board's (NLRB) Washington D.C. headquarters. Earlier this year, the NLRB Chicago office ruled players under scholarship on the Northwestern University football team were employees and should be able to unionize. They cast a sealed vote on whether or not to form a union and the results will be revealed pending the appeal.
If the NLRB upholds the decision, athletic teams across the nation would likely start forming unions.
With Wilken's ruling, school administrators are facing major changes and the new decision on its own is not much to go on.
"It goes on the list of items that will need to be part of our budget projections," Rick Hart, athletic director at Southern Methodist University, told the AP. "As we prioritize how we allocate resources we'll try to get a better feel of what this will represent.
"There's not a lot of clarity."
