Pending a court decision in Oakland, Calif., the NCAA could either have to stop using its players' names and likeness for promotional use or start paying them, the Newark Star-Ledger.
College sports is a multi-billion dollar industry and because of a clause in an NCAA-issued form each student athlete must sign to be eligible to play, the association can use their names and likeness to promote the sport.
U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken listened to arguments on Thursday as to whether or not former and current college athletes may join an Ed O'Bannon's existing lawsuit. The former collegiate star filed suit, along with a number of other former players, against the NCAA for improperly reaping benefits by using his name and likeness in deals with video game and other companies.
"We've been anticipating this for quite some time and there are a number of current athletes who have expressed a desire and an interest in joining the case," the plaintiffs' lead lawyer Michael Hausfeld told USA Today.
O'Bannon believes an antitrust laws were violated.
Marc Edelman, a sports business attorney and an incoming assistant law professor at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College in New York, told the Star-Ledger the violation comes when the NCAA is limiting all of its student athletes to make "free market choices."
"When 1,200 independent colleges come together, this violates antitrust laws," he said.
Wilken now must decide whether to allow more former and current athletes to join the suit, turning it into a class-action lawsuit, which could attract hundreds, if not thousands, of plaintiffs. The judge is not expected to make her decision for several weeks.
Michael McCann, director of the Sports Entertainment Law Institute at the University of New Hampshire School of Law, told NBC News that the NCAA has a lot to lose on the pending decision.
"It would be changing college sports from a model where players have been limited in terms of compensation - room and board and tuition - to something much bigger than that," he said.
The NCAA has come under public scrutiny by some sports writers and pundits for not sharing the billions of dollars they make in ticket sales, TV deals, merchandise and more.
ESPN's Tom Ferry wrote in an op-ed Thursday that the NCAA argued in a 1984 that losing the Supreme Court decision of the NCAA v. Board of Regents would be the downfall of college sports.
"The NCAA lost," Ferry wrote. "Since then, the annual growth rate of Division I-A (FBS) college athletic departments has been 8.2 percent, fueled by growing TV contracts negotiated by conferences."
He also pointed out that the economic growth was greater than the U.S. economy (five percent) and McDonalds (7.7 percent).
The college sports association stated in March that it would not budge from its current standpoint.
"The NCAA is not exploiting current or former student-athletes but instead provides enormous benefit to them and to the public," it said in a statement in March. "This case has always been wrong - wrong on the facts and wrong on the law."
Matthew Mitten, director of the National Sports Law Institute at Marquette University, said he does not believe the NCAA is unreasonable in their stance.
"I'm not one who believes this case is a potential earthquake," Mitten told NBC News. "Student athletes are already compensated with scholarships that have the economic value of four or five years of college."
He also said the class-action suit, if allowed, would drastically change the repercussions for the NCAA.
"If we go down that path - what's to stop athletes from taking money from third parties, from sports agents getting involved," he said. "It would change the nature of college sports."
