NCAA’s legal arguments getting weirder by the day
In asking a federal court not to revive a case, the NCAA has equated itself to a minister who convinced his followers to staff his restaurant for free.
The legal maneuvers and media spin the NCAA has put out as it continues to fight a cavalcade of lawsuits brought by former athletes and assaults in the court of public opinion seem to get less and less coherent as time passes. Just months after a brief filed on the NCAA’s behalf compared athletes to prisoners, the NCAA’s latest is a doozy.
On Thursday, April 19, lawyers representing the Pac-12 and the NCAA in a lawsuit filed by former USC football player Lamar Dawson asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to consider the ramifications of another recently-decided lawsuit. What’s most intriguing are the details of the suit that the NCAA attorneys are asking the court to consider.
Dawson previously lost the case in the same court when he argued that he was in fact an employee of USC during his time playing linebacker and thus was entitled to all the benefits of that distinction, including minimum wage and overtime protections. The court disagreed in its ruling on April 27, 2017. Dawson is now asking the court to revive the case with slightly different allegations.
In response, counsel for the NCAA has pointed judges to Perez v. Ernest Angley, Cathedral Buffet. An opinion was issued in that case by the federal 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on April 16, and the back story is what becomes most interesting in light of the NCAA’s recommendation.
Angley and the Cathedral Buffet were positioned as defendants after the US Department of Labor brought suit in 2015 against the televangelist and his restaurant in Ohio. The suit alleged that Angley and the business were in violation of federal labor law because accurate records of employee hours were not kept and many of the employees worked without pay. While a lower court ordered the business to pay $400,000 in fines, the 6th Circuit overturned the order. Its opinion determined that the volunteers had no expectation of payment for their work and Angley’s “spiritual coercion” did not amount to wage theft.
Perez is relevant to Dawson because the suit involved the same law that Dawson is asking the court to consider the relevant facts in light of, and it was recently decided by another federal court at the same level. This means, however, the NCAA have equated themselves to Angley/Cathedral Buffet. Following that logic through, that means the NCAA is stating that because Angley’s coercion (that’s the word the 6th Circuit used in its opinion) does not equate to wage theft, neither should the NCAA’s enticement of young athletes to provide labor for itself without monetary payment. Furthermore, the NCAA is suggesting that because these athletes enter into the situation with no expectation of receiving a regular paycheck, the NCAA should receive the same protection from federal labor laws that the Cathedral Buffet now enjoys.
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Fans who thought they would never see the NCAA compare itself to a restaurant owner who used religion to convince people to provide the restaurant free labor apparently were wrong. If that keeps Dawson from being revived in court, the NCAA appears to be quite comfortable with that comparison.