Judge grants preliminary injunction over NIL rules
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Dan Murphy, ESPN Staff Writer
A federal judge in Tennessee granted a preliminary injunction Friday afternoon that prohibits the NCAA from punishing any athletes or boosters for negotiating name, image and likeness deals during their recruiting process or while they are in the transfer portal.
The injunction is not a final ruling in the case, but the judge’s decision will likely have an immediate and dramatic impact on how NIL deals are used in the recruiting process.
“The NCAA’s prohibition likely violates federal antitrust law and harms student-athletes,” U.S. District Judge Clifton Corker wrote in his decision Friday.
NCAA rules prohibit student-athletes from signing NIL contracts that are designed as inducements to get them to attend a particular school — one of the few restrictions in place for how athletes can make money. For example, the NCAA recently announced sanctions against Florida State football because a member of its coaching staff connected a prospect with a booster collective that works closely with the Seminoles. The collective made a specific offer to the player, who was considering transferring from his current school to Florida State.
The attorneys general of Tennessee and Virginia argued that the NCAA is illegally restricting opportunities for student-athletes by preventing them from negotiating the terms of NIL deals prior to deciding where they want to go to school. The lawsuit was filed Jan. 31, one day after University of Tennessee chancellor Donde Plowman revealed in a letter to the NCAA that the school’s athletic department was being investigated for potential recruiting rules violations.
In Friday’s ruling, Corker determined that the attorneys general have a reasonable chance of winning their case and that student-athletes could suffer irreparable harm if the restrictions remain in place while the case is being decided.
“Turning upside down rules overwhelmingly supported by member schools will aggravate an already chaotic collegiate environment, further diminishing protections for student-athletes from exploitation,” the NCAA said in a statement. “The NCAA fully supports student-athletes making money from their name, image and likeness and is making changes to deliver more benefits to student-athletes, but an endless patchwork of state laws and court opinions make clear partnering with Congress is necessary to provide stability for the future of all college athletes.”
Anthony Skrmetti, Tennessee’s attorney general, said in a statement Friday that his office plans to litigate the case “to the fullest extent necessary to ensure the NCAA’s monopoly cannot continue.”
“The NCAA is not above the law, and the law is on our side,” Skrmetti said.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares called the win in court “rewarding” and saw it as an extension of the Supreme Court ruling in the NCAA vs. Alston case in 2021, which he said should have put the NCAA “on notice” for its legal vulnerabilities.
“We’re finally getting to the point where you’re seeing real student-athlete empowerment at the collegiate level,” Miyares told ESPN in a phone interview late Friday. “The NCAA in an arbitrary and capricious manner was trying to restrict that.”
Miyares said the NCAA model has gotten to the point where it’s unsustainable, pointing out the billion-dollar NCAA tournament television contract that was signed without the players getting any cut of it. The potential of change to NIL rules that would come with this ruling could be just the start.
“I think could be the first steps of significant change,” he said. “And I think it’s been coming for a long time.”
College athletics attorney Tom Mars, who worked with a Tennessee collective, Spyre Sports Group, on this case, said the ruling could mark the beginning of the end for the NCAA.
“I think this will be one more brick in the wall that is the end of the NCAA,” Mars said. “Short of intervention by Congress, the demise of the NCAA now seems inevitable based on nothing but a financial analysis, as it appears the NCAA is poised to lose all of its upcoming antitrust cases. The cumulative effect of which could make the NCAA financially insolvent.”
“A bad case is a bad case, and they’ve put all their defenses forward,” Mars added. “And there’s no precedent anywhere in the United States that supports their defenses.”
Corker said the NCAA’s lawyers did not make a compelling argument for why using NIL contracts as recruiting inducements would undermine the academic side of college sports.
“While the NCAA permits student-athletes to profit from their NIL, it fails to show how the timing of when a student-athlete enters such an agreement would destroy the goal of preserving amateurism,” the judge wrote.
Earlier this week, Skrmetti told ESPN that he was willing to work with the NCAA to find some middle ground on how it could enforce some of its recruiting rules while the case is resolved.
“If they want to talk about possibilities for finding a workable solution in the short term, we’re always open to conversation,” Skrmetti said, noting he had not discussed the case with NCAA leadership. “There’s no guarantee we’ll be able to reach an agreement, but if there’s a mutually agreeable path forward as we work to get these issues figured out, we’re open to that.”
In an interview with ESPN on Tuesday, NCAA president Charlie Baker said the restriction on recruiting inducements was written because the association wants athletes to choose their future schools based on the best educational opportunities rather than where they could make the most money.
“I also think it makes it enormously challenging, as we are currently seeing in the existing NIL environment, for kids and families to figure out what the right choice is in the first place because an enormous amount of information flows their way that may not in fact be accurate,” Baker said.
ESPN asked Baker if having contracts that the prospective athletes could sign before committing to a school would help ensure that the offers they were receiving were accurate or could provide some way to hold a booster or school accountable for false promises.
“I don’t know,” Baker said.
Since adopting new rules that opened the door for NIL deals in 2021, the NCAA has issued two sanctions related to how boosters used NIL opportunities as an inducement in the recruiting process: the recent Florida State case and one involving the Miami women’s basketball team in February 2023.
The NCAA has struggled to enforce the inducement rules despite widespread acknowledgement and complaints from coaches, players and administrators that offers for NIL money have become a central discussion in recruiting players out of high school and the transfer portal. The rules allow coaches and collectives to share information about a prospect’s potential earning power as long as they don’t make specific offers or promises. Without documented evidence of a violation or cooperation from parties directly involved in an offer, the NCAA’s enforcement staff doesn’t have the power to compel the information they need to levy sanctions.
Plowman, Tennessee’s chancellor, said in her letter to the NCAA that it was “intellectually dishonest” to have rules that allow collectives to meet with recruits and enter into contracts with recruits but prohibit “conversations that would be of a recruiting nature.”
“Any discussion about NIL might factor into a prospective student-athlete’s decision to attend an institution. This creates an inherently unworkable situation, and everyone knows it,” Plowman wrote. “Student-athletes and their families deserve better than this.”
Baker told ESPN that he didn’t think the NCAA was ignoring reality by asking athletes to pick their schools based on academic and athletic opportunities and worry about NIL opportunities after they arrive.
“I think the most important thing here is let’s deal with some of the issues around accountability and transparency and consumer protections first,” Baker said. “And if we then want to have a conversation about other stuff, about how this should all work, especially if we get to the point where we give schools the ability to do more in this space, I’m all-in on that.”
In a separate case about the NCAA’s rules that restrict an athlete’s ability to transfer to a new school without penalty, a federal judge decided in December to grant an injunction. That ruling compelled the NCAA to change its rules to allow athletes to transfer as many times as they would like during their college careers while the case is pending.
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Ryan S. Clark
Many of Mikko Rantanen’s greatest moments have come in a Colorado Avalanche sweater. It’s just that the most defining moment of his career came at their expense.
It wasn’t enough that the Dallas Stars were trailing by two goals. It was also the fact that Rantanen scored a hat trick in a string of four unanswered goals that saw his current team, the host Stars, eliminate his old team, the Avalanche, in a 4-2 win Saturday in Game 7 of the Western Conference quarterfinals at the American Airlines Center.
“Obviously, the feeling was incredible to win a series,” Rantanen said in his postgame media availability. “This series was not exactly what I expected. I expected a seven-game series, even before Game 1. The ups and downs in the series. … Belief was there with the group the whole time. Obviously, I was able to make a pay to get the first one and the crowd started to roll.”
The Stars, attempting to reach the conference finals a third straight time, will advance to the semifinal round in which they will await the winner of series featuring the St. Louis Blues and Winnipeg Jets. That encounter will be decided Sunday in Game 7 in Winnipeg.
Soon, the Stars’ collective focus will shift to another Central Division foe. But for now? The attention before, during, and after the game, was on Rantanen.
Part of what made the Avalanche-Stars series arguably the most intriguing first-round series in either conference was the fact it placed two 100-point teams that are in championship window against each other. But, it also came with several subplots with the notable being the team that traded quite a bit to land Rantanen — with the hope he could win them a Stanley Cup now — needed him to defeat the team that he won a championship with back in 2022.
With one assist through the first four games, there was a discussion about if the Stars could manage to win with a sputtering Rantanen on top of the fact they were already without two of their best players in defenseman Miro Heiskanen and forward Jason Robertson.
Rantanen responded with a three-point performance in Game 5, and a four-point performance in Game 6 only to then have a hand in each goal on Saturday. His first goal came on the power-play with 12:12 remaining in the third period when he found enough space to fire a wrist shot that beat MacKenzie Blackwood.
Then came the game-tying goal and the significance it carried. The Stars went on the power play went Avalanche forward Jack Drury was called for holding. Drury part of the trade package the Carolina Hurricanes used to get Rantanen in late January before they would trade him to the Stars.
Drury’s penalty opened the door for Rantanen to score a game-tying goal that might be one of, if not, his signature salvo. Rantanen skated into the Avalanche zone in a 1-on-3 before he split two players before going around the net for a wrap-around goal that went off the skate of Samuel Girard with 6:14 left.
Three minutes later, the Stars received another power-play opportunity that saw Rantanen along with another former Avalanche forward in Matt Duchene work together to find Wyatt Johnston for the game-winning goal.
In the final minute, the Avalanche pulled Blackwood in the attempt to grab a late goal and force over time. Instead? Stars goaltender Jake Oettinger withstood a barrage that officially ended when Stars forward Tyler Seguin got the puck out of the zone only for Rantanen to skate in on an open net for the hat trick with three seconds left.
“I couldn’t care less who scored for them, I really couldn’t,” Avalanche captain and left winger Gabriel Landeskog said when asked about what it was like to watch Rantanen score a hat trick. “Mikko is one of my best friends and I love him, but I couldn’t care if he scored or if somebody else scored.”
For eight full seasons, Rantanen was part of a homegrown movement that saw the Avalanche go from finishing with what was then the worst record in the salary cap era back in 2016-17 to become a perennial favorite to win the Stanley Cup, which did they did in 2023, while also becoming a model for the need to build through the draft.
Building through stars such as Cale Makar, Nathan MacKinnon, Landeskog and Rantanen allowed the Avalanche to become a success. As did the moves they made to get other key figures like Valeri Nichushkin and Devon Toews.
Like all teams in a championship window, the Avs were facing the prospect of possibly making a difficult decision. They had yet to agree to a new contract with Rantanen, who was a pending unrestricted free agent. Then, came the blockbuster trade that few throughout the league saw coming.
The Avalanche traded Rantanen in a three-team trade that saw them get Martin Necas and Drury along with two draft picks. Rantanen’s time with the Carolina Hurricanes was limited to just two goals and six points in 13 games.
Despite the fact the Hurricanes are also among that cadre of championship contenders, Rantanen struggled to find cohesion in Raleigh. Rather than run the risk of watching leave for nothing in free agency, the Hurricanes put out feelers to a few teams with the Stars being one of them.
A long-time admirer of Rantanen, the Stars packaged two first-round picks, three second-round picks and former prized prospect Logan Stankoven to get Rantanen. They then signed him to an eight-year contract worth $12 million annually.
“It’s two things: It’s where our team’s at, and it’s Mikko Rantanen,” Stars general manager Jim Nill told ESPN back in March.
Rantanen finished the regular season with five goals and 18 points in 20 games prior to the showdown with his former team.
Not only did Rantanen’s hat trick condemn his former team to their second first-round exit since winning the Stanley Cup, but it continued a theme of former Avalanche eliminating their previous employers.
The Avalanche and Stars faced each other in last season’s Western Conference semifinal that saw Duchene, a former Colorado first-round pick, score the game-winning goal.
A year later, it was another former Avalanche first-round pick who delivered the devastating blow.
“It seems pretty fitting,” Johnston said about Rantanen. “Obviously, we want to win for each other and I think that goes a little extra when it’s a guy like that who is such a big part of our team and was there for a long time and everyone knows the trade that went on. It’s so awesome. We’re so happy as a group for him.”
As if Rantanen scoring a hat trick in a four-goal comeback wasn’t enough, there’s also the fact that this is now the ninth consecutive Game 7 that Stars coach Peter DeBoer has won his career.
DeBoer’s nine wins in Game 7s broke a tie with Darryl Sutter for the most in NHL history. It was also DeBoer’s third game 7 wins with the Stars.
“I felt something was going to happen,” DeBoer said. “But I could not have predicted that.”
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