(05-14-2019 10:00 AM)ken d Wrote: I'm not a lawyer either. But it seems to me that the case you cite isn't germane in this decision. IIRC, the ACC sued the University of Maryland, not the State of Maryland. And I suspect that the university had previously agreed as a condition of its membership in that voluntary organization that disputes could be settled in a North Carolina court.
This may be a loose thread in a tapestry. University Presidents are state employees. State employees are an extension of the State itself which is answerable to the voters and taxpayers of the state it serves.
This begs many questions. When is a state's taxpayers and legislators bound by a decision of a President of one of its Universities when that decision impacts apportionment and the State's budget, and therefore the taxpayers' obligations?
It also poses the question of when does a voluntary association, and that is what an athletic conference is, cease to become voluntary and becomes obligatory? And is the imposition of that obligation truly binding upon the legislators and taxpayers of a state?
When GOR's were first instituted this was my mainline of questioning their efficacy. Yes they worked fine for assigning the rights of artists, but state sponsored non profit sports teams? And I could see private schools being able to enter into them, but I could not see how ultimately the tail could wag the dog where taxpayers were concerned, especially over something that was supposed to operate like a non profit and with Title IX implications it was understood that revenue sports would cover non revenues. Therefore anything that constrains the schools revenue sports from bringing in everything they could, limits the opportunities of others and burdens the taxpayers.
It always seemed to me that each state's schools should be free to organize their sports in a manner that best suited the citizens of that state and that anything that bound them was a restraint on that states apportionment and a limit on its schools.
In fact the biggest beneficiaries of the current law is not a state, nor its citizens, but corporations (networks), and smaller less lucrative state schools which are bound to them contractually.
Nobody cared what athletic conference a school participated in until corporate money was involved and then the GOR's were to preserve rights contracts with those corporations, and then sometimes at the detriment of the taxpayers of some of the state schools.
People may not like it, but ultimately we may be headed back to networks having to sign a contract with each specific school. It's not a burden that University Presidents will relish which is probably why these points and others have not been pursued. It really has been a matter of if we are all earning more why rock the boat? But now that a revenue gap is growing, and will continue to grow, any state school not in the SEC or Big 10 is going to have leadership, alumni, and state legislators who are going to start taking a much closer look at the intricate legalities of these assigned rights and looking for a way out of them.
Schools are looking to cover declines in enrollment and are competing nationally for students. Sports profile is part of that lure. So enhancing sports profile actually affects the ability to draw those outside students. Contracts that limit a school's ability to maximize its sports revenue affects those profiles. A GOR that locks a school into an inferior position for over a decade, sometimes two, at a time when revenue may be passing peak, is going to be felt to be extremely punitive. So I would be looking for more and more challenges along these lines, and ultimately I expect the whole GOR apparatus to fail where state schools are concerned.
We'll see.