1984 Supreme Court verdict 'released the tiger' in college athletics

During this summer realignment craze, Chuck Neinas’ wife always reminds him, “You created this monster!”

Neinas knows she’s right.

As TV rights dollars drive all these realignment moves – including some that defy practicality – it’s impossible not to reflect on the landmark 1984 U.S. Supreme Court verdict that unlocked the door leading to escalating TV rights revenue for schools.

Neinas, 91, and Andrew Coats, 88, played leading roles in the case, Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma v. NCAA. They could teach a master class on how the 7-2 verdict has led the industry to this inflection point.

Remember, the NCAA had monopolized the TV rights market for decades, limiting schools’ appearances on TV. No team could appear on television more than six times in two years. Plus, each network had to schedule appearances for at least 82 schools in each two-year period. No school could negotiate TV rights on its own.

But that was about to change with the antitrust suit Oklahoma and Georgia initially brought in 1981.

Neinas served as executive director of the College Football Association, formed to negotiate TV contracts and push back on the NCAA’s monopoly. Coats, an Oklahoma-based attorney, became the legal mind who successfully argued the case against the NCAA on behalf of the Sooners and Bulldogs.

Coats called Neinas his “henchman,” telling On3, “I’ve probably screwed up college football so much you can hardly fix it. When we released the TV money, it released the tiger. It has changed things ever so much.”

Neither ever envisioned that the decision would super-charge the TV rights market to this extent.

After the ruling, Coats thought all TV money would be poured into one gridiron pot and divided equally among big football-playing schools. Had that occurred, he said, the realignment wheel – which began spinning in earnest in the 1990s – would not have gathered momentum and the Pac-12 would be intact.

Coats called the current state of affairs a professionalized model at its highest level. Amateur athletics, he said, is an artifact.

Eternal ‘tug and pull between academics, commercialism’ 

In June 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that by imposing limits on games the networks could broadcast, the NCAA operated as a “classic cartel” and was guilty of restraint of trade.

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Byron White, a former Heisman Trophy runner-up, was prescient in foreshadowing the cut-throat commercialism that would engulf college athletics in the decades to come, reaching perhaps an extreme extension this summer. 

White wrote, “by mitigating what appears to be a clear failure of the free market to serve the ends and goals of higher education, the NCAA ensures the continued availability of a unique and valuable product, the very existence of which might well be threatened by unbridled competition in the economic sphere.”

White also referenced a long-term effect being the “purely competitive commercialism of [an] ‘every school for itself’ approach to television contract bargaining.” 

And thus we have a “dog-eat-dog” culture permeating college athletics amid this realignment frenzy, said Tom McMillen, CEO of LEAD1 Association. Three decades ago McMillen was a U.S. Rep. in Maryland who in 1991 sponsored a bill called the “Collegiate Athletic Reform Act.” Among other things, it would have enabled the NCAA to regain control of football TV rights, prohibiting schools from negotiating their own TV deals. He wanted an NFL kind of television model for college sports.

The bill reached one committee before it died. 

“I think if ‘Whizzer’ White were alive today, he would say he was wrong in the short term,” McMillen told On3. “But I think in the long run White’s concern really has been proven out in that there’s always been this tug and pull between academics and commercialism, and this [realignment] is a classic case of it.”

‘I guess they thought they would never lose’

As the case worked its way through the courts, Coats attended the NCAA Convention. When the issue was formally broached it was ruled out of order and was not considered.

“We were treated like illegitimate children at a family reunion,” Coats recalled. “But DeLoss Dodds [the athletic director] at Texas and Bob Devaney [the athletic director] at Nebraska would come by and say, ‘Gee, hope you guys win. You can’t use our name. But we’ll send you some money.'”

Before the Supreme Court hearing, Coats added, the plaintiffs tried to make a deal with the NCAA and “they just wouldn’t talk about it. They had never lost. And I guess they thought they never could lose.”

Coats and Neinas joke with each other over which one of them came up with the line they’ve used countless times – that NCAA stands for Never Compromise Anything Anytime.

Between 1984 and 1986, Jay Bilas, now an ESPN analyst, was on the NCAA’s Long-Range Planning Committee while playing basketball at Duke. He said that was the “worst decision probably the NCAA ever made was letting me behind the scenes to see how the sausage was made. I didn’t care for it.”

“[Then NCAA President] Walter Byers had kind of ultimate czar authority over everything,” Bilas told On3. Then-Oklahoma President Bill Banowsky even told Byers that he reminded him of J. Edgar Hoover.

“They [NCAA] could tell you when you can be on TV, how often, all that stuff,” Bilas added. “And the schools got tired of it. They were like, ‘Wait a minute. We can promote our programs by being on TV.’ I don’t think even the schools anticipated how much money there was in media rights.”

No one could have.

After all, initial industry concerns centered on whether there’d be too much football on TV and fans would feel oversaturated with the product. Coats said the NCAA argued there really wasn’t a separate market for college football, that it was just a show like, “I Love Lucy.”

‘You may win that case. But you will regret it’

Now virtually every game is available to watch on your device of preference.

Four decades after a ruling “fired a shot heard ’round the world,” as Coats called it, we have seen ESPN’s 10-year, $3 billion SEC deal trumped by the Big Ten‘s seven-year, $7 billion rights deal with FOX Sports, NBC and CBS Sports. 

And schools are willing to go to great lengths, including creating coast-to-coast intraconference matchups and taking a heavily reduced initial revenue share, to gain entry into a super conference. 

As Neinas told On3, “There was good. And there was not so good. It disrupted conferences.”

And it has torched century-old rivalries, including the Apple Cup and Bedlam. Now Coats, a longtime Sooners fan, is watching one of the sport’s great rivalries, Bedlam, first played in 1904, go up in flames because of TV revenue-driven realignment – knowing he lit the fuse.

When TV dollars were turned loose, Coats said he has watched conferences make billions, schools and coaches make millions and, in turn, “nobody was going to sit by and let the kids, who are putting on the show, get by with $35 a month.”

Chuck Neinas endorses Power 5 forming own entity

But in the wake of O’Bannon and Alston court decisions this century, the NCAA has only grown more vulnerable to legal challenges. 

“They’ve just kind of become dormant,” Coats said. “And we didn’t really want that to happen. The NCAA has done a lot of great things.”

Asked if he endorses a Power Five conference breakaway from the NCAA, Neinas said, “Oh, absolutely. Just take the CFA blueprint and you’ve got it perfectly.”

At some point, a breakaway of sorts could be the end result. And the origin of this perpetual chase for enormous TV rights deals traces back to the Board of Regents case.

Months after the ’84 Supreme Court ruling that the NCAA’s control of TV rights violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, White told Coats, “Andy, you may win that case. But you will regret it.”

Coats never did. 

But he conceded it “really caused some terrible problems. That, and with NIL and the transfer portal, has changed the game. It is hardly recognizable.”