Johnson v. NCAA - what does this mean for collegiate student-athletes?

Wait, you're not Victoria. That's Dennis Cox, my old friend.

Who? How are you, sir? I'm doing well, how are you?

I'm doing well. It is an exciting day for very many reasons. I don't need to ask to what I owe this pleasure, but I know we have a big hockey game over at PNC Arena tonight. Cam Ward goes into the Hurricanes Hall of Fame, which I would say long time coming, but this is the first year of it. Yeah.

So it's not like he had to wait very long. He is part of the inaugural class. He goes in, that's the only new member because theoretically the three retired jerseys, Ron Francis, Glen Wesley, Rod Brindamore, are also in, but none of those three will be giving speeches tonight.

No, I make for a really long night. Right. We've heard from all of them because they all had their jerseys retired and there were ceremonies for those.

So, yes. And we'll get clarity on this from Mike Foreman later in the program as chief marketing officer of the Carolina Hurricanes. But I don't believe that this means that his number is officially retired because you would think that that would have been presented like not only is it a Hall of Fame ceremony, but it's a number retirement ceremony.

True. But I will say this and again, we'll get clarity from Mike Foreman later in the program when he joins us. Nobody's worn 30 since Kam has left, had plenty of goaltenders. Just like nobody has worn number 12, Eric Stahl's number since he was traded. My sense is that those numbers will remain dormant whether they are officially retired or not, at least for the immediate future. So that's just a guess of mine, but I'm not 100% sure. But again, I don't have great clarity on that, much like John Shire and Tony Bennett didn't get great clarity on that ridiculous ruling in Charlottesville. Well, there's that. So I know you normally produce Joe and Joe, the OG in the afternoon on the fan here in Raleigh.

Yes. How much conversation did you guys have about officiating or have you guys had about officiating over the last three days? A lot. It's a driving conversation. For my money too much.

And maybe it's because there's nobody sitting here with me to bounce it off of. I find the conversations awful. We can't change anything. Yeah. Well, I know something that Joe Obius pointed out yesterday was when it comes to officiating that the league, the ACC, and speaking of them specifically, has the ability to make changes in terms of you can hire these referees full-time so they don't have to go work a big south game the next night or something along those lines. But they would still go work a big south game. Well, not if you make them full-time for your league.

That's the thing. That's not cost-effective for the league. They're never going to do that.

I was saying they won't, obviously. But the league seems to be okay settling with, hey, you know what? It's good enough right now and people still watch.

So what's the incentive to change? Well, there are a couple of things about this. First of all, I know people think the officiating is bad. The officiating is not bad. The officiating is the same everywhere.

Yeah. I watched an NBA game two weeks ago in which LeBron James drove to the basket on the final play and was so obviously fouled against the Celtics. I mean, as clear as day, LeBron James, with a layup, and the layup missed the rim by a foot. It was not blocked. Did LeBron James just black out on his way to the rim?

Of course not. He was fouled. It was obvious. And they didn't call it. Officiating is the same everywhere. We watch ACC basketball. So it's very simple to say, well, those ACC refs. By the way, two of the three refs, I don't believe, are ACC refs who were on the Duke Virginia game, right?

Yeah. And there was a game recently where there were no refs that work primarily in the ACC that were there. And I don't remember the crew that was up in Blacksburg when Kyle Filipowski got punched in the throat. I know it was inadvertent.

I know it was unintentional. Still happened. Right.

It doesn't matter. Yeah. Right.

I didn't intend on gaining this weight, but it still happened. A lot of fouls are not intentional. So we don't know, but I was told that it doesn't matter if it's intentional or not. If it's a foul and they went to the monitor, then it's a foul. I mean, just end of story.

Yeah. So the kid from Virginia Tech who punched Kyle Filipowski in the throat, that should have been a flagrant one at the very least, which would have meant Duke shoots free throws and gets the ball. My contention was the officials didn't want to change the outcome of the game by doing that, because it would have. I think Duke probably would have won the game, or at least they would have had a good chance to win the game at that point on that sequence.

And maybe Virginia Tech was more deserving. What happened at the end of the Virginia game? That was a mistake by the referees in applying the rule, and it was a mistake by the ACC in the statement that they released.

Huge mistake. The truth is that there's nothing we can do to right the wrongs of officiating. Zero. Unless we review every play and nobody really wants that. We don't. Right.

Could you imagine? We have enough reviews anyway. So we're in search of a solution to a problem that does not exist. The problem exists, but the problem is not any worse in the ACC than it is in the SEC or the Big 12 or whatever league you're in, including the NBA. These guys are doing a very good job for the most part, and some are better than others. We understand that.

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Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield is the trade name of Blue Cross Blue Shield Health Care Plan of Georgia, Inc. The only thing that we should do, and this is a fix that should be in place for every regular season game, not just the NCAA tournament, but the NCAA tournament has a pool reporter rule, where after the game, if there are questions about an officiating decision or a call or a couple of calls, whatever it is, then a pool reporter will be allowed to ask the head referee or the referees a question, just alone, not in front of a press conference. And then we get some clarity on the official statement. Why was this decision made? That's an easy one for the ACC.

Jim Phillips just goes, here's how we're doing it, starting today. So apparently they waited too long. And by the time they went to ask the referees, I was reading a David Teals column in the Richmond Times, the Richmond Times this weekend, or this week, where he said, by the time they got, it was like a half hour after the game, by the time they got to the referee's room, they were all gone.

Well, I get that. I get why they would be all gone a half hour after the game, but maybe immediately after the game would be a good time to ask, Hey, why did you guys not send Kyle Philipowska to the free throw line? You know what the problem with the statement was? The ACC gave the Fowler incorrectly. Dunn, forget his first name, whatever the help defender there, didn't foul Kyle Philipowski. The foul was Reece Beekman, the point of defense guy.

Now he made a good defensive play, but I think he got the body underneath. The basket would have counted if it went, the basket would have counted if it went. So the foul should count. That's the rule.

That's the rule. But because, like the statement made it seem as though nobody had actually watched the video. And that's where the ACC messed up. The statement was bad. Because if you read the statement and then watch the video, you go, are we talking about different plays?

Other than we know Kyle Philipowski got fouled? Anyway, officiating is too much the conversation. We can't have a press conference with the referees after games. That's silly.

It doesn't make any sense. And it would not solve any problem other than to get people more defensive. And that is not what we want. We'd like these games to be officiated a little bit better if we can. But there's something that the, I mentioned this the other day, something that the premier league did that I think needs to happen. When obvious mistakes are made, especially when we're talking about the application of a rule, then the officials need to get hit.

Not literally, but figuratively. You lose your next assignment. That's easy. Now they might go to another league and work, but on short notice might be more difficult for that to happen. And maybe also get help across the leagues. ACC officials also work like Big East or Atlantic 10, like you work in an area for the most part.

So that's what needs to happen. The whole officiating thing, the conversation is tiresome. Tiresome. Because there are calls that happen in the first quarter, or in the case of men's college basketball, which doesn't believe in quarters, dumb, in the first half that also impact the game. Maybe it gives somebody a foul they shouldn't have gotten. That impacts the game. So anyway, enough about officiating. Let's do a quick out of the gate. Oh, they are.

They absolutely are. Brian Murphy from WRALSportsFan.com, WRAL Sports investigative reporter is going to join us. We're going to talk about the NCAA going to court again. Why do they do this? They are masochists.

Because they have to spend the money, Adam. It's just, I can't. All right. Cam Ward, Hurricanes Hall of Fame. Tonight, Canes play the Montreal Canadiens. The Canadiens are the second worst team in the Eastern Conference, but they've won three in a row. Oh, good for that. Yeah. They're missing their top goal scorer, Cole Caulfield, third year player. Really good player, talented player. They're missing him. He's out for the year, but they still have other good players, and they have won three in a row, including a win over the Edmonton Oilers the other day, who are obviously sleepwalking. So with a whole bunch of hoopla going on around this game, my advice, coffee.

You know, smelling salt, something. Start the game on time, to borrow a phrase from our old friend Bill Peters. Did I see this correctly? Did Virginia almost lose it? Louisville? What are you doing? Speaking of staying, being asleep.

How does that happen? Louisville has three wins this year. Three.

Oh, all year. I didn't realize it was that few. They're three and 23, Dennis.

Oh, God. Three and 23. Do you know what they're, I mean, I haven't looked at the net ratings today. They couldn't have fallen that much further. Do you know what their net rating was before yesterday?

It probably went up because they played Virginia. 330. What? How many? Like 355. Okay. So not good.

Yes, they are not on the at-large board. Three and 23. I don't know how Virginia, Virginia won by three. Virginia Tech capitulated. It'll lost at Georgia Tech. All year long, I have said Virginia Tech is good. And I'm going to have to, at this point, go, I guess they're not. I guess they're not. They just beat Virginia.

I don't know. I didn't see any of the games. So who knows what happened at Virginia Tech. Clemson beat Florida State by 40. No, this is not football from two years ago.

40. Was it 94-54? Clemson won. What has happened to Florida State basketball?

What has happened there? All right. So before we get to Brian Murphy, ACC standings, and they're really, what you really need to know is the groupings because you've got the double by group, which is Pitt, UVA, Miami, and Clemson. Is this football or basketball? Yes. Then there's the next five.

They don't have to show up a day early. State, Duke, Wake, Syracuse, North Carolina. Those are your next five. Syracuse, UNC would be the 8-9 game. And then the Tuesday crew, Boston College, Florida State, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, Notre Dame, and Louisville. Sounds right. Those are bad teams down there. Again, Virginia Tech, I think, has something, but I could very well be wrong.

I really, really could be wrong. I think that's going to be our group. We might have a shuffling in. I could see State getting up into the top four, maybe Clemson tumbling out.

Who knows? But we'll figure all of that out when, well, we're only two and a half weeks from Greensboro. All right, yesterday, Johnson v NCAA.

Wait a second. The NCAA is in court. There is no way that this is going to turn out well. Brian Murphy, WRAL sports investigative reporter, joins us now on the Adam Gold Show. So I saw Michael McCann from Sportico started a tweet thread like this. It was a disastrous day in court for the NCAA. And all I could think of was, when isn't it a disastrous day in court for the NCAA? Well, I listened to the proceedings because you can't watch.

You can only listen. And yes, just from, I am not a lawyer, but from the questions that were being asked and the way the judges were asking questions of the attorneys on both sides, it certainly seemed like the NCAA was in a world of trouble. And this case is about whether or not student athletes are employees of the university and should make minimum wage, at least minimum wage. This is at the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. And this is only on the NCAA wants the case dismissed.

Right. And so then the plaintiffs were obviously saying, no, the case should move on. And the judges seem to indicate that the case should move on, that there's no way to this.

And so this will go end up going back to the district court. So it's a long process, but another seemingly disappointing day for the NCAA. I I'm at a loss for why the NCAA is even trying to, I mean, I guess I understand why you're getting, trying to get the case dismissed because, and it's not going to be dismissed. So there will be discovery here and that's problem for the NCAA. But this exchange is one of the, I mean, there's a lot of really embarrassing exchanges for the NCAA here, but when the lawyer representing the NCAA says, this is not about division one athletes and the judge responds, this is about division one athletes, like, well, what could it possibly be?

What else could it be about? Well, the NCAA wants, you know, they want to look at everybody from division one all the way to division three and say, well, you can't, there's no one size fits all for all these people. So you have to just dismiss the case. And if some of them aren't employees, then none of them are employees. And, and one of the judges said, well, you know, we may see a situation where the quarterback in an sec school is treated differently than someone who runs cross country at Alabama.

Right. In another part, the judge said, like, I'm finding it really hard to find any way that they're not employees, which obviously this case is only about deciding whether or not to dismiss, but the larger tenet is to find out whether or not they are employees. And one of the judges was like, help me come up with a way to decide that they're not employees.

And nobody really had a good explanation for that. No, because the NCAA doesn't and this exchange kind of, I think, plays into that. The NCAA attorney argued that they're not professional athletes because they're from the school perspective, even today, there is not the expectation that they will be compensated beyond the scholarship by the schools. And the judge said, well, isn't that because you've deemed it so, so, uh, and I, I keep bringing up Brett Kavanaugh's concurring opinion, uh, back in the case, what is now about a year and a half ago, two years ago in which he said, I don't know how they've been getting away with this forever for, you know, for, for decades already at this point, how are they not being paid?

Yeah, this came up in the case too. You know, the judges were like, well, if they've always been employees, why hasn't it been so? And I think what's really changed is the money, right? There was a time where coaches were paid like college professors.

Um, and so you could make a case that, look, nobody's getting rich off of this. They're getting an opportunity to play, obviously over the last 25 years that has changed dramatically. And especially in the last, you know, 10 to 15 years, it's, it's changed exponentially. And those arguments I don't think are holding as much water as they once did. Um, I don't, you know, this is why the NCAA hired a president who's basically a lobbyist.

They're going to Congress to fix this problem because I don't think they can win in the courts anymore. Yeah, but I don't think they can win in Congress either because I don't think there's the motivation in Congress to, uh, I don't even say fix because I don't know that, uh, anything is going to be fixed, uh, basically to protect what the NCAA wants to do, which is go back to the old system. Uh, the people involved in college athletics, in my opinion, prefer the collegiate model. And you mentioned, I think the really the money and cause it is literally the money quote is that it's about, it's about money and the increase in money.

I would be all in favor of the collegiate model being the case. If the sport isn't, if football wasn't worth billions of dollars at this point, because 25 years ago it wasn't billions of dollars. So now it is.

It is. And we still have this thirst for more money. Like where's that money going?

Right. I mean, that's, that's, you know, we've seen it, the, the proliferation of facilities and, and coaching salaries and, and everything else to not give it to the players. Um, and now we're seeing, you know, with, with NIL, some of that money is getting to the players. Um, but I think that these challenges, you mentioned the Kavanaugh concurrence are going to keep happening. And it, and all it takes is for the NCAA to lose one of these cases, right. The cases can keep coming. They've got a bad a thousand, but the plaintiffs really only got to win one, uh, for the whole system to come crumbling down. And I, I just not sure that NCAA is prepared for what comes next.

I mean, I think we've seen with NIL, they weren't prepared for what was going to happen when they changed those rules. I'm not sure they have a contingency plan for what happens if, and when the federal government decides these are actually employees. One of the big parts that the plaintiffs are making is it has less to do with scholarship and compensation and more to do with all of the other demands you're putting on these athletes that make them employees. The fact that they can't, they can't gamble, which, which obviously is a minor one, but, um, that they can't go to the classes they want to go.

Cause it interferes with practice. They can't, they can't work outside jobs. They can't do this.

They can't do that. These are, these are terms of employment, uh, me and you have to deal with some of that same stuff, you know, working at the company that we work at. When you work for an employer, they put terms of employment in place and you either follow that or you don't have a job. Well, uh, for these college athletes, you either follow that or you don't no longer play on the team. And now, and the, and the team's arguing, well, that's not an employment based contract. And the plaintiffs are arguing.

That's exactly what it is. Um, a gentleman named Romy, um, uh, um, Hamuga, I, I, I totally botched his name and I apologize, uh, who is, uh, in charge of an organization, uh, that is trying to organize, uh, college athletes. It's a re he re he represents the interest of college athletes in an unofficial capacity, but he has said for years that the biggest issue is healthcare. And if, if you could get workman's comp as a college athlete, if they offered that, um, that would, that they might've been able to head this off a decade ago.

If they had really thought forward about, all right, we have all this, all more, so much more money coming in. We're playing longer seasons. We're going to expand the playoff. We're going to ask more of these football players.

Uh, what can we do for them? But all of that's been lip service from the NCAA. And every time I hear them say, well, it's really about the student athlete experience.

I want to punch somebody. Well, the attorney in this case said probably the easiest way is to loosen all of that, uh, extra stuff to let, uh, you know, players, uh, major in what they want to major in to, to miss practice for a class to, you know, loosen some of the restrictions on what they can do with their outside time. You know, some of that would maybe not make them employees, but, but obviously, you know, that's probably not going to happen. And this case is going to move forward and, and there are other challenges out there, but this I think represents the biggest threat to the NCAA since the Allston case.

All right. So a final thing for Brian Murphy from WRAL, he's the sports investigative reporter, because you mentioned NIL and I know it came up during this. And for those people who don't know name, image, and likeness, we just call NIL now is the ability for a third party, uh, in some cases it's corporations to compensate players for their time and effort and exposure.

I know it's happening. We have Jeremy Roach for, for Duke and Armando Baycott for North Carolina, each repping the same product. Uh, but it's also allowing boosters and collectives to pay the players, which used to be illegal, but now is not, uh, how does NIL kind of impact this situation or does it? I think, you know, it didn't come up a lot in this case. Uh, you know, this case was much more about whether they're employees of the university or employees of the football program. Um, but I think what it does is show that there's a robust market. I mean, as if we didn't already know, there was a robust market for the services of these players. There is a robust market. NIL has proven that at least at the, at the top end of, of division one football and men's basketball. And so, you know, this can be seen as a restraint of trade when, when all you can offer is a scholarship or all you can offer these additional things, it can be seen as a way to, you know, keep labor costs down that you're, you're putting an artificial limit on what players are worth.

And I think that's where NIL has, you know, we've always thought there was a market now, clearly the market has demonstrated there is a market for these players. Brian Murphy, WRL sports investigative reporter at Murph's turf on Twitter. I thank you very much for your time. We got to do this on a regular basis.

What do you say? Let's do it. All right. Well, uh, I'll talk to you later, man. I appreciate your time. All right. Thanks Adam.

All right. We have, uh, yeah. If you're paying attention and this was going on during our show yesterday, uh, and I was just watching Twitter kind of laugh at the incident. You could, if Twitter had a chuckle feature, then the, then Twitter would have been laughing at the NCAA.

It's, it's as though they have been dropped here on the, in the United States from another planet. The amount of money the NCAA takes in from football and men's basketball, and to a obviously far lesser extent, women's basketball, but there is money. The amount of money that they take in from those three sports is mind numbing compared to what it was 25 years ago. I will bring this up and then we will break.

Tripp Tracy is going to join us on the other side to talk about Cam Ward. 20, about 25 years ago, roughly. It's a little bit less than that.

This was about the turn of the millennium. The ACC for a fiscal year distributed $9 million per school in shared revenue, money in equal shared revenue, money, $9 million per school. That was the most in college athletics.

Think about that for a second. The ACC was ahead of the SEC, was ahead of the big 10 in shared revenue. They distributed to their member institutions.

And at that point it was only nine, right? We, this is prior to the first wave of expansion. What is the big 10 going to distribute based on their new TV deals? It's going to be close to $100 million per school. The SEC will be in the $80, $85 million range and maybe more once Texas and Oklahoma settle in. The ACC will be up around 45 is my guess.

Between 45 and 50 when everything really starts to develop. So what is the percentage increase here? To the ACC, it's like a 400% increase. And in the others, it's a 1000% increase almost. That's why we want to know how come you guys can't compensate the players?

What has changed? The biggest, I don't want to use the term scam, but it might apply. The biggest question I would have for all of these people is how did we exist in 2000 on $10 million per year? And now we're crying poor if we can't get 35. Inflation ain't that. This is a self-made problem for the NCAA.