The Ivy League and its eight member schools scored a victory in court on Thursday when a federal judge in Connecticut dismissed a lawsuit accusing their agreement to not provide athletic scholarships and not pay Ivy League athletes compensation of amounting to an antitrust violation.
The core problem with Choh & Kirk v. Brown University et al., U.S. District Judge Alvin W. Thompson explained in his 36-page order, is that the case doesn’t adequately identify a relevant market for antitrust scrutiny.
While Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale offer “athletically and academically high-achieving students” the chance to graduate from an elite college and play Division I sports, Thompson stressed that other universities offer a similar mix of highly-selective admissions and D-I sports, but athletes at those schools can land athletic scholarships.
The judge listed schools mentioned by the plaintiffs and the defendants in their briefs. In alphabetical order, those schools are: UC Berkeley, Duke, Georgetown, Michigan, Notre Dame, Rice, Stanford, UNC Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt and Virginia. An athlete with strong academic credentials could decide they would rather go to one of these top, but non-Ivy colleges, land an athletic scholarship and play D-I sports.
Because other top schools could fit into the market targeted by the plaintiffs, it’s “impossible,” Thompson wrote, to evaluate whether Ivy League schools have sufficient market power to deny athletes of scholarships and other athletics-based aid “without losing athletically and academically high-achieving student-athletes to other excellent schools.”
Another deficiency in the complaint, Thompson reasoned, is that while the Ivy League has a certain identity that combines “academic and athletic excellence,” that identity falls short of establishing a market for antitrust review. Other D-I conferences describe themselves as unique and special, but that doesn’t make them a standalone market.
Although Ivy League athletes can’t land athletic scholarships, Ivy League schools provide substantial aid—sometimes full rides—to students, including athletes, with financial needs.
The plaintiffs can appeal Thompson’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
The case presents an interesting challenge to a Division I conference. In NCAA v. Alston, while the NCAA and its members lost, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch cautioned that individual conferences have wide discretion under antitrust law in adopting amateurism rules. “Individual conferences,” Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion, “remain free to reimpose every single enjoined restraint tomorrow—or more restrictive ones still.”
