The Lawsuit: O’Bannon V. NCAA
In 2009, Ed O’Bannon and 20 other former college athletes filed a lawsuit against the NCAA, EA and the CLC (Collegiate Licensing Company) claiming that players should be awarded compensation for use of their image.
The lawsuit’s main point of evidence was the use of the 1995 UCLA Bruins team in the NCAA Basketball series developed by EA Sports.
In the game, it featured the players of that classic team, equipped with their iconic numbers, exact weight and height, shot style, and biographical information, but also stripped the players of their names to avoid compensating them for their likeness.
As this lawsuit was battled out in the courts for nearly five years, EA was forced to discontinue the series until the legal dispute was settled.
A once billion-dollar video game franchise vanished and NCAA video games were no more.
Due to the NCAA’s rules surrounding compensation for student-athletes, EA Sports was able to benefit off the back of hundreds of thousands of people over the years by using their image in games without paying them anything.
The court case finally came to a close once the NCAA, EA, and the CLC came to a settlement of $40 million dollars. This settlement gave as much as $4000 dollars to nearly 100,000 current and former student-athletes that had their likeness represented in the NCAA sports games.
EA Sports and the NCAA are now free to create college sports games as long as they do not intentionally use the likeness of any current or former players.
Although Ed O’Bannon began the lawsuit that started it all, figuring out why this happened for losing the NCAA Football games is more complicated than pointing the finger at one person.
The issue is rooted in the self-created bylaws of the NCAA and EA’s willingness to go along with benefitting off a college athlete’s image without repercussion for as long as they did.
Ed O’Bannon was doing what was right for the hundreds of thousands of student-athletes that had their likeness appearing in NCAA games without their consent, and the result of that was the end of NCAA games.
