




Lawyers for a group of plaintiffs led by former UCLA basketball player Ed O'Bannon filed a similar brief Tuesday night. They are seeking an injunction that would prohibit the NCAA from limiting what Bowl Subdivision football players and Division I men's basketball players can get for playing their respective sports and for allowing schools to use the names and likenesses in television broadcasts, video games and other marketing. Currently, college athletes are allowed a scholarship basically comprises tuition, room, board, books and mandatory fees.

The NCAA offered its assertion concerning the amounts of money that recruits allegedly would be offered under the plaintiffs' proposed setup to back its argument that its current limits on what college athletes can receive help maintain competitive balance among the schools. Under anti-trust law, a practice that constitutes a restraint can be allowed if the restraint can be shown to be promoting competition.

The NCAA argued that its rules do not create an environment of restraint that even requires the association to show justifications for it, but it nevertheless also presented its justifications.

While saying its limits on what athletes can receive promotes competition and balance among schools and teams, the NCAA argued that absolute competitive balance among the schools is not desirable. This is a line of reasoning that allows it to have a circumstance under which some schools have much greater financial resources than others but still claim there is reasonable balance – at least balance comparable to that which exists in professional sports leagues.

Games are not interesting to fans if they are too lopsided, the NCAA's lawyers wrote, but "they are also less interesting to watch if competition is so balanced that there are no dynasties and no underdogs. The ideal is some modest level of imbalance: enough to create storylines, but not so much as to create snoozers. The NCAA will present evidence showing that college football and men's basketball are at least as balanced — or about as properly imbalanced — as the NFL and the NBA."

The NCAA said it also will offer evidence concerning the connection between its limits on what athletes can receive and their integration into the educational side of schools. The association's lawyers said that while the plaintiffs will have witnesses who make "anecdotal allegations that some (student-athletes) at some schools have not been focused on or have not received a college education," the NCAA will present "hard evidence — data --that football and men's basketball (student-athletes), do, in fact get an education, including statistical analyses showing that these (student-athletes) graduate and achieve success at equal or higher rates than other young people with similar backgrounds."