Steve Berman is hopefully not anybody whose name we’ll remember.
Don’t mistake him for Chris “Boomer” Berman, the ESPN icon. Steve Berman is an attorney, specifically, a lawyer representing current and former athletes involved in the looming $2.8 billion House vs. NCAA settlement that will upend whatever status quo remains in college sports.
Steve Berman is a killjoy.
It’s his job. He is trying to not only bring down a caste system that has allowed high major coaches to collect tens of millions in salary while the athletes who actually put their bodies and lifestyles on the line have, until very recently, collected a comparative trickle of the revenue stream from network TV deals, game revenues and merchandise sales.
Transforming that landscape is overdue. Nearly everybody will admit we are entering the era of professional sports played by college teams, by young men and women ages 17-23 or so, give or take six or seven years of eligibility.
The implications are vast. Nearly all of the two dozen basketball seniors recently involved in the McDonald’s High School All-Star Game this spring have their own personal media teams to build their brands. Those Class of 2025 grads will begin their semi-adult lives making decimal point money to play basketball for Duke, Kentucky, Kansas and the blue-bloods, along with the wanna-be programs who can hustle up the money to play in the high-stakes poker room.
One of those boys will be making $6 million (I kid you not) to hoop it up next year on The Road to the Final Four, which is now beginning to look more like the Road to Perdition.
Is the pay scale soaring out of control? It already did when agents did their jobs and began bringing their coaching clients big bucks as the new millennium dawned. Last year, more than 100 college football coaches made over $1 million annually. Seven head coaches made at least $10 million a year. And they all have eight-figure buyout clauses.
It took about 10 years into this century for college athletes to do more than sit up and take notice. Ed O’Bannon, a former UCLA basketball star, filed a lawsuit that posed questions the NCAA didn’t want to face. The college sports landscape has eroded much like the Louisiana coastline ever since.
The same federal judge who is now overseeing the negotiations to reach a settlement of the House lawsuit, Claudia Wilken, ruled in 2014 that by barring payments to athletes, the NCAA violated anti-trust laws. Tough to argue otherwise.
The last decade plus has been mostly a slow slide toward what the old guard considers anarchy. And it IS turbulent, at the very least, to be entering airspace where million-dollar deals, out in the open, for college athletes are all around the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC, and even in the outlying territories.
So hearts lept after President Trump’s visit to speak at the University of Alabama’s commencement included extended discussions with former football coaches Nick Saban and Tommy Tuberville. The Sabanator and Tubs told The Donald, according to The Wall Street Journal, that the college sports world was turning upside down and paying athletes big money was creating an uneven playing field.
(When HAS it ever been even? But that’s beside this point).
The WSJ reported the president, who certainly enjoys the spectacle of big-time sports, told his staff to start considering what might go into an executive order to make a market correction.
Trump has issued nearly 150 executive orders since returning to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Why not another? Some have worked wonders – cannot dispute border security is infinitely improved – and some, not so much, at least so far.
But Berman blanched at the thought that President Trump might come up with an order that caps the cash flow to the athletes. It would be “unmerited and unhelpful,” Berman told The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel on Monday.
He even criticized Saban’s “eleventh-hour self importance” which tells you Steve Berman is no Chris Berman, and has no clue that Saint Nick is to college football what General Eisenhower was to World War II.
Judge Wilken has set a Thursday deadline for both sides of the House lawsuit to present their case on her stance that current athletes must not lose spots on their teams because of the pending implementation of roster limits across NCAA Division I in each of the sports involved in the settlement – which is to say, all of them.
Berman fears Trump could shrink the take for athletes, and even restrict the transfer portal – which would be a great consequence.
Then there’s the very delicate dance that colleges are doing to avoid having athletes classified as employees, which opens the door to workman’s comp and related responsibilities that would completely uproot the foundation of NCAA sports.
I’m not sure even a Trump executive order can provide the answers Saban, Tuberville, Greg Sankey and the big boys of college sports want. Doubt the Donald, as Boomer Berman would say, “could … go … all … the… way!”
It might be at least a band-aid, if not a Hail Mary. However, Judge Wilken still holds the trump card.
Contact Doug at sbjdoug@gmail.com