While EA Sports has already announced that it will be ending its NCAA Basketball franchise after this season (because video game players didn’t understand why they had to play a regular season…zing!), the game manufacturer and the NCAA will likely continue to suffer for the annual college sports video games they have put out over the years for some time to come.
For those unfamiliar with sports gaming, the NCAA sells the rights to use the teams and players in video games to EA for a hefty chunk of change. Or, they don’t actually sell the rights to the players — perish the thought! — instead a video game player gets to play an anonymous Florida QB wearing the number 15, with the same facial structure, build, stats, and religious alignment of Tim Tebow. And then the game conveniently lets you edit the names of the players to reveal that, coincidentally, the announcers pre-recorded those names!
This scheme continued for some time before Ed O’Bannon of UCLA and Sam Keller, a former ASU and Nebraska QB decided to file suits challenging the NCAA’s right to sell their likenesses for its own gain.
Last week in federal court, Keller prevailed in defeating EA’s motion to dismiss the suit, meaning the game manufacturer is poised to undergo an expensive and time-consuming scouring of their documents unless they settle, which I would imagine they would — a public review of these documents, likely rife with NCAA correspondence that cynically treats college athletes as unpaid pawns in a billion-dollar boon for the organization charged with protecting them, probably would be a PR nightmare on par with, I don’t know, unnecessarily expanding the tournament.
