Baseball America | Blog | Baseball America College Blog | Oliver Settlement Restores ‘No Agent’ Rule

The New York Times is reporting that the NCAA has agreed to pay former Oklahoma State lefthander Andy Oliver $750,000 to settle the lawsuit between the two sides. Oliver had sued the NCAA after he was ruled ineligible for being represented by a lawyer in negotiations with the Twins after he was drafted in high school.

The more significant development with the settlement is that it marks a return to the status quo. In February, Erie County (Ohio) judge Tygh M. Tone ruled in Oliver’s favor and prohibited the NCAA from enforcing its "no agent" rule. But today, Tone dismissed the case at the parties’ request and vacated the order that barred the NCAA from enforcing the "no agent" rule.

Clearly, the rule is vulnerable to legal challenges, but for now, at least, the NCAA can go back to prohibiting players from having representation in their dealings with pro clubs.

However, if the NCAA plans to actually try to enforce the rule, which has been almost universally ignored and very seldom enforced in baseball for years, the return to the status quo won’t last long. The NCAA sent a questionnaire out to players earlier this fall in an attempt to gain information about their relationships with advisers, but many observers in the baseball industry have expressed alarm over this tactic. And multiple sports law professors have e-mailed Baseball America expressing "shock" over the "invasive" nature of the questions. One of them, Rick Karcher, is a professor of sports law at Florida Coastal School of Law who was slated to serve as an expert witness for Oliver’s side in the case against the NCAA.

"The MLBPA, not the NCAA, is the proper entity to be regulating the player-agent relationship," Karcher wrote in an e-mail. "The new questionnaire clearly interferes with that relationship, and the NCAA has no right to any of that information nor to make eligibility determinations based on that information. Moreover, the questionnaire could possibly constitute an illegal restraint on trade."

For all the months of legal wrangling over the Oliver case, nothing has changed in the end, but this issue is not going to disappear quietly. If the NCAA is insistent upon finding a way to enforce its antiquated "no agent" rule, it better be prepared to confront a host of other legal issues.

"We’re pleased that this ordeal is over for Andy, but we’re not pleased with how the NCAA treats student-athletes,” Oliver’s lawyer, Rick Johnson, told the Times. "We hope that this causes the NCAA to reform itself and for state and national government—basically Congress—to come in and take a look at this."

Exactly why does the NCAA believe that it needs to have the no-agent rule in the first place?

Posted by Joe Reisel | October 9, 2009 at 8:01 am | Shortcut

how does a “questionairre” which if given to players drafted but not signed, prohibit them from participating in fall and/or spring games because of contact, no signing, no money exchanged, just phone conversations with a parent and advisor warrent the extensive reprimand from the NCAA. Do other scholarship entities, educational, obtain the same scrutiny, if one seeks to compare schools from an outside source.

Posted by hawkeye | October 10, 2009 at 1:00 am | Shortcut

The NCAA exists, not so much to protect amateur athletics, but to be an athletic bureaucracy. (My apologies to John Kenneth Galbraith for poaching his famous comment.)

What does the NCAA hope to gain from this? All bureaucrats sit around and congratulate themselves on how they’ve used a word processor to change the world. The NCAA is always after one thing: more power.

Consider two other examples in NCAA baseball:

(1) The Official Rules of Baseball is a 4X5″ booklet that’s about a quarter inch thick. It’s worked great for over 100 years. Using Official Rules as a template, the NCAA playing rules are almost 2 inches thick. The NCAA rules are a cumbersome amalgamation which often requires an umpire to make 3 decisions on an enfolding play, rather than a single decision under Official Rules. The NCAA book grossly over-regulates everything from the balk rule to collision plays. Why? Because they have a committee meet every year to make new rules; and the first premise of bureaucracy is that, when committees meet, they have to do SOMETHING. Creating annual rule changes which harm the quality of play are just fine with them, as long as that committee is doing something.

(2) A handful of European players are now finding their way into NCAA baseball. They played in their own countries’ pro leagues. Though the European national leagues are pathetic, many players in those leagues do get paid, so any players who competed in those leagues have lost their amateur status under NCAA rules. With the encouragement of MLB, the NCAA just ignores the illegal players. Hey, it’s their rules, so they can ignore them whenever they want.

It is that hubris which led the NCAA to entangle themselves with Andy Oliver. Having lost to him in court, and knowing they will likely get hauled into court for trying that trick again, what does the NCAA do?

They try to bluff players into exposing themselves by demanding the players answer questions the NCAA very well knows it has no right to ask.

Note to Congressman Waxman: Apparently, three quarters of a million dollars is not a sufficient disincentive to get the NCAA’s attention.

Posted by fred4945 | October 11, 2009 at 12:34 am | Shortcut