New class action lawsuit filed against NCAA, multiple former players named as plaintiffs

A new class action lawsuit has been filed against the NCAA, according to Sports Illustrated’s Ross Dellenger. Multiple former athletes have been named as plaintiffs.

The lawsuit, filed by the same firms that won the landmark Alston case against the NCAA in 2021, is against the NCAA and all of the Power Five conferences. It seeks the “triple damages on behalf of current and former Division I college athletics for injuries suffered from rules found to be unlawful in the Alston litigation.” As part of the Alston case, the NCAA had to distribute as much as $5,980 per year to athletes in education-related compensation dating back to 2018.

“Attorneys contend that at least $5,000 athletes are owed two years of back Alston payments from 2018–19 and ’19–20, but that number could climb to more than 20,000 athletes, putting damages at a minimum of $200 million and as much as $1 billion,” Dellenger wrote.

Former Oklahoma State running back Chubba Hubbard and former Auburn track athlete Keira McCarrell are named as plaintiffs. According to the lawsuit, Hubbard was “deprived of receiving the $5,980 Academic Achievement Awards that he would have earned each year that he attended OSU.”

McCarrell started her career at Oregon from 2017-19 before transferring to Auburn, where she competed from 2019-22. She “was deprived of receiving Academic Achievement Awards that she would have earned each year that she attended Oregon and the first two years that she attended Auburn,” according to the lawsuit.

As “a direct result of the NCAA rules prohibiting OSU from offering such payments sooner — rules that have since been determined to violate the antitrust laws — Hubbard was deprived of receiving the $5,980 Academic Achievement Awards that he would have earned each year that he attended OSU,” the lawsuit alleged, via USA Today’s Steve Berkowitz.

Winston & Strawn LLP and Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP are the two firms involved with the lawsuit. Steve Berman, Hagens Berman’s managing partner and co-founder, emphatically called out the NCAA and how it’s impacted by anti-trust laws.

“The NCAA has been operating for 50 years as if they are exempt from antitrust laws,” Berman said, via Dellenger. “The Supreme Court made it clear they aren’t. They want to go back to Congress and establish the status quo making them immune from the antitrust laws. No one else in the United States has that luxury. Why should they? We think it is pretty outrageous.”