Sports Law Blog gets attention

Marc's post on the Gregg Williams suspension got some pub from reporter Stefan Fatsis on this week's Hang Up and Listen podcast on Slate. Fatsis seems to be a regular reader of the blog; he interviewed me for an NPR speech on fan speech a few years ago.

New Sports Illustrated column: What Hurdles Remain for Dodgers Sale?

I have a new column for SI on a group that includes Magic Johnson wining the bidding process for the Dodgers and what issues remain.  They include factors that will be considered by a bankruptcy judge on April 13 and how debt financing plays a role in Major League Baseball's evaluation of the winning bid. 

Hope you have a chance to check out the column.

Odds

Tassos Kaburakis and I recently had the chance to collaborate on a research project looking at gambling in the EU. Our findings were just published in the new issue of Business Law International. The abstract is below. Our follow-up piece focuses on the US exclusively and is slated for publication later this year. Among other things, our US-specific article looks at PASPA on the statute's 20th anniversary.

Using law and policy as a sustainable competitive advantage source is a recent research stream. This paper illustrates how legal and policy research contributes to firms’ strategy in the regulated gambling industry, defined by legislation and jurisprudence. The gambling sector has been a microcosm of European integration and harmonisation challenges, as well as promising opportunities. Research on European Court of Justice case law in the period 1990-2010 and on recent policy developments yields significant findings for firms wishing to compete in the gambling industry, in which entry barriers have traditionally been high due to restrictive regulation. Following the latest European Court of Justice decisions in September 2010 and the ensuing policy impact across Europe, gambling operators are prudent to invest in litigation, lobbying, continuous legal and policy monitoring, and establishment of regional gambling sites in jurisdictions they would have been preempted from pursuing heretofore.

Football Agents: Back on Campus

After almost five years, the NFLPA decided to rescind the “Junior Rule” yesterday. This rule, enacted and enforced by the NFLPA, specified that agents were not allowed to contact a college player until after their junior year—specifically, either after their last regular season or conference championship game or December 1st, whichever came later. Since the NFL’s CBA requires that three regular seasons have completed before a player may be drafted, the intent was to reduce unnecessary contact between draft ineligible student-athletes and agents.

In theory, this rule made sense; in practice it became an unbridled disaster for the industry. The competition to sign student-athletes is fierce and this rule became a wedge between agents who completely ignored it and those who tried to follow the law. Unfortunately for the NFLPA and their agents, since contact with a student-athlete is not prohibited by the NCAA, by and large student-athletes and institutions neither cared about nor enforced this rule.

The result was that agents were forced to decide between abiding by this rule or losing potential clients to their competitors who largely ignored this prohibition. Furthermore, even if agents themselves decided to follow the law, they skirted its intent by hiring runners or representatives to recruit for them. Since the NFLPA has no jurisdiction over anyone not certified by the union, the industry saw an explosion of runners who descended on college campuses across the country.

Yesterday, the NFLPA, by a vote of the player representatives, rescinded the “Junior Rule.” What this means is that schools across the country must be even more prepared to educate their student-athletes. The good news is that the game has changed from enforcement to education. The bad news, how many schools take educating student-athletes in this transition process seriously?