mthoopsfan
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"The 75-Year-Old Woman Who Has Become the Most Powerful Figure in College Sports History
With the NCAA and athletes on the brink of a historic $2.8 billion settlement, one judge is calling all the shots"
"The most powerful person in college sports history isn’t a conference commissioner or an NCAA president. It’s not even Teddy Roosevelt, who reformed football in the early 1900s following a rash of deaths on the field.Instead, it’s a 75-year-old federal judge who has degrees from two schools—and never scored a touchdown or sank a jump shot at either one.
Claudia Wilken is the jurist who will have the final say on the pending $2.8 billion settlement of a class-action lawsuit that is set to end the NCAA’s decades-old rules that have prohibited players from getting paid. It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of college sports rests on her decision.
The deal Wilken is scrutinizing would award back pay to thousands of athletes, while allowing schools for the first time to pay their athletes directly from the billions of dollars they help generate. For an NCAA that had long sold the public on unpaid amateurs as central to the appeal of college sports, it is an earthquake. To athletes, it’s a revelation.
At the center of it all is Wilken, a polite but assertive judge with wavy, graying hair, rimless glasses and a preference for keeping cases moving. Unlike most judges, she doesn’t require people to rise when she enters the courtroom.
Wilken was educated before the federal Title IX law required schools to field teams for girls and women and once quipped that she thought the term “SEC” referred to the “Securities and Exchange Commission” and not the college-powerhouse Southeastern Conference.
The most powerful person in college sports history isn’t a conference commissioner or an NCAA president. It’s not even Teddy Roosevelt, who reformed football in the early 1900s following a rash of deaths on the field.
Instead, it’s a 75-year-old federal judge who has degrees from two schools—and never scored a touchdown or sank a jump shot at either one.
Claudia Wilken is the jurist who will have the final say on the pending $2.8 billion settlement of a class-action lawsuit that is set to end the NCAA’s decades-old rules that have prohibited players from getting paid. It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of college sports rests on her decision.
The deal Wilken is scrutinizing would award back pay to thousands of athletes, while allowing schools for the first time to pay their athletes directly from the billions of dollars they help generate. For an NCAA that had long sold the public on unpaid amateurs as central to the appeal of college sports, it is an earthquake. To athletes, it’s a revelation.
At the center of it all is Wilken, a polite but assertive judge with wavy, graying hair, rimless glasses and a preference for keeping cases moving. Unlike most judges, she doesn’t require people to rise when she enters the courtroom.
Wilken was educated before the federal Title IX law required schools to field teams for girls and women and once quipped that she thought the term “SEC” referred to the “Securities and Exchange Commission” and not the college-powerhouse Southeastern Conference.
She moved west and earned degrees in the old Pac-8 Conference: undergraduate at Stanford, law at California. At Berkeley, she was in the same law school class as Lance Ito, the man who would preside over O.J. Simpson’s murder trial.
Wilken, who was nominated for her position by President Bill Clinton, has already delivered two big rulings favorable to college athletes.
In 2014, she broadly sided with former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon over his name, image and likeness being used in videogames. Wilken also ruled for West Virginia running back Shawne Alston when he challenged tight NCAA restrictions on benefits for college athletes—a decision unanimously affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Both cases hammered the NCAA’s contention that players should be limited to scholarships and little else. So when lawyers were preparing their biggest antitrust lawsuits yet, aiming to end compensation caps in college sports once and for all, they were very clear about the courtroom they wanted to battle in.
It was Claudia Wilken’s.
And after Wilken backed the plaintiffs’ proposals for who could get damages—and the methodology for awarding them—the NCAA knew going to trial was especially risky. If the NCAA lost, it would be staring at crushing damages."