The Lawsuits, Prologue

Dense? Yes, often. But important as ever to the future of college sports.

With another college football season in the books, I wrote for The Washington Post about everything facing the industry off the field, a lot of which is unfolding just a few blocks from my house. Click for that story. Then you should also read our awesome coverage from the national championship in Atlanta, including this from Chuck Culpepper, then this column from Jerry Brewer. The title game was solid, in my humble, non-football-expert opinion. But I can confidently say reading them was a damn good time.

The Lawsuits, Prologue

In advance of the national championship game, The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis wrote about how the college football beat goes well beyond football these days, seeing that many reporters — hi! — talk to old men in suits more often than young men in pads. And in that story, Curtis quoted Ralph Russo, a national college writer for The Athletic and just an all-time good guy.

Here’s me quoting Curtis quoting Russo, which is kind of like quote inception.

These stories are a long way from asking how Notre Dame’s secondary will stop Ohio State wide receiver Jeremiah Smith. Even if conference realignment stories do big traffic, there’s a danger in going full-suit.

“The wonky stuff, the policy stuff—you have to understand it,” said The Athletic’s Ralph Russo, who was at the stakeout. “You have to know who to talk to about it. But you got to be careful how much you write about it. Because to a certain degree, your readers are like, How does this affect my running back room?”

This is a regular conflict in my day-to-day, something I talk about constantly with my editor: Lawsuits, NCAA policy and national politics are central as ever to the story of college sports. But often, they are also really, really dense, making it hard to generate reader interest. If you can believe it, a breakdown of antitrust law — or labor organizing, or why the Pac 12 is suing the Mountain West — doesn’t quite sell like an Arch Manning profile. It’s my job, of course, to both alert people to the latest developments and explain why they matter. We’re just selective about when we do it (even if we’re not as selective about debating whether we’re right or wrong).

So on top of whatever I cover for The Post, this is the first of a loose, sporadic series called The Lawsuits. You are reading The Lawsuits, Prologue. Sometime soon — hell, maybe real soon, given the pace of these things — you’ll get The Lawsuits, Pt. 1, then The Lawsuits, Pt. 2, and so on, until a hologram NCAA president is shouting about the latest case at the 2125 national championship, played at a stadium owned by Jerry Jones VI, the game sponsored by a life-extending pill.

I won’t write about every lawsuit. There are many, and they aren’t all created equal. But I’ll do my best to highlight the important ones, plus some key steps within those. If you plan to read The Lawsuits in a headline here and keep it moving, I get it. But you might like antitrust talk more than you think.