In the ever-evolving landscape of college sports, one tenet remains the same: the Ivy League’s refusal to award athletic scholarships. However, they may be forced to forgo tradition pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by current and former student athletes at Brown University.

A class-action lawsuit filed March 2023 claimed eight Ivy League universities unlawfully colluded to reduce financial aid and compensation for student-athletes.

Grace Kirk ‘24, a current student-athlete on Brown’s women’s basketball team, and Tamenang Choh ‘21, a former member of Brown’s men’s basketball team, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Connecticut on March 7. Both Plaintiffs turned down athletic scholarships at non-Ivy League schools and claim that the Ivy League schools colluded to “refuse to provide any athletic scholarships or other compensation/reimbursement for athletic services.”

The Plaintiffs’ claims are based on the pivotal NCAA v. Alston decision handed down in 2021, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA’s restriction on education-related compensation was a violation of antitrust law. The decision led to the NCAA instituting the Name, Image and Likeness policy (NIL), which allows student-athletes to receive compensation from brands in the form of endorsement deals, or as social media influencers.

Although the Ivy League was not a party in the Alston case, the Plaintiffs argued that since the Ivy League schools are members of the NCAA, they should be held to the same antitrust standards as other colleges.

The Ivy League denied any wrongdoing and moved to have the case dismissed. The Ivy League and its member universities argued that the claims by the student-athletes do not threaten competition or produce anticompetitive effects in the market as whole. They argued that the policies actually do the opposite, increasing competition through creating “campus cultures that do not prioritize athletics over other aspects of their educational mission.”

The conference and their member schools argued that the student-athletes were trying to “misuse the antitrust laws to force the Ivy League to change the policies that help define the nature of Ivy League athletics.”

The Defendants also cited the Alston decision in their motion to dismiss, claiming that an individual conference can write its own rules and that “common sense and precedent confirm that a single athletic conference in the NCAA is not an antitrust market.”

Plaintiffs Kirk and Choh responded with an opposition to the motion to dismiss in late June, arguing that the Ivy League’s position on equal treatment of athletes and non-athletes is simply a restatement of “the NCAA’s discredited amateurism defense” resoundingly rejected in Alston.

Additionally, the Plaintiffs argued that the conference failed to explain how its refusal to provide athletic scholarships to pay for education is not “in harmony with these schools’ educational purposes,” or how the Defendants’ policies to allow student-athletes to profit from NIL deals constitutes equal treatment, while “athletic scholarships paying for cost of attendance, or the higher Alston-approved sums do not.”

The Plaintiffs’ opposition continued by claiming that “as a naked price restraint among horizontal competitors, the Agreement is a per se violation of the Sherman Act” and presumed to be anticompetitive. As a result, Plaintiffs do not need to allege “a relevant market, market power, market-wide anticompetitive effects, or refute justifications.”

Regardless, the student-athletes argue that the agreement itself shows market power in a properly defined market, but the precise “contours of the markets are a subject for discovery.”

A month after the Plaintiff’s opposition to the motion to dismiss, the Ivy League responded claiming that antitrust laws do not apply since students are free to apply to other academically elite colleges who offer athletic scholarships.

Defendants claim that the Plaintiffs’ alleged market fails because the Plaintiffs “without explanation, lump together dozens of different sports with facially different competitive landscapes” and that the Plaintiffs “must allege market-wide effects, and they focus solely on purported effect in the facially implausible Ivy-League-only markets.”

The Defendants further argue that the Alston decision supports a finding that leagues can operate individually rather than being automatically engaged in a naked restraint of trade. They claim that agreements “that plausibly facilitate legitimate joint ventures like sports leagues,” such as the agreement in question here, “are not among that narrow set of naked restraints.”

In early August, Connecticut Federal Judge Alvin W. Thompson found good cause for conditional access to discovery, including electronic data, expert reports and records held under the Department of Education’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid sought by Plaintiffs.

The Judge also issued limitations on the discovery, writing “to the extent that this stipulation imposes limitations on discovery that would otherwise be available under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure or this court’s standing orders, the parties have agreed to those limitations to increase the efficiency of their dealings with testifying experts and to minimize discovery disputes regarding testifying experts.”

So, the question remains, will the Ivy League be forced to change its ways? Only time and legal experts will tell.