Non-scholarship athletes argue proposal to fix roster-limit rule in lawsuit does not go far enough

A court filing in the multibillion-dollar college sports lawsuit argues the proposed remedy for the roster-limit rule holding up the case does not go far enough in protecting walk-on and other athletes who lost their spots when schools started cutting players in anticipation of the settlement being approved.

Attorneys for Michigan walk-on football player John Weidenbach and Yale rower Grace Menke filed a brief last week responding to the proposal that any athlete who had lost a spot because of the roster-limit rule not count against the cap when it goes in place next school year.

It’s the roster caps that have prevented U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken from approving the $2.78 billion settlement, which is designed to allow schools to pay players directly beginning later this year.

Wilken suggested any athlete already on a roster be “grandfathered in” for the rest of their college career, so as not to count against the new roster limits. The limits, while expanding scholarship opportunities across all sports, are expected to cost thousands of athletes — most of them walk-ons or on partial scholarships — their spots on rosters.

Wilken is accepting objectors’ filings through Tuesday, then giving the NCAA and plaintiffs through Friday to rebut those arguments.

The court filing on behalf of Menke and Weidenbach argues the solution proposed by the NCAA and plaintiffs “fails in numerous respects” to protect those athletes.

Among its arguments is that the proposed remedy makes restoring players to roster spots completely optional for the schools that cut the players. It also says the directive for schools to make a list of players it cut because of roster limits — the list would then be used to determine which players should not count against the new caps — leaves room for the teams to make up other reasons for cutting the players.

“It provides student-athletes with no opportunity to challenge those decisions or prove that roster caps, rather than something else, caused them to be cut,” the filing said.

The NCAA and plaintiffs argue that since none of these roster spots was ever guaranteed, a provision allowing players back on their old teams to compete for their spot leaves them in no worse a situation than before they got cut.

But the filing argues the damage has already been done by schools that cut players with the expectation that Wilken would approve the settlement — an assumption the judge said was incorrect.

“Counsel continues to hear from many athletes and their families whose lives are being turned upside down as a result of the implementation of roster caps,” the filing said. “Defendants’ indifference, when simple fixes were offered to address a problem of their making, is stunning.”

Among the objectors’ proposed fixes was for schools to automatically restore players to their old roster spots, while giving them “discretion to cut athletes for legitimate reasons unrelated to the roster cap, such as conduct violations and poor athletic or academic performance.”

Under the latest proposal, the players would be able to either go back to their old schools or find a new one, but either way, they would not count against that school’s roster limit.

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