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Oklahoma Bar Journal

October 2018 | Sports Law

 

Feature Articles

Safe Sport: Protecting Athletes From Sexual Abuse
The amount of abuse coming to light in youth-serving organizations is alarming. The 156 victims who spoke during the Nasser hearings regarding abuse in gymnastics are the tip of the iceberg. The U.S. Center for SafeSport opened in March 2017. This entity is authorized to investigate complaints in many organized sports organizations.

Legalized Sports Betting in Oklahoma
Widespread sportsbook-style sports betting in the United States has been largely confined to the state of Nevada since at least 1992. In 1992, Congress passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA).1 PASPA served as an ice age of sorts, freezing sports gambling schemes as they were in 1992, until the end of time or until the statute is repealed.2 While the statute was largely unchallenged for more than 15 years, in 2009, Gov. Jack Markell of Delaware was sued by the Office of the Commissioner of Major League Baseball and a quartet of other major sports organizations after the Delaware lottery sought to expand their sports gambling offerings beyond parlay-style bets on National Football League (NFL) games.3

The Use of Liquidated Damages Clauses in Coaching Contracts - The University Perspective
No doubt about it, collegiate athletics has become big business. With huge revenues generated from ticket sales, television contracts and post-season play, college sports are a booming industry. Many college coaches are extraordinarily highly compensated and command guaranteed multiyear contracts. Most of those contracts contain “buyout clauses,” lay terminology for “liquidated damages” clauses that set forth the negotiated, prebreach presumption of the amount of damages the nonbreaching party will incur, or agree to receive, if the contract is terminated.1 Although most modern coaching contracts contain reciprocal clauses – one establishing damages should the university terminate the contract and one establishing damages should the coach terminate the contract – this article will only focus on the latter situation.

The Lasting Impact of NCAA v. Bd. of Regents of The University of Oklahoma: The Football Fan Wins
INCAA v. Bd. of Regents of the Univ. of Okla.,1 the United States Supreme Court struck down the “television plan” of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which was designed to limit the total television broadcasts of college football games and the number of appearances of individual schools, as well as to fix the compensation to be received by individual schools. A 1995 article in the Oklahoma Law Review documented the increase in television broadcasts and television revenues – as well as the increase in live attendance – that followed the Supreme Court’s opinion.2 Now, nearly 35 years after the Supreme Court’s opinion (and over 20 years after the original article), we take a brief look at the continuing impact of the NCAA opinion.

So You Want to Be a Sports Agent?
It was 1996. The movie Jerry Maguire hit the big screen.1 And a generation of aspiring sports agents was born

Plus Articles

OBA Diversity Awards 2018
The OBA Diversity Committee is set to host its annual Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher Awards Dinner Oct. 18, 2018, in Oklahoma City. The event will feature a keynote address from Susan Carns Curtiss. Ms. Curtiss is the founder of Girl Attorney LLC, a national organization that works to advance, promote, support and encourage women in the legal profession and beyond. The event will also feature a special presentation by Professor Cheryl Wattley. Professor Wattley is the author of A Step Toward Brown v. Board of Education: Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher and Her Fight to End Segregation and I’ll Do It, a play about Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher and the fight for civil rights.