<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"                      <p class=\"imgtitle\">Flaum</p>           CHICAGO (Legal Newsline) - The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled Monday that rules by the National Collegiate Athletic Association concerning athletic scholarships do not violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. <br /><br />Two Division I college football players claimed they were anti-competitive. Joseph Agnew, who played football for Rice in 2006, and Patrick Courtney, who played for North Carolina A&T in 2009, both received one-year scholarships. <br /><br />Both suffered career-ending football injuries during their college tenures. Because the injuries prevented them from playing football, their scholarships were not renewed. <br /><br />Agnew and Courtney sued, claiming that the cap imposed by the NCAA on the number of scholarships given per team and the prohibition of multi-year scholarships prevented them from obtaining scholarships that covered the entire cost of their college education. <br /><br />The plaintiffs alleged that the rules have \"an anticompetitive effect on the market for student-athletes, and therefore violate... the Sherman Act.\"<br /><br />The NCAA filed a motion to dismiss and a federal district court granted that motion. The plaintiffs appealed the dismissal to the Seventh Circuit.<br /><br />The argument proffered by the plaintiffs was that NCAA member schools compete intensely over the premier student-athletes in the country. <br /><br />Were it not for the two bylaws -- the one-year scholarship limit, which prohibits NCAA member schools from offering student-athletes multi-year scholarships, and the cap on the number of athletic scholarships a school can offer for each team in a given year -- schools would offer multi-year scholarships to stay competitive in the market for elite athletes, the plaintiffs said. <br /><br />The plaintiffs claimed that multi-year scholarships used to be the norm. The current ban on multi-year scholarships compels student-athletes who do not have their scholarships renewed to pay more for their under-graduate education, they alleged. <br /><br />They maintained that the limit on the number of athletic scholarships a school can offer reduces the total number of athletic scholarships offered, thus preventing some students from obtaining a bargained for education<br /><br />Seventh Circuit Judge Joel Flaum wrote, \"While we depart from some of the district court's reasoning, we ultimately conclude that plaintiffs' complaint did not sufficiently identify a commercial market-an obvious necessity for Sherman Act violations-and thus we affirm the district court's dismissal of plaintiffs' suit.\"<br /><br /> "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://legalnewsline.com/stories/510527414-seventh-circuit-ncaa-does-not-violate-antitrust-law>