Former NCAA tournament hero Kris Jenkins, in a lawsuit filed last week with the Southern District of New York, is suing the NCAA and six major conferences for limiting athlete pay and restricting his ability to capitalize off his name, image and likeness while he was at Villanova University.
Jenkins’ lawsuit alleges that the NCAA and the major conferences, including the Big East, violated federal antitrust laws by impeding the ability of college athletes to make money based on their performances and collective market values. The lawsuit also claims that the defendants “unjustly enriched themselves and their for-profit business partners while causing extensive damage to the student-athletes.”
Per the lawsuit, Jenkins “seeks the compensation that he would have received absent Defendants’ unlawful restraints on pay-for-play compensation, a share of game telecast revenue and compensation that he would have received for media broadcast uses of his NIL (‘BNIL’), and the compensation that he would have received for his NIL from third parties for use in video games and other opportunities including marketing, sponsorship, social media, branding, promotional, and other NIL deals.”
The lawsuit comes nine years after the former Wildcats star hit a buzzer-beater against North Carolina in the 2016 national championship game to seal Villanova‘s first of two titles in a three-year span.
Jenkins said he’s happy for the athletes who today can make millions for their efforts in the NCAA tournament. But he said he filed the lawsuit in part because the NCAA and his school have been rewarded financially as a result of his effort in that title game and beyond.
Jenkins opted out of the $2.8 billion House v. NCAA settlement, which was discussed in a hearing in California on Monday, and decided to pursue his own lawsuit, one of a handful filed by former athletes who have said they were denied their NIL rights while they were in school.
“I feel like it’s different from those [lawsuits], and the NCAA has shown that it is different from a lot of other things that have happened in the past just because of the magnitude of the situation, the shot, the financial gains for the NCAA and the unlawful rules that they had in place that prohibited all of us from being able to benefit,” Jenkins told ESPN on Monday.
In his lawsuit, Jenkins says his shot encouraged a $22.6 million donation to Villanova University from alumnus William Finneran in 2016 and also allowed the NCAA to make money by using the video and image of his shot in a variety of ways. On YouTube, the NCAA’s video of his last-second shot over the Tar Heels in 2016 has 4.5 million views.
The former Villanova standout said he wants to be compensated fairly — a desire he has for all current and former athletes — for the greatest achievement of his collegiate career.
“It’s such a unique situation,” he said. “It’s a one-of-one case. We haven’t had a game-winner, walk-off, buzzer-beating 3-pointer to win a national championship — I would say ever — until my shot, and you see it being used on CBS broadcasts and commercials, and that lets you know the value right there. I haven’t played college basketball in eight or nine years and the shot is still being replayed and reused, and I haven’t been compensated for that in any way.”
Jenkins added that he would have been able to put his family in a better situation had he been allowed to capitalize on NIL rights.
“I just feel like the opportunity had arose for us to make the right move [with the lawsuit] and seek full compensation for not being able to make money on NIL, which hindered my family’s progress, which hindered my progress financially, which set our family back from the position that we really could have been in from the hard work that I put in,” he said. “Because at the end of the day, being a college student-athlete is a nine-to-five job. We spend more time working and doing things than faculty do. Faculty gets to go home for Christmas break, but not your basketball players.”
When asked for a response to Jenkins’ lawsuit, a spokesperson said the NCAA has “no comment.”
