“Title:12.5.2.2 - Use of a Student-Athlete's Name or Picture Without Knowledge or Permission.
If a student-athlete's name or picture appears on commercial items (e.g., T-shirts, sweatshirts, serving trays, playing cards, posters) or is used to promote a commercial product sold by an individual or agency without the student-athlete's knowledge or permission, the student-athlete (or the institution acting on behalf of the student-athlete) is required to take steps to stop such an activity in order to retain his or her eligibility for intercollegiate athletics. Such steps are not required in cases in which a student-athlete's photograph is sold by an individual or agency (e.g., private photographer, news agency) for private use. (Revised: 1/11/97, 5/12/05)”
However institutions have been bending these laws for years by selling merchandise in the likeness of an athlete without acknowledging the athlete's name or actual picture. Tuesday Jay Bilas publicly outed one of the biggest offenders of breaking this NCAA rule, the NCAA themselves. Bilas tweeted the below message on August 6 at 11:06am, “Go to ShopNCAAsports.com, type in “Manziel” in upper right search box, hit enter. This comes up. Pic.twitter.com/N7KNvXIu24” The twitpic attached is a screen grab that shows a variety of Texas A&M #2 jerseys for sale.
Over the next few hours Bilas followed the above Tweet with 14 additional Tweets of other examples of names of current and former players names he searched on Shop NCAA Sports and the returned results. The athletes included Nerlens Noel, Marqise Lee and suspended Notre Dame QB Everett Golson. However his first Tweet (the above mentioned Tweet) is still perhaps the most surprising and ironic, Johnny Manziel, the Texas A&M quarterback who, according to yahoo.com, “is being investigated for allegedly violating NCAA rules by accepting money in return for autographing his jerseys.”
Bilas’ Tweets garnered attention on Twitter and in the media, and then around 4pm EST yesterday, ShopNCAASports.com removed their search function from their site...or at least hid if from the public. At the time of this article, it remains removed from the site. However the NCAA recently did announce that it will not longer sell team-related jerseys. USA Today quoted NCAA President Mark Emmert saying, ""There's no compelling reason the NCAA should essentially be re-selling paraphernalia from institutions," Emmert said. "I can't speak to why we entered into that enterprise, but it's not something that's appropriate for us, and we're going to exit it.""
This incident raises an interesting question about the site's (and by extension the NCAA's) liability for aligning the keyword phase (in this case a student-athlete’s name) with search results (a jersey of their school and the number they wear). I inquired with an SEO expert and he explained that the internal search within websites can either be an embedded Google search (meaning the site leverages Google’s search functionality and accepts whatever its crawl technology decides is the best results to display) or the site can use its own, customized search software (likely purchased from a vendor and allows the website owners to set-up those search-return relationships themselves). Most ecommerce sites employ the latter technique. That way, they can connect the search terms customers use for given products with the results they think will be most useful (e.g. a search for ‘Father’s Day gifts” is set-up to return ties, golf accessories, etc.). As ShopNCAASports.com is an ecommerce site, and the way the results displayed, it is very likely the results were manually linked to those student-athlete name keywords.
The site, ShopNCAASports.com, is labeled with the official NCAA logo & links and is copyrighted by Fanatics Retail Group. The site appears, for all intents and purposes, to be sanctioned by the NCAA. The questions now are around liability, which casts search & optimization into an interesting light. Can/should backend code and search software be audited to check if the site deliberately linked a player to a jersey? Taking that one step further, if the audit comes back that there is a deliberately created link, could the NCAA then be liable for breaking its own rule based on using a player's name without his/her permission, even if it is just on the back end of its site? If the NCAA is truly breaking its own rules, how can justice be handed down? Considering the power of the NCAA, one might ask the most important question of all, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will guard the guards themselves?) Ref. huffingtonpost.com, usatoday.com, sports.yahoo.com, web1.ncaa.org Pic. Ref. twitter.com
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