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Dan Murphy
The University of Wisconsin filed a lawsuit Friday claiming Miami’s football team broke the law by tampering with a Badgers player, a first-of-its-kind legal attempt to enforce the terms of a financial contract between a football player and his school.
The lawsuit refers to the athlete in question as “Student Athlete A,” but details from the complaint line up with the offseason transfer of freshman defensive back Xavier Lucas. Lucas left Wisconsin and enrolled at Miami in January after saying the Badgers staff refused to enter his name in the transfer portal last December.
In the complaint filed Friday, Wisconsin claims that a Miami staff member and a prominent alumnus met with Lucas and his family at a relative’s home in Florida and offered him money to transfer shortly after Lucas signed a two-year contract last December. The lawsuit states that Miami committed tortious interference by knowingly compelling a player to break the terms of his deal with the Badgers.
“While we reluctantly bring this case, we stand by our position that respecting and enforcing contractual obligations is essential to maintaining a level playing field,” the school said in a statement provided to ESPN on Friday.
According to the complaint, Wisconsin decided to file suit in hopes that “during this watershed time for college athletics, this case will advance the overall integrity of the game by holding programs legally accountable when they wrongfully interfere with contractual commitments.”
Representatives from the University of Miami did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The pending case promises to be an interesting test of whether schools can use name, image and likeness (NIL) deals to keep athletes from transferring even though the players aren’t technically employees. Starting July 1, schools will begin paying their athletes directly via NIL deals.
The contracts between Wisconsin and their athletes give the school the nonexclusive rights to use a player’s NIL in promotions. Part of the deal, according to the lawsuit, prohibits an athlete from making any commitments to enroll or play sports at other schools. The lawsuit says Wisconsin had a reasonable expectation that Lucas would “continue to participate as a member of its football program” until the deal ended.
However, according to several contracts between Big Ten schools and their players that ESPN has previously reviewed, these deals explicitly state that athletes are not being paid to play football for the university. Since the school is technically paying only to use the player’s NIL rights, it’s not clear if a judge will consider it fair to enforce a part of the contract that dictates where the player attends school.
The Big Ten said in a statement Friday that it supports Wisconsin’s decision to file the lawsuit and that Miami’s alleged actions “are irreconcilable with a sustainable college sports framework.”
Darren Heitner, a Florida-based attorney who represents Xavier Lucas, told ESPN that Wisconsin did not file any legal claims against Lucas and declined to comment further.