NCAA Quits Selling Jerseys Online After Explosive Twitter Rant

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By Sam Laird2013-08-09 00:33:20 UTC

As recently as Tuesday morning, you could go to the NCAA's official online store, type in the name of your favorite college athlete, and buy the corresponding jersey for $60 or so. All this despite the NCAA maintaining, in a closely watched class-action suit, that it does not profit off the images and likenesses of its amateur athletes who power a multi-billion dollar college sports entertainment industry.

NCAA president Mark Emmert said on Thursday, however, that college sports' governing body will soon cease selling player jerseys and other school-specific apparel on its shopncaasports.com site. The unspoken impetus for this abrupt about-face? An explosive Twitter campaign lodged by ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas (pictured above) on Tuesday morning.

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"Having the NCAA selling those kinds of goods is a mistake, and we're going to exit that business immediately," Emmert said on Thursday, according to the Wall Street Journal . "There's no particularly compelling reason why the NCAA ought to be essentially reselling jerseys and paraphernalia from institutions."

The Journal also reports shopncaasports.com was operated by an external company and that Emmert said the NCAA itself "had no revenue at all from that site from the sale of those jerseys," to his knowledge.

The NCAA is currently on its heels in a federal suit spearheaded by ex-UCLA star Ed O'Bannon and former shoe marketer Sonny Vaccaro that could change the face of college sports forever. The suit, which has been expanded and awarded class-action status since originally being filed in 2009, seeks to give players a piece of the financial pie that has exploded over the past couple decades. The NCAA has claimed, among other things, that jerseys of specific schools and numbers aren't tied to specific players and simply exist by happenstance.

Bilas, a former Duke star and licensed attorney, has emerged as one of the NCAA's most vocal public critics, frequently taking them to task for hauling in cash while the athletes who generate that revenue remain unpaid and often have to miss games for drawn-out investigations. He took his criticism to a new level with an extended Tuesday-morning rant that drew widespread attention online and included tweets such as these:

Hours after Bilas' screed, the search bar that returned player-numbered jerseys by name query was quietly removed from shopncaasports.com. Then came Emmert's Thursday admission.

"Having the NCAA selling those kinds of goods is a mistake, and we're going to exit that business immediately," Emmert said, according to the Journal. "There's no particularly compelling reason why the NCAA ought to be essentially reselling jerseys and paraphernalia from institutions."

Bilas isn't always so serious on Twitter, however. He's well known for starting each day with a quote from the rapper Young Jeezy and boasting about his "trill"-ness and "swag." The NCAA appears to have learned this week that when Bilas comes after you, as Jeezy once said, "you better call your crew; you're gonna need help."

Image: Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images

Topics: college sports, Entertainment, Sports