Law & Order: NCAA / College Legal
UW-Madison is suing the University of Miami
On Friday, the college football world was rocked, shocked, or at the vest least felt a small tremor that made them go “oh woah, earthquake,” when the University of Wisconsin and its NIL collective filed a lawsuit against the University of Miami over alleged tortious interference.
Per Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports:
In a first-of-its-kind and, perhaps, a precedent-setting move, Wisconsin is seeking unspecified financial damages and a declaratory judgement deeming UM’s actions as wrongful for interfering with a binding revenue-share contract between UW and Xavier Lucas, a former defensive back who left the program in January to compete at Miami. It was a groundbreaking decision in which Lucas transferred without entering the portal (it had already closed) and after signing the contract with the Badgers.
The story, like all things college football, is extremely messy and features a series of competing, contradictory claims. While the lawsuit does not name Lucas a defendant—that’s only the University of Miami—it does impune his character.
Lucas’s attorney alleges that Wisconsin blocked Lucas from entering the transfer portal. The decision to leave Wisconsin was motivated by his father suffering a “serious, life-threatening illness,” but Wisconsin disputes this, saying that their coaches received “inconsistent information.” In other words, they thought he was lying.
The revenue-share contract between UW and Xavier Lucas is, from this layman’s perspective, of questionable relevance. The contract was reportedly contingent upon the approval of the House settlement. The approval came in June 2025. Lucas transferred, using arcane NCAA enrollment loopholes to skirt any rule violations, in January 2025. It’s not clear to me, or to Dellenger’s unnamed legal experts, this timeline makes the contract enforceable. If the exchange the contract is regulating is entirely theoretical, it would seem it’s less of a contract and more of a wish-casting.
The entire affair whiffs of sour grapes. Luke Fickell is Wisconsin’s head coach and irrefutable evidence of nominative determinism. In 2024, he fired his offensive coordinator halfway through the season for not being aware that you’re allowed to run the ball. When a reporter asked Fickell who would call plays, Fickell said, “Why does it matter?”
He exchanged a series of extremely whiny barbs with Jim Harbaugh about transfer rules in 2019, arguing that Harbaugh should’ve done more to help a transfer from Michigan have immediate eligibility when he got to Fickell’s team. Harbaugh pointed out that he does not control eligibility rules. Fickell then gauffed and huffed and spouted something about how he only cares about what’s best for the players.
It would seem to me that being closer to an ailing parent, or simply making more money, in the entirely plausible reality that Lucas is exaggerating, would be in the player’s best interest.
What the case is really about, of course, is the dull minutiae surrounding contract negotiations and when, exactly, can teams contact players to solicit their services. Professional sports leagues prevent this from becoming an issue by having a player-base that are treated as employees. Employees are organized via unions, and unions and leagues negotiate collective bargaining agreement to regulate all this nonsense so it doesn’t have to play out in a courtroom.
This has to end. If it goes on for much longer, David E. Kelley or Dick Wolf will hear about it and try and turn it into a TV show. Law & Order: NCAA wouldn’t really have any cache anymore—“in the NCAA justice system, the people are represented two separate yet equally annoying group of dorks”—so it would probably have to be College Legal, a show about a law firm that takes on a variety of college sports cases while all the attorneys are constantly sexually harassing one another. That sounds like a criticism but I would never criticize a TV show that got this blistering condemnation of the War on Terror on broadcast television.