Today’s many college athletes are raking in millions due to NIL (names, images, and likenesses) contracts, and they have former college basketball player turned pro Ed O’Bannon to thank.

O’Bannon is a former National Basketball Association (NBA) basketball player. Before that, he was a star college athlete, having been a power forward for the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Bruins on their 1995 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship team. The New Jersey Nets selected him with the ninth overall pick of the 1995 NBA draft. After two seasons in the NBA, he played mainly in Europe.

While he had a solid pro basketball career, he is most known as the lead plaintiff in “O’Bannon v. NCAA,” an antitrust class action lawsuit against the NCAA that resulted in the discontinuation of NCAA video games. The NCAA has decided the rules governing athletes’ eligibility at its more than 1,000 member colleges and universities. Previously, the rules banned student-athletes from being paid for the use of their names, images, and likenesses (NILs).

NIL is a term that describes the means through which college athletes are allowed to receive financial compensation. NIL refers to the use of an athlete’s name, image, and likeness through marketing and promotional endeavors.

But in 2008, O’Bannon’s image was used without his consent in a college basketball video game produced by Electronic Arts (EA). This software company made video games based on college football and men’s basketball from the late 1990s until around 2013. In 2009, O’Bannon sued the NCAA and the Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC), the entity which licenses the trademarks of the NCAA and a number of its member schools for commercial use, in federal court. 

In 2009, O’Bannon filed a federal lawsuit against the NCAA and Electronic Arts. In a landmark decision, which was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals, O’Bannon defeated the NCAA. O’Bannon received no compensation from the case.

In his book, “Court Justice: The Inside Story of My Battle Against the NCAA,” about the case, co-authored with Michael McCann and Jeremy Schaap, O’Bannon wrote about his motives for the lawsuit.

He saw how the NCAA’s unfair system of “amateurism” exploited college athletes who generated huge profits for their schools without being compensated.

His case changed all that.

College athletes earned an estimated $917 million in the first year of NIL payments, which began in July 2021, according to new data from Opendorse.

In this Sept. 18, 2010, file photo, former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon Jr. sits in his office in Henderson, Nev. NIL’s blossoming started with a seed: a 2009 class-action lawsuit filed by former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon that argued the NCAA should not be allowed to use the likeness of football and men’s basketball players — past and present — to make money. (AP Photo/Isaac Brekken, File)/”Court Justice: The Inside Story of My Battle Against the NCAA” book cover, Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/Court-Justice-Inside-Battle-Against/dp/1635762626