Since the defendants and plaintiffs in House v. NCAA reached a tentative $2.8 billion settlement agreement in May, there have been no shortage of complaints from non-Power 5 schools and conferences, arguing that they are being made to suffer financially for matters over which they had no control.
But so far only one institution, Houston Christian University, has taken the formal—if legally debatable—next step in attempting to halt the case’s impending resolution. In a seven-page motion filed June 20, the school of 2,300 undergraduate students asked a federal court to allow it to intervene in the case, arguing that it had “significantly protectable” interests which no side had taken “any step to protect.”
Its prayer (for relief) comes 16 years after the school, formerly known as Houston Baptist, settled a federal antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA over the wait period for schools applying for Division I membership.
Helping to lead Houston Christian’s case then, as now, is its anomalous outside counsel, James Sears Bryant, whose resumé includes professional sports agent, Democratic state representative (from a Republican district in Oklahoma), minor league basketball team owner, consumer advocate and Hollywood producer. When it comes to religion, Bryant describes himself as “probably a heretic,” and when it comes to college sports, he’s probably a paradox: a longtime player advocate and NCAA adversary who is also a full-throated defender of amateurism.
“It’s really [each] school’s name and likeness that makes college sports so identifiable,” Bryant said in a recent telephone interview, during which he sought to reframe the current debate over House. “It was really fun on Saturday afternoon to see students that are affiliated with the program and try to win one for the alma mater. All that is gone.”
Though these points have been made before by many who have argued in defense of the traditional “collegiate model,” it is striking to hear them coming from this man now.
In his prior career representing pro athletes, Bryant had numerous collisions with college sports’ governing body, its thick rule book and the black market it created. This included his representing several high-profile players under NCAA investigation for taking impermissible benefits. In light of (or despite) these experiences—the very kinds that would eventually turn the public, courts and politicians against the NCAA’s restrictions on athletes earning money—Bryant still champions the paragon of the “student-athlete,” and casts doubt that college football and basketball players truly lost out on the billions of dollars that the House settlement purports to address.
These days, Bryant, who is based in Oklahoma, serves as founding partner of the National Litigation Law Group, a 60-employee practice that specializes in credit card and student debt. The firm’s board of directors includes Bryant’s former client, Nick Van Exel, the former Cincinnati Bearcats basketball star who played 13 seasons in the NBA.
In addition to his legal endeavors, Bryant has also stuck a foot in Hollywood, launching a production company, Jesse James Films, in 2020. Bryant has since served as an executive producer on the comedic movies Chick Fight and Hooking Up, as well as the documentary, What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?
Bryant’s connection to Houston Christian had its own kind of cinematic start. Before taking it on as a client, the lawyer recalled having not ever heard of the private Baptist school. He was in an airport in 2008, having just failed in convincing another small university (he declined to name) to file suit against the NCAA over its mandatory D-I reclassification wait period.
Passing time before his plane arrived, Bryant struck up a conversation with a nearby stranger, who happened to be a kinesiology professor at HCU. Eventually, they got to chatting about the NCAA and Bryant’s theory of its antitrust violation. At that moment, Houston Christian, which had received provisional Division I status in 2007, was fighting with the association over how much longer it needed to wait for full membership. The school believed that it should only have to wait three years, based on precedent, but the NCAA had told them that it was seven.
When the professor returned to HCU’s campus, she passed word about her chat with Bryant along to Robert B. Sloan, the school’s president, who immediately summoned Bryant to Houston for a meeting. With Bryant serving as outside counsel, the school field an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA in April 2008, decrying its “seven-year group boycott.” As part of a settlement, the NCAA agreed to the let Houston Christian receive full D-I membership in 2011, entitling all of its athletic programs to be eligible for NCAA postseason play.
In a phone interview, Sloan, who continues to lead HCU, gave Bryant much of the credit for keeping the school’s D-I dreams alive.
“We were about to give up [after] the NCAA said you can’t get in,” Sloan said. “They were going to wield their power.”
In the years since, Sloan and Bryant continued to keep in touch and say they came close to filing a second antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA in the mid-2010s, after the association adopted a new governance structure giving greater autonomy to the five wealthiest leagues. Sloan spoke out publicly against the changes, but the school ultimately kept its litigative power dry.
“[Bryant] and I were ready to go,” Sloan said, “but I couldn’t have done this without my board’s approval.” Bryant, meanwhile, has continued to serve HCU in other ways.
Five years ago, he and his wife established an endowment to cover the salary of HCU’s head men’s basketball coaching position. When asked what compelled him to donate those kinds of resources to a school that was not even his alma mater, Bryant replied, “Because of amateurism.”
Bryant cast HCU’s recent effort to intervene in the House case as part of a larger, yet deeply personal, battle to preserve the future of small, liberal arts education in America. A self-described ‘D’ student in high school, Bryant credits much of his success to the “transformative experience” of attending a small liberal arts school—in his case, the now-defunct Phillips University in Enid, Okla.—after a two-year stint in community college. He went on to earn a law degree at SMU, commencing a career in sports law.
In the late 80s, Bryant, then a newly minted lawyer, was retained by Oklahoma State star wide receiver Hart Lee Dykes, who was being investigated by the NCAA for accepting under-the-table payments during his recruitment. Dykes’ half-brother, Todd Chambers, was a college friend of Bryant’s at Phillips University.
At Bryant’s urging, Dykes agreed to a controversial—and nearly unprecedented—deal with NCAA investigators, in which he was given immunity from losing his athletic eligibility in exchange for spilling the beans on several programs, including his own. The player’s testimony led to Oklahoma, Illinois, Oklahoma and Texas A&M all being put on NCAA probation—and Dykes being publicly pilloried for years to come.
“What does a normal attorney do when a client says the NCAA is here, and they want to know where I got the car and cash?” Bryant said. “I say, ‘You tell the truth and cut a deal.’ I guess I was pretty naive. I didn’t realize the consequences of what was going on.”
Bryant continued to represent Dykes ahead of the upcoming NFL Draft but was fired when the wide receiver was selected by the New England Patriots. In response, Bryant filed a suit against Dykes, claiming the player had breached their representation contract and owed nearly $30,000 in unpaid loans. Bryant, who insisted his lending took place only after Dykes had left college, ultimately decided not to pursue the claim. Chambers, Dykes’ half-brother, would later work at National Litigation Law Group, and still serves on its board.
In the mid-1990s, Bryant moved to Washington, D.C., to join ProServ, the once-dominant sports management firm, where he ran the basketball division following David Falk’s breakaway with Michael Jordan. Among Bryant’s clients was Marcus Camby, the No. 2 pick in the 1996 NBA Draft. Camby was later found to have transgressed NCAA rules when he publicly admitted to accepting cash and jewelry from an agent—not Bryant—while in college. The NCAA subsequently vacated UMass’ Final Four appearance and made the school return the money it had earned from its tournament bid.
“I’ve always said publicly that players should not have as restrictive as rules as [the NCAA] had,” Bryant said, “because most of the corruption in college sports is not over cars and things you saw in the Camby deal, it is over lunch money, over a mother who needs a house payment paid … but what we are now doing is eliminating amateurism.”
Thus, Bryant contends the House case is not an engine of progress.
“Higher education leaders are extremely progressive in the classroom but completely reactionary about their own institutions,” he said. “They are afraid of change.”
To him, the proposed settlement only furthers that conventionalism.
“It doesn’t take thinking out of the box to settle a case,” said Bryant. “One of the key problems of the legal system is people consistently settling to avoid liability and controversy instead of taking corrective positions in fighting. These [damages] did not happen. Nobody took $2.8 billion [from athletes] … I am a huge college football fan, but tell me: Who has had $280 million a year taken from them?”
Sloan, the HCU president, says the school’s board was completely on-board with the latest legal action. For now, it’s just Houston Christian advancing the small-school argument in court, though both Bryant and Sloan say they’ve heard from a number of other school leaders who have indicated they will join the fight.
“Because we have low resources, we couldn’t afford to have a big, massive lawsuit to take on deep pockets,” said Sloan. “All we are asking is for the ability to sit at the table. I think it highlights all the simple issues of what is wrong with college athletics. They are threatening amateurism. They are allowing our mission to be subverted. The tail is wagging the dog.”