Dontaie Allen, winner of the 2019 Kentucky Mr. Basketball award, is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed against the NCAA on Jan. 31 in the Eastern District of Kentucky.
The Allen v. NCAA lawsuit includes 33 current and former Division I men’s basketball and football players — seven with ties to the commonwealth. It argues that the NCAA has denied and restricted college athletes’ compensation, including their ability to profit off their names, images and likenesses.
It’s one of multiple filed last month with the goal of securing higher payments for current and former college athletes than the House v. NCAA settlement. Part of what makes this particular case unique, though, is that it also seeks to challenge the NCAA’s “pay for play” prohibition. Newport-based lawyer Chris Macke called it “intellectually dishonest.”Macke pointed toward Duke basketball star Cooper Flagg, the projected No. 1 overall pick in the 2025 NBA Draft. He has signed NIL deals with big-time brands New Balance, Gatorade and Fanatics. It is unknown how much Flagg has made from these deals, but various media outlets have valued them well over $1 million. Macke argued that these companies wouldn’t pay Flagg for his NIL if he wasn’t performing on the basketball court.Take Texas Tech football. The Red Raiders’ NIL collective spent $10 million to recruit 17 transfers in from the portal this offseason, according to ESPN. Three top-50 players each signed deals exceeding $1 million for 2025.”Guys are getting paid to play sports, and I think we should be honest about that,” Macke told The Courier Journal. “I don’t think anybody has been so far. I think that it’s a convenient way to keep the athletes from becoming employees of universities. … That’s the reality of it, and we wanted to do that differently in our suit than it was done in the House (class) action.”Seven of Allen v. NCAA’s 33 plaintiffs have ties to the commonwealth.
Dontaie Allen: Allen hails from Falmouth. He played at the University of Kentucky from 2020-22 and at Western Kentucky from 2022-24. He now plays for Wyoming.
Derrick Barnes: Barnes is from Covington and attended Holy Cross High School there. He played football for Purdue from 2017-2020 and was drafted by the Detroit Lions in 2021.
Adam Kunkel: Kunkel is from Hebron and is listed in the filing as a Burlington resident. He played basketball at Belmont from 2018-20 and Xavier from 2020-23.
Vincent “Tre” Mitchell: Mitchell played his final year of college basketball at UK last season after stints at UMass (2019-21), Texas (2021-22) and West Virginia (2022-23).
Matt Cross: Cross played his sophomore season of college basketball at Louisville (2021-22) after spending his freshman year at Miami. In 2022, he transferred to UMass. This season, he’s at SMU.
Spencer Macke: Macke is from Fort Thomas. He played 10 games for West Virginia basketball from 2019-21.
Tayler Persons: Persons played one season at Northern Kentucky (2014-15) before transferring to Ball State (2016-19).The limitations of the House settlement
The House settlement, which received preliminary approval Oct. 7, 2024, would provide $2.8 billion in back damages to athletes who could not profit off their NIL between 2016 and Sept. 15, 2024. The settlement would also do away with scholarship limits, instead imposing roster caps, and establish a revenue-sharing system in which athletics departments pay players directly. The projected revenue-sharing cap for 2025-26 is $20.5 million.
Chris Macke, who is also a certified NBA and NFL agent, takes umbrage with that number. In the NBA and NFL, he said, leagues take their annual revenue and split it 50/50 among the players associations and the teams. The players associations then use these numbers to establish a salary cap through collective bargaining agreements, which curb antitrust violations, create economic stability and maintain competitive balance.
