Their NCAA Cinderella Win Made History. Now They Want to Be Paid

Alvin Battle walked through the double doors of the Reynolds Coliseum at NC State University on a rainy afternoon last month.

He wore a bright red shirt sporting the school logo, and his 6-foot-7-inch frame towered over students as they shuffled past to class. Still, he was virtually unrecognized.

Four decades ago, Battle and his Wolfpack teammates celebrated one of the greatest upset runs in college basketball history. He proudly still wears his championship ring. And he rattles off a play-by-play recollection of that 1983 game with stunning clarity.

“We know the story of Cinderella—rags to riches,” said Battle, now 63. “That’s our story.”

As soon as next month, the NCAA is poised to win court approval of a nearly $2.8 billion settlement with student-athletes whose names and images helped build college sports into a multibillion-dollar business. But the payout doesn’t apply to players before 2016 who arguably had a role in creating the revenue juggernaut.

Battle and some of his teammates are among dozens of those former players who have sued for compensation, claiming the NCAA continues to profit off their name, image, and likeness through repeated broadcast footage and other highlights.

The ongoing cases underscore the appetite for litigation nearly four years after a landmark Supreme Court ruling that the NCAA’s compensation rules violated federal antitrust law, leaving the organization open to attack.

The NCAA has largely relied on procedural defenses against allegations by long-ago athletes, arguing they sat too long on their claims and lost the right to bring them.

Rakesh Kilaru, a Wilkinson Stekloff lawyer who represents the NCAA, also dismissed some as flimsy money-grabs. “People didn’t bring them before for a good reason,” he said. “They’re not very strong claims.”

NCAA’s Rise

The now-ubiquitous organization was born more than a century ago, thanks in part to safety concerns recognized even by President Theodore Roosevelt.

The president’s son played football at Harvard, and Roosevelt got behind an effort among universities, including Ivy League rivals Yale and Princeton, to examine game rules, increase safety, and prevent needless deaths.

The Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States became a rulemaking body in 1906; more than 60 colleges and universities were charter members.

Four years later it was renamed the National Collegiate Athletic Association. From its start, the organization maintained that its athletes were amateurs and students, not professionals.

But as it did with many fields, television transformed the organization, exposing it to a nationwide audience eager to watch and root for their favorite teams. These days, the annual television contract for the men’s college basketball tournament alone reportedly nears $1 billion.

For most of the past century, courts treated the NCAA as exempt from antitrust law. “The NCAA said, ‘We are promoting amateurism; that basically lets us do whatever we want because that’s an important value,’” said Michael Carrier, a Rutgers Law School professor.

That began to change when former West Virginia University running back Shawne Alston and others sued the NCAA in 2014, challenging rules that capped the value of athletic scholarships at less than the full cost of attending an NCAA school.

A district court sided with Alston, enjoining the NCAA from limiting the education-related benefits that schools can make available to student-athletes. The Ninth Circuit affirmed, and the athletic association asked the Supreme Court to review the case.

Its lawyers argued the compensation restrictions were important to the amateurism model and prevented blurring the line between college and professional athletes.

The high court didn’t see it that way. Its groundbreaking 2021 decision said the NCAA’s compensation rules aren’t different than any others put in place by a sports joint venture and amounted to a violation of antitrust law.

The NCAA’s business model “would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote in a concurrence.

Roughly a week later, the NCAA lifted restrictions, allowing student-athletes to begin making money from their name, image, and likeness.

Immediately, the deals flooded out. A Miami quarterback signed a five-figure contract with one business and made agreements with others. Twin sisters who starred on Fresno State’s women’s basketball team cashed in on their already sizable Instagram following.

By last year, the payments scaled new heights. Louisiana State University gymnast Olivia Dunne inked a multimillion-dollar NIL deal. Colorado’s quarterback, Shedeur Sanders, became the first college football player to sign an NIL contract with Nike.

Around the same time, a text message popped up on Alvin Battle’s phone, in an ongoing chat thread with his teammates from NC State’s 1983 squad. It was from the starting center, Cozell McQueen, and linked to a news article about a potential NCAA settlement to compensate athletes, but only those who played since 2016 or will in the future.

‘We Can Win’

North Carolina has always been home for Battle. He grew up in a rural pocket of the state, the son of a handyman and a homemaker.

But the family lacked money—he regularly went to bed hungry as a child—and he was troublemaker, he said. So his parents sent him to live with his grandma, a “disciplinarian,” around age 10 or 11. “She pretty much raised me,” he said.

Basketball became an outlet. Battle recalls practicing with a neighbor, using a bicycle rim as their hoop. His parents were short, but Battle got the tall genes from a great-grandfather who stood 6-foot-9 and weighed 350 pounds.

He played basketball at Northern Nash High School, near Rocky Mount, and college recruiters quickly noticed his talents. But two knee surgeries sidelined him his senior year, and colleges lost interest.

With help from his high school coach, Bobby Dunn, Battle landed at Merced College, a central California community college where a high school teammate had found success.

At Merced, Battle got financial aid, rehabbed his knees and thrived. In 1982, he was crowned the California Junior College Basketball Player of the Year.

Battle was ready to move to Division I basketball—he had his eyes on Virginia Tech—when Jim Valvano called. The coach, a New York native entering his third season in Raleigh, was starting to get noticed.

“He said ‘Alvin, if you come to NC State, we can win a national championship,’” Battle recalled.

He arrived as a junior with an athletic scholarship, living off-campus with teammate Thurl Bailey.

He had very little spending money, not enough to go out to dinner, see a movie, or even go on a date. “Can’t have a girlfriend unless you have money,” Battle said.

The academics were also a struggle. “You just suffered through it,” he said.

The championship win against Houston made it all worth the struggle. The Cougars had entered the tournament atop the national basketball polls, with a roster that included future Hall of Famers Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler.

NC State, by contrast, fell out of the Top 20 for most of the second half of the regular season. They might have struggled to even get invited to the NCAA tournament had they not, in a shocker, topped Virginia to win the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament.

In the ACC and national tournaments, the Wolfpack sealed its “Cardiac Pack” nickname, winning three games by a single point, and two more in overtime.

“We played harder than anyone else to get there,” Battle said. “We definitely had an advantage.”

The forward was on the floor for a few minutes of the championship game against Houston in Albuquerque and scored just two points. But he at least got in; some teammates didn’t.

They arrived home in the wee hours of the morning after the game, finding throngs of fans at the airport.

“You would have thought we were rock stars,” McQueen said. “It was like, ‘Man, where did all these people come from?’ Holy cow.”

The celebrity vibe lingered awhile. McQueen recalled a team trip to the state capitol where they were honored by lawmakers. “We shook quite a few hands,” he said.

Some members of the 1983 team made it to the NBA, including Bailey, Lorenzo Charles, and Sidney Lowe, who later coached NC State from 2006-11.

A few others played for the former Continental Basketball Association or in Europe.

McQueen did both but stopped playing in the early 1990s. For a while, he worked as an entrepreneur installing snack machines and payphones in North Carolina.

Even then, the 7-foot center discovered he couldn’t “just go in and leave” some places, he said. Inevitably, fans would bombard him with requests for autographs and pictures.

Cinderella Magic

A Cinderella run in the men’s NCAA basketball can generate millions of dollars in advertising revenue for a school and boost enrollment, said Kurt Rotthoff, a professor of economics and finance at Seton Hall University who co-authored a study on such underdogs.

Student applications to NC State surged 40% after the win, according to a 1987 study by two Clemson researchers.

Valvano helped build support for a new basketball arena, which opened in the late 1990s. Valvano died of cancer in 1993 and became famous to a new generation of basketball fans for his “don’t give up” speech at the ESPY Awards that year.

The impact of a championship is usually short-lived, especially for large public institutions like NC State, Rotthoff said. But the Wolfpack’s win still potentially has market value, he said.

Its victory was all the sweeter because the university often cedes the state spotlight to perennial basketball powerhouses Duke and North Carolina.

The NCAA itself touts that NC State team’s climb as one of the greatest Cinderella stories in history. Its hourlong video recap of the game—on a site with ads—has drawn nearly 100,000 views in just the last four years.

And as March Madness restarts each spring, that scene from four decades ago—the winning dunk by Lorenzo and Valvano sprinting across the court—has been used again and again by the NCAA in highlight reels, advertisements, and other promotions for the tournament, the plaintiffs allege.

That archival footage is a way for NCAA to sell “hope,” said W. Stacy Miller II, a North Carolina attorney representing Battle, McQueen, and their teammates.

“You don’t see Michael Jordan up there all the time, or Magic Johnson or Larry Bird,” Miller said. “You see these guys.”

Seeking Justice

The idea of litigation had been swimming around in McQueen’s head for years, he said. In the 1990s, lawyers approached him about potentially joining lawsuits against the NCAA. Each time he declined.

But reading about the Alston decision, then last year’s news of the potential settlement for athletes since 2016, made him reconsider.

“My motivation was: Wait a minute, how can they do that for them and not do something for us?” said McQueen, who said he splits his time between driving a truck and investing.

Another former teammate, Mike Warren, suggested they talk to Miller. The lawyer was a former Wake Forest University football player whom Warren knew from high school.

The suit Miller filed for them and other teammates in North Carolina Superior Court in June 2024 claims the NCAA intentionally misappropriated the Cardiac Pack’s publicity rights and has since reaped millions from their names, images, and likenesses. NC State isn’t a party in the suit.

“The young players who stepped onto the court in 1983 should never have been coerced into signing a contract that stripped them of their legal rights,” the complaint says.

The NCAA contends the claims are time-barred because they challenge conduct more than 40 years old. It also argues that the plaintiffs don’t have legally protected rights of publicity in North Carolina.

A judge this week declined the NCAA’s request to put the case on hold until it gets a decision in a similar case whose lead plaintiff, Mario Chalmers, was a point guard who helped Kansas win the NCAA tournament in 2008.

Miller is also an attorney for the plaintiffs in the Chalmers suit.

Other former athletes suing the association include 2005 Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush, a University of Southern California running back, as well as Denard “Shoelace” Robinson, a quarterback at the University of Michigan.

An image of Robinson clad in Wolverine blue and clutching a football was the cover shot for shot for EA Sports’ NCAA Football 14 video game. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Players like him “would make millions today,” if it weren’t for the NCAA’s anticompetitive rules, said Jim Acho, attorney with Cummings, McClorey, Davis & Acho PLC who represents Robinson.

“If they wanted to do it the right way, they should have gone the full Megillah; they should have gone back to the 1980s, or 1990s when all of this began,” Acho said of the pending settlement.

As proposed, the NCAA and the five most prominent athletic conferences would pay $2.57 billion into a settlement fund. Another $200 million would be divided among class members who competed between 2019 and 2022.

Men’s football and basketball players from the top conferences are in line for some of the largest settlement payouts, from an average of $91,000 to up to $280,000.

A final approval hearing is set for April 7, hours before the NCAA’s men’s college basketball championship.

Dozens of objections have been filed over issues including unequal back pay for women athletes, roster limits, and compensation restrictions. More than 300 current or former athletes who can participate in the settlement have opted out.

The Department of Justice in January filed a statement of interest in the case, saying the court should reject the deal. Dunne, the LSU gymnast, is scheduled to testify in objection.

The deal’s revenue-sharing model has created a whole host of legal issues, said Diana L. Moss, vice president and director of competition policy at the Progressive Policy Institute.

If approved, participating colleges will share up to 22% of their athletic department’s annual revenue with athletes. That payment pool would be more than $20 million per school in the 2025-26 academic year and is projected to grow each year.

Richer schools will have more money to pay athletes, while smaller schools would have less to contribute, she said.

“The fallout of this settlement is what we will be dealing with for many years,” Moss said.

Watching, Waiting

Neither Battle nor his attorney will say what they think a fair amount of compensation might be for him and his teammates.

He says he’s doing OK financially, working as a manager at a health-care organization and living a “lower middle class” lifestyle. He’s married, and his two daughters, one of whom played volleyball at Virginia Tech, are now adults.

The lawsuit isn’t just about monetary gain, he says. It’s about justice.

“What gives them the right to use that footage—use our name, image and likeness—for over 40 years without compensating one person?” he said.