It’s sad that Cozell McQueen didn’t live to see Sept. 8.
That’s the date when the North Carolina Supreme Court will hear arguments in a lawsuit pitting McQueen and most members of North Carolina State University’s 1983 men’s basketball national championship team against college sports’ governing body.
The “Cardiac Pack” accuses the National Collegiate Athletic Association of profiting illegally for decades from players’ names, images, and likenesses.
The North Carolina Business Court ruled in August 2025 against 12 former players linked to the suit. The team hopes the state’s highest court will overturn that decision.
McQueen is a plaintiff, though he died Aug. 5 after battling brain cancer.
“The NCAA took the Cardiac Pack’s 1983 championship and turned it into an advertising campaign,” lawyers representing the NCSU players wrote in June.
“Decades after these players won the 1983 title, the NCAA lifted their images from the game footage and pressed them into advertisements for its modern tournaments and the ‘March Madness’ brand — a brand the NCAA did not even own until 2010,” the legal brief continued. “It did so for profit. And it did so without asking.”
“That is commercial misappropriation,” Cardiac Pack lawyers argued. “For nearly a century, this Court has recognized that a person’s name and likeness may not be commercialized by another without consent. Nearly every state agrees. The Plaintiffs’ claims fit that settled law.”
“The NCAA’s answer is to ask this Court to invent a new exception — one gerrymandered to its own line of business — so that it alone may turn athletes into advertisements for free,” the brief continued. “No law supports that exception, and this Court should reject it.”
The defendants offered a different take in May.
“Over the past fifteen years, few issues in college sports have attracted as much public attention and generated as much litigation as the question of whether student-athletes should be compensated for their names, images, and likenesses (NIL),” NCAA lawyers wrote. “This issue has led to at least a dozen lawsuits across the country demanding increased compensation for student-athletes, including multiple certified class actions brought by student-athletes themselves.”
The former NC State players “sought to challenge agreements they allegedly signed decades earlier,” the NCAA’s brief added. “Not only do these claims rehash issues that have been repeatedly litigated, but their antiquated nature doomed their viability from the start.”
Business Court Judge Mark Davis “correctly concluded” that the players’ claims “must fail as a matter of law,” NCAA lawyers wrote. The lawsuit “is barred in its entirety by the applicable statutes of limitations. Plaintiffs’ causes of action are grounded in the central allegation that the … (NCAA) coerced them into signing agreements prior to the beginning of the 1983 NCAA basketball season — conduct that allegedly occurred more than four decades ago.”
The statutes of limitations linked to each claim “expired decades ago, and Plaintiffs offer no justification for their delay,” according to the brief. “Plaintiffs’ attempts to engage in legal acrobatics to avoid this outcome are without merit.”
“Every court to address substantively identical claims under the Sherman Act has found such claims time barred,” the NCAA argued. That includes four federal district courts and the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.
The NCAA highlighted two other key elements of Davis’ ruling against the Cardiac Pack.
“First, Plaintiffs have not alleged a legally enforceable right of publicity in their NIL from the game footage at issue,” the brief explained. “The Business Court reached this conclusion after rejecting the argument that North Carolina’s right of privacy extends to the broadcasting (or rebroadcasting) of game footage of a sporting event in which a plaintiff voluntarily participated.”
“Without such a right, Plaintiffs cannot successfully allege a deprivation of something that they have a legal right to possess, as required to state the claims they attempted to pursue under North Carolina law,” NCAA lawyers wrote.
Second, the federal Copyright Act of 1976 blocks the players’ claims, according to the brief. “At bottom, Plaintiffs seek to assert rights afforded only to the owner or licensee of the copyrighted broadcast game footage; they do not allege that the NCAA manipulated or imitated their NIL to promote independent products to which they have no connection. Plaintiffs’ claims are thus indistinguishable from a claim of copyright infringement and are therefore preempted.”
Having lost at the trial court, the odds are long for the Cardiac Pack to score a courtroom victory. But as recent tributes to Cozell McQueen reminded us, this group knows how to score an upset.
Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation.
