‘Heretic’ Lawyer Behind Fight Between Houston Christian House and NCAA

Given that the defendants and plaintiffs in Chamber vs. NCAA After reaching a tentative $2.8 million settlement in May, there has been no shortage of complaints from non-Power 5 schools and conferences that they are being forced to suffer financially for matters over which they have no control.

But so far, only one institution, Houston Christian University, has taken the formal — if legally questionable — step of trying to block the case’s imminent resolution. In a seven-page motion filed June 20, the institution, which has 2,300 undergraduate students, asked a federal court to allow it to intervene in the case, arguing that it had “substantially protectable” interests that neither party had taken “any steps to protect.”

His prayer (for relief) comes 16 years after the school, formerly known as Houston Baptist, settled a federal antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA over the waiting period for schools applying for Division I membership.

Houston Christian’s attorney, James Sears Bryant, helped defend his case, as he does today. He has been a professional sports agent, a Democratic state representative (from a Republican district in Oklahoma), a minor league basketball owner, a consumer advocate and a Hollywood producer. When it comes to religion, Bryant describes himself as “probably a heretic,” and when it comes to college sports, he is probably a paradox: a longtime defender of players and an opponent of the NCAA who is also a staunch defender of amateurism.

“It’s really the name and image of each school that makes college sports so identifiable,” Bryant said in a recent phone interview, in which he sought to reframe the current debate over Home“It was really fun Saturday afternoon to see the students affiliated with the program and try to win an award for the alma mater. All that is gone.”

Although these arguments have been made before by many defenders of the traditional “collegiate model,” it is striking to hear them today coming from this man.

In his earlier career representing professional athletes, Bryant had numerous run-ins with college sports’ governing body, its thick rules, and the black market it created. He notably represented several high-profile players under investigation by the NCAA for receiving impermissible benefits. In light of (or despite) these experiences—the very ones that would eventually turn the public, the courts, and politicians against the NCAA’s restrictions on money-making athletes—Bryant still upholds the paragon of the “student-athlete” and casts doubt on whether college football and basketball players have truly lost the billions of dollars the NCAA has awarded them. Home the regulation claims to resolve.

Today, Bryant, who lives in Oklahoma, is a founding partner of the National Litigation Law Group, a 60-person firm specializing 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 work, Bryant has also set foot in Hollywood, launching a production company, Jesse James Films, in 2020. Bryant has since served as an executive producer on the comedy films Chick Fight And Loginas well as the documentary, What the hell happened to the blood, sweat and tears?

Bryant’s connection to Houston Christian had its own cinematic beginning. Before taking him on as a client, the lawyer recalls never having heard of the private Baptist school. He was at an airport in 2008, after failing to convince another small university (he declined to name it) to file a complaint against the NCAA over its mandatory waiting period for DI reclassification.

While waiting for his plane to arrive, Bryant struck up a conversation with a stranger nearby, a kinesiology professor at HCU. They ended up discussing the NCAA and Bryant’s theory that it violated antitrust laws. At the time, Houston Christian, which had been granted provisional Division I status in 2007, was battling with the association over how much longer it had to wait to become a full member. The school thought it should only have to wait three years, based on precedent, but the NCAA had told it it would be seven.

When the professor returned to the HCU campus, she reported her conversation with Bryant to Robert B. Sloan, the school’s president, who immediately summoned Bryant to Houston for a meeting. With Bryant as outside counsel, the school filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA in April 2008, denouncing its “seven-year group boycott.” As part of the settlement, the NCAA agreed to allow Houston Christian to receive full DI membership in 2011, which made all of its athletic programs 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 DI dreams alive.

“We were about to drop out (after) the NCAA told us we couldn’t get in,” Sloan said. “They were going to exercise their power.”

In the years since, Sloan and Bryant have continued to stay in touch, and they say they nearly filed a second antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA in the mid-2010s, after the association adopted a new governance structure that gave the five wealthiest leagues greater autonomy. Sloan publicly spoke out against the changes, but the school ultimately retained its power to sue.

“(Bryant) and I were ready to go,” Sloan said, “but I couldn’t have done it without the approval of my board of trustees.” Bryant, meanwhile, 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 coach. When asked what inspired him to give that kind of resource to a school that wasn’t even his own, he said: foster motherBryant replied: “Because of amateurism.”

Bryant outlined HCU’s recent effort to intervene in the Home The case is part of a larger, but deeply personal, battle to preserve the future of liberal arts education in the United States. A self-described “D” high school student, Bryant attributes much of his success to the “transformative experience” he had attending a small liberal arts school — in his case, the now-defunct Phillips University in Enid, Oklahoma — after a two-year stint at a community college. He went on to earn a law degree from SMU, launching a career in sports law.

In the late 1980s, Bryant, then a freshman law school graduate, was hired by Oklahoma State star wide receiver Hart Lee Dykes, who was under investigation by the NCAA for accepting bribes during his recruiting. Dykes’ half-brother, Todd Chambers, was a college friend of Bryant’s at Phillips University.

At Bryant’s request, Dykes agreed to a controversial and nearly unprecedented deal with NCAA investigators, in which he was granted immunity from losing his athletic eligibility in exchange for disclosures about several programs, including his own. The player’s testimony led to probation at Oklahoma, Illinois, Oklahoma and Texas A&M, and Dykes being pilloried for years.

“What does a normal lawyer do when a client says the NCAA is here and they want to know where I got the car and the money?” Bryant said. “I say, ‘Tell the truth and make a deal.’ I guess I was pretty naive. I didn’t realize the implications of what was happening.”

Bryant continued to represent Dykes before the next NFL draft, but was fired when the wide receiver was selected by the New England Patriots. In response, Bryant filed a lawsuit against Dykes, claiming that the player had breached their representation contract and owed nearly $30,000 in unpaid loans. Bryant, who insisted that his loan was not paid until after Dykes left college, ultimately decided not to pursue the suit. Chambers, Dykes’ half-brother, would later work at the National Litigation Law Group and still serves on its board of directors.

In the mid-1990s, Bryant moved to Washington, D.C., to join ProServ, a once-dominant sports management company, where he headed the basketball division after David Falk’s breakup with Michael Jordan. Bryant’s clients included Marcus Camby, the second overall pick in the 1996 NBA draft. Camby was later found in violation of NCAA rules when he publicly admitted to accepting money and jewelry from an agent—not Bryant—while in college. The NCAA subsequently revoked UMass’s Final Four bid and forced the university to repay the money it had earned from its tournament bid.

“I’ve always said publicly that players shouldn’t have rules as restrictive as the NCAA,” Bryant said, “because most of the corruption in college sports isn’t about cars and the things you saw in the Camby case, it’s about lunch money, a mother who needs to pay her house rent … but what we’re doing now is eliminating amateurism.”

Thus, Bryant argues that Home The case is not a driver of progress.

“Higher education leaders are extremely progressive in their classrooms, but completely reactionary in their own institutions,” he said. “They are afraid of change.”

For him, the proposed regulation only reinforces this conventionalism.

“You don’t have to think outside the box to settle a case,” Bryant said. “One of the major problems with the legal system is that people routinely settle out of court to avoid liability and controversy instead of taking corrective positions in the fight. Those damages didn’t happen. Nobody took $2.8 billion (from athletes)… I’m a big college football fan, but tell me, who got $280 million a year?”

Sloan, the HCU president, said the school’s board of trustees is in full agreement with the latest lawsuit. So far, only Houston Christian is making the small-school argument in court, though Bryant and Sloan said they’ve heard from a number of other school leaders who have indicated they’ll join the fight.

“Because we have limited resources, we can’t afford to have a big lawsuit against wealthy people,” Sloan said. “All we’re asking is to be able to sit at the table. I think it highlights all the simple problems that are wrong with college sports. They threaten amateurism. They allow our mission to be subverted. It’s the tail wagging the dog.”