2019 Kentucky Mr. Basketball is lead plaintiff in lawsuit vs NCAA. Here's what to know

2019 Kentucky Mr. Basketball is lead plaintiff in lawsuit vs NCAA. Here’s what to know

Posted by author February 14, 2025 Basketball

This lawsuit, which has several ties to the commonwealth, is one of multiple filed last month with the goal of securing higher payments for current and former college athletes than the House v. NCAA.
Lead attorney Chris Macke said the suit also seeks to challenge the NCAA’s prohibition of “pay for play.” Macke called the rule “intellectually dishonest.”

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 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.

The projected cap for 2025-26 represents 22% of the average revenue of power conference schools and Notre Dame across eight categories, including but not limited to ticket sales and media rights. According to Louisville’s 2023-24 NCAA financial report, U of L totaled $105.5 million across those categories. UK totaled $129.2 million, according to its 2023-24 financial report.

In January, days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Justice urged Judge Claudia Wilken to eliminate the proposed cap or allow it to be the subject of future litigation.

“They said, ‘We don’t think your plan going forward, this injunctive part of the settlement, is going to fly,'” Chris Macke said. “‘Basically, because you’re still limiting how much colleges can pay their athletes. You’re still committing antitrust violations.'”

Macke believes college sports will have to enter into some kind of collective bargaining agreement with players. Otherwise the lawsuits will just keep coming.

More than 400,000 former college athletes are eligible to receive compensation from the House settlement. Forty thousand have filed claims suggesting they would participate, according to Front Office Sports. At least 250 have opted out of the settlement as they seek a higher financial reward. That feels remarkably low to Macke.

Should a particular number of athletes opt out of the settlement (the exact number is redacted from public court records, but a list of opt-outs is scheduled to be released March 3), it could trigger an automatic rejection.

Jan. 31, the day of Allen v. NCAA’s filing, was the deadline for athletes to submit claims, objections or opt out of the House settlement. Its final approval hearing is scheduled for April 7.

Macke said they filed the lawsuit in the commonwealth because it’s littered with local ties. He and Rob Sparks, the other attorney listed, practice in Northern Kentucky.

Some of the plaintiffs without ties to Kentucky bring compelling circumstances to the Allen v. NCAA suit. Four of them — Donte Ingram, Cameron Krutwig, Lucas Williamson and Marques Townes — played for Loyola-Chicago’s 2018 Final Four team. Filip Petrusev, another plaintiff, played for Gonzaga and was named 2019-20 West Coast Conference Player of the Year.

Of the former Loyola players, Macke said, “I think some of those guys were the most famous basketball players in the country there for a couple weeks in March of 2018. … If we were being fair, and if you were getting paid for the value of your services, you should have made some money from that.”

When they received their House settlement evaluations, they were underwhelmed. Especially knowing that some of their power conference counterparts could receive upward of $1 million.

“The last guy at the end of the bench on the worst team in the Big 12 is going to get a chunk of money, and then these guys who were playing at the highest level, were media darlings, got offered nothing,” Macke said.

Similarly to the mid-major athletes Macke is representing, women’s sports at the collegiate and professional levels have been systematically undervalued for decades. While there are no current or former women’s college athletes listed in the Allen v. NCAA suit, Macke said, “I won’t tell you that there’s not going to be some women yet to be added.”

The U.S. Department of Education rescinded the Biden administration’s guidance on Title IX/NIL on Wednesday, which will likely spark a bevy of lawsuits. And then, of course, there’s the DOJ’s message to Wilken last month regarding the revenue-sharing cap. The only thing that feels certain as the House settlement’s final approval date approaches is that this is far from over.

“I think they’ve got a bumpy road ahead on that,” Macke said. “… Hopefully everybody gets paid, and college sports remains competitive. I’m a Kentucky basketball guy, so I just want to see college basketball go on the way it has for 60 years.”

Reach college sports enterprise reporter Payton Titus at ptitus@gannett.com, and follow her on X @petitus25.