By Ben Strauss
On a summer day three years ago, a woman named Diane Dickman took the stand in a federal courtroom in Oakland. The NCAA was on trial, accused of breaking antitrust laws by barring athletes from profiting from their images. Dickman, the NCAA’s managing director for academic and membership affairs, was not a marquee witness like NCAA president Mark Emmert or Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany or Ed O’Bannon, the former UCLA basketball star and lead plaintiff in the case. But she was critical to the defense that academics were a key reason why athletes could not be paid.