Ramogi Huma, a former college football player, had been at a Justice Department lectern for eight seconds when he began an excoriation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
The governing body of college sports was, he declared, “a predatory economic cartel that treats players like university property rather than people.”
Huma had long used similar language as the leader of the National College Players Association, an advocacy group. But his 2019 speech to a roomful of antitrust experts at the Robert F. Kennedy Building signaled a shift in Washington. Less than a decade earlier, Huma recalled, federal law enforcement officials had told him that the capital’s political climate did not support action against the N.