‘A Whole Other Animal’: Steve Lutz on Navigating Lawsuits, Eligibility and NIL at Oklahoma State

STILLWATER — Steve Lutz said he’s learned more about different legal processes than he ever cared to know over recent years.

That’s the modern life of a college basketball coach juggling NIL, eligibility — oh, and basketball.

At the forefront of Oklahoma State’s offseason this year is Sam Houston transfer Kashie Natt and returner Parsa Fallah seeking one last year of eligibility and having to go through the courts to do so.

Early this month, Natt was granted an ex parte order that made him eligible to return to team activities. Fallah is reportedly in a group of 45 athletes included in a lawsuit against the NCAA seeking eligibilty.

The college coaching job was at one point to recruit good players, develop them and try to win basketball games. All of that is still expected now, along with an ability to navigate what is essentially a salary cap while also being plugged in on legalese at least well enough to understand some of the big picture stuff that’s going on.

“Now you start with the litigation process, and that’s a whole other animal,” Lutz said Tuesday. “I don’t know the exact number, but I wanna say that the NCAA has spent $350 million last year alone in defending themselves. The system currently has some things that need to be tweaked, and until those are tweaked and until there is some sort of backing by the government, I think we’re going to just continue to see people trying to exercise these loopholes.

“I think that the five-for-five is a good step forward. I think that will eliminate some of this, but because of the timing of they’re rolling it out, in the summer, it’s just gonna be chaotic in between here and October, it really is.”

For now, Natt is on the roster and practicing with the Cowboys ahead of their summer trip to Puerto Rico. There’s a world where he and OSU get through the season before the legal side has the chance to take its course, but there’s also a world where a court date gets set and a ruling gets made where he is or isn’t eligible.

If it isn’t obvious by all the hoopla, Natt’s eligibility isn’t exactly straight forward, having spent time at the junior college level, the NAIA level and last season being his first at the Division-I level (you can read more about that here).

Following Natt being granted the ex parte order, the NCAA released the following statement via Chief Legal Officer Scott Bearby:

“The order in the Natt case, issued without the NCAA having any opportunity to respond and by a judge not even assigned to hear the case, is demonstrably flawed and the latest instance of an environment where litigation has become a tool to avoid playing by the rules that everyone has agreed to follow. The student-athlete at issue already benefited from the ‘Pavia waiver,’ which provided him the opportunity to play for a fifth season, and nobody, including the institution where he seeks to compete next year, has ever expressed any doubt that his collegiate career ended when the Pavia waiver expired. We will pursue all remedies to seek reversal of this decision, which contributes to the instability in college sports that only Congress can solve.”

That’s the type of stuff you probably don’t get into coaching for. And I imagine when Lutz was an assistant at SMU in 2006, he probably wasn’t thinking about someday having to divide money up among a roster, trying to determine how much a returner is worth vs. how much an incoming freshman is worth vs. how much a transfer from the lower level was worth.

“The things that we’ve learned as a college coach in terms of contracts, in terms of negotiations, in terms of revenue sharing and NIL — it’s unbelievable,” Lutz said. “I understand — and we don’t have a general manager here mostly because of budgetary restrictions — but I understand why people have general managers. Because if you don’t a business sense or you don’t have people to help you, man, you’re gonna have a hard time navigating it by yourself. Luckily our staff, especially (associate head coach) James (Miller), does a great job of helping with all of that. But I’m very, very hands on.”