Of all the things it could be doing, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office declaring war against the Marine Corps for naming its annual band competition “Sousa’s March Mania.” Something seems seriously wrong with the NCAA’s legal priorities.
“The President’s Own” Marine Band showdown is a tournament-style competition of musical marches. In March this year, 32 marches went head-to-head over four weeks with winners advancing by popular vote to determine a champion.
Last year, the Marines applied for a trademark for “Sousa’s March Mania.” The USPTO took final action last month, registering the trademark. The NCAA immediately called its lawyers to petition the USPTO to cancel the registration.
According to the online sports publication Sportico, the NCAA’s petition asserts that Sousa’s March Mania could “invoke the same commercial impression” as college basketball’s March Madness, and the NCAA is “now and will continue to be damaged” by the USPTO’s action.
Is college basketball being threatened by the band? The NCAA thinks so — enough to mount a frivolous dogfight for naming rights as it faces significant problems in court.
March Madness is the most lucrative money-making operation the NCAA has going, generating billions of dollars in revenue. To detonate the risk of military musicians occupying its turf, NCAA President Charlie Baker flexes his muscle and declares, “The Few, The Proud, The NCAA.” Now that would be an understandable trademark challenge by the Marines.
As an organization on the front lines of defending women’s sports, Concerned Women for America has had our sights on the NCAA for years. We cannot help seeing the irony of the NCAA’s latest legal maneuver. In 2022, March Madness took on a whole new meaning for female athletes at the NCAA Division I women’s swimming championships when Lia Thomas, a University of Pennsylvania transgender-identifying swimmer who previously competed on the men’s team, stole a national title in women’s swimming and paraded naked in the female locker room. We were on site at Georgia Tech to protest the NCAA selling out female athletes to a new kind of madness: transgender mania.
Today, the NCAA is entangled in three lawsuits for its failure to defend female athletes from sex discrimination and harassment over its transgender inclusion policy. Despite the serious legal liability and mounting costs in these cases on top of new challenges involving name, image, and likeness and women’s sports, the NCAA acts like it has nothing but time and a bottomless legal budget to wage a frivolous battle against one of America’s most respected military institutions.
To boot, the NCAA soldiers on under an institutional delusion that denies what a woman is. Even with a policy change claiming “alignment” with President Donald Trump’s executive order on women’s sports, the NCAA’s new policy welcomes any male self-identifying as a woman to join college women’s teams and receive the same benefits as female athletes.
Truly ironic. The NCAA is in court refusing the rights of female athletes to women’s sports for women only, the real trademark of women’s sports, while it brazenly asserts a right to any trademark that bears a name, image, or likeness to March Madness.
In the age of NIL, the NCAA’s promotion of transgender-identifying males as women athletes has been an insidious abuse of the real name, image, and likeness of being female. Now it wants to block the rights of the Marine Corps to March Mania. Will it object to any bracket-style competition during the month of March with a similar name? Bedlam, mayhem, chaos, pandemonium, lunacy, or hysteria? Is the NCAA’s NIL too fragile for such a threat?
The NCAA could be honored by the Marine Corps taking a page from its playbook. Instead, it cries foul and distracts from the serious legal trouble exposing its failure. Attorney John Manly issues a warning. He is the lawyer who won a $380 million settlement against USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee for team doctor Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse of Olympian Simone Biles and over 150 of her peers.
A pathbreaker himself, Manly understands the legal liability of the NCAA and the impact of landmark lawsuits being brought by Riley Gaines and dozens of other college women athletes. He recently commented on the matter to Fox News Digital.
“I think it’s really important,” Manly said. “… How that plays out is going to determine whether women’s sports is going to continue as we know it or if it’s going to change. … The fact that the NCAA hasn’t just owned up to it and come to a settlement with her is shocking to me.”
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The NCAA should take Manly’s advice and get its legal priorities straight. Instead, Baker goes to great lengths to defend the NCAA’s March Madness brand while continuing to offend biologically female athletes pleading for protection from the madness in women’s sports.
Irony and hypocrisy. Baker and the NCAA refuse to own up to failing college female athletes in court, but they have the gall to take on a trademark fight with the Marines. Ooh-rah.
Doreen Denny is a senior adviser at Concerned Women for America, the nation’s largest women’s public policy organization.