Former Duke men’s tennis player files objection to House v. NCAA settlement, alleges false NIL promises and retaliatory environment

Former Duke men’s tennis player Sam Landau filed an objection to the House v. NCAA settlement May 15, alleging that head coach Ramsey Smith lured him to Duke on the false promise of substantial NIL payments and made retaliatory claims to discourage his complaints after breaching those promises.

Landau’s proposed amendment to the House v. NCAA case — which will allow schools to directly pay players through their athletic department revenues — is an arbitration framework for student-athletes to recover “NIL payments that were promised but remain unpaid.” His objection also proposes an alternative to exclude Duke from the House settlement. 

After playing for two seasons at Indiana, Landau entered the transfer portal in December 2023 as an incoming junior. Smith reportedly promised him roughly $45,000 in NIL payments — on top of scholarship money — if he chose to attend Duke over Southern California. 

Landau needed a third scholarship year to assure graduation without cost, since not all of his business class credits would transfer from Indiana to Duke. However, he had only two years of eligibility remaining. According to Landau’s father and lawyer, the men’s tennis program could only offer partial scholarships for 2024-25 and 2025-26, and NIL payments were supposed to make up the difference. In a text message to Landau’s mother on April 28, 2024, Smith wrote that Landau would be “well taken care of with NIL,” and “we will take care 100% of the fifth semester and 100% summer school.”

Landau’s father, the attorney for the objection, told The Chronicle in an email that Landau received $10,000 in NIL payments over the past year. The objection maintains that when Landau and his family approached Athletic Director Nina King about the breach of the NIL contract payment obligation, she took no action.

Duke athletics and the men’s tennis program did not respond to requests for comment on the allegations.

Players across the country have had similar complaints about missing NIL money but filed suits directly against a coach or University. For example, six Florida State men’s basketball players sued coach Leonard Hamilton and boycotted practices for an alleged $250,000 each in promised money. Landau has not filed a suit against Duke or Smith. 

The money that Landau allegedly was promised and did not receive would not have come from Duke’s athletic department, but from corporations or collectives, third-party organizations that raise money from a school’s boosters and work to pair student-athletes with NIL opportunities. The NCAA’s Division I council approved a rule in April 2024 allowing schools to facilitate NIL deals, but athletic departments can’t directly pay players until the House case is finalized. 

But if approved, the settlement will allow schools to directly pay players a select amount from their athletic department budgets, also known as revenue sharing. This new payment framework would be in addition to the NIL payments that student-athletes receive from sponsorships and collectives.

Landau’s objection outlines two proposals to the House settlement. The first is to create a way for student-athletes to earn unpaid but promised NIL payments. The objection asserts that due to the smaller NIL amounts in non-revenue sports and the power dynamics between the student-athlete and the school, filing lawsuits are not worth the burden. Therefore, he proposes a process to allow for players to confidentially issue damage claims from “broken NIL promises,” mediated through a third party. 

The alternative proposal is to exclude Duke from the House settlement entirely, which Judge Wilken is highly unlikely to entertain. The objection states that because Duke allegedly ignored its contractual obligations, it “cannot be trusted” to comply with the settlement and should be subject to “much stronger oversight moving forward.”

While the objection acknowledges that the allegations may appear to be outside of the House v. NCAA settlement’s scope, it states that because of the settlement’s broad language, “some Power 5 schools likely will try to argue that the proposed settlement releases student-athletes’ claims for fraudulent inducement based on promises of NIL payments.”

Alleged retaliation

In the objection, Landau alleges that Duke took several steps to discourage him from airing complaints about the breached payments.

In January, after Landau confronted Smith and King about the missing payments, Smith allegedly retaliated against Landau by falsely claiming he had been a drug addict at Indiana, a rumor which the objection says was started by men’s tennis senior Connor Krug. Smith then allegedly claimed to have received the information from Texas men’s tennis head coach Bruce Berque.

However, in a March 5 email to Landau’s father, on which Berque was copied, Texas athletics staff wrote: “We do not have any information supporting that Coach Berque or [Texas tennis player] Mr. Braswell made any comments to Coach Smith or Mr. Krug (or anyone else) alleging your son’s drug use.” Krug declined to comment on the allegations.

Landau’s objection goes on to allege that the team promoted another retaliatory claim — this time, that Landau ran a college tennis meme account called “Parsabums” on Instagram. King reportedly scheduled a meeting with her staff and the men’s tennis coaches and players (excluding Landau) to determine whether he was acting as the account’s administrator, since it often posted content critical of Duke’s tennis team and about Landau’s situation. The objection denies Landau’s involvement with the account. 

Landau entered the transfer portal for a second time May 5. 

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