Earlier this month, Travis Waldron wrote about the lawsuit against EA Sports, which creates avatars of college athletes that closely match their physical appearance and performances in games, but changes their names so they don’t have to pay up the way they normally would if they were benefiting from their use of a real person’s image. Now, Rutgers quarterback Ryan Hart has won an appeal against EA, after a 2011 ruling sided with the video game company’s claim that they had First Amendment rights to create a replica of Hart for use in NCAA Football. The judges’ reasoning for siding with Hart in the appeal? EA’s reinterpretation of Hart wasn’t “transformative.”

Judge Joseph Greenaway wrote in the Third Circuit decision that “The digital Ryan Hart does what the actual Ryan Hart did while at Rutgers: He plays college football, in digital recreations of college football stadiums, filled with all the trappings of a college football game. This is not transformative; the various digitized sights and sounds in the video game do not alter or transform the appellant’s identity in a significant way.” The standard he’s talking about is called the Transformative Use Test, a weighting system meant to prevent economic harm to individuals by preventing other people from simply reproducing their images for profit, but to guarantee free speech rights by protecting work that, as the Supreme Court ruled in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., “adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message.” The Third Circuit compared the use of Hart’s image by EA to Activision’s reproduction of No Doubt for its Band Hero game, arguing that Hart’s claim was even stronger than No Doubt’s, because while in Band Hero, players contribute their own singing, NCAA Football is designed to let players reproduce Hart’s actions closely.

I’m all for the broad movement to rationalize the treatment of NCAA athletes, and to acknowledge the truth, that they exist in a space between the true amateurs playing ultimate frisbee in college leagues, and professional athletes who are employed by the teams in the major leagues. And the way the Third Circuit ruled, even if it was in Hart’s favor, illustrates how far we have to go to achieve those changes. The bigger fight over whether the NCAA can license current and former players’ images without compensating them is still pending, and is scheduled for a 2014 jury trial. Hart may end up winning the debate over whether EA needs to license the images of college players it’s including in its games. But precisely who EA pays that money to is a problem that we’re at least a year away from solving.

Last week, I wrote about how the owner of Washington’s National Football League team promised to never change that team’s derogatory name, and that the only thing that may cause change is a trademark lawsuit that could make calling a team the “Redskins” far too costly to tolerate. A new study, however, suggests that Snyder may already be costing himself money by not changing the name.

The arguments in favor of keeping the name “Redskins” stem from tradition and nostalgia — the team has been the Redskins since 1933, when it still played in Boston. It would make sense for Snyder to worry, then, that changing it would have negative economic consequences. Team names are brand markers, and changing up the brand isn’t usually a recipe for financial success — estimates say the cost of changing the brand for an NFL team could be as high as $10 million to $20 million.

In the case of mascots that utilize Native American imagery, though, reshaping the brand identity may actually be good for business, according to research from sports marketing experts at Emory University. Emory’s Mike Lewis and Manish Tripathi studied the economics of college teams that dropped Native American imagery — either team names or actual mascots — and found that the negative effects are muted, limited to only a one- or two-year time frame. After that, the costs subside — and may even turn into benefits:

In terms of financial impact, the model results suggest that school’s experience a very short (1 or 2 years) negative impact and then quickly recover. The results also suggest that in the long-term the shift away from a Native American mascot yields positive financial returns. As a follow up, we used the brand equity measures created here as a dependent variable and regressed this value against the previously defined variables related to the school’s use of a Native American mascot. In this analysis we found NO significant effects. The key implication is that switching away from a Native American mascot has no long-term negative effect on brand equity.

Lewis and Tripathi caution that the study isn’t perfect: they had to predict revenues based on winning percentages and other variables, so there’s a fair amount of guesswork involved. And men’s college basketball and professional football aren’t a perfect comparison, as they note, because football teams are more likely to be identified primarily by their mascot (“the Cowboys” or “the Redskins”) while colleges are identified by school name (“Maryland” or “Oklahoma State”).

Still, they’re confident that their “findings have a great deal of face validity.” As they wrote: “While some fans may complain, it is not clear that these fans actually change their behavior or their shopping habits. It might also be that merchandise sales become more appealing to segments that did not like the previous Native American mascot.” So even if the biggest estimates are right, the losses could be temporary, and dropping the name Redskins could ultimately cost Dan Snyder less than any number of bad contracts he’s handed out in recent years.

Reno Saccocia has been the head football coach at Steubenville High School since 1983. He has won 311 football games, made 23 appearances in the state playoffs, and captured three Ohio state championships. That, apparently, is all that matters to the school board that covers the high school, because it just gave Saccocia — who also may have covered up the sexual assault of a teenage girl by two of his players, according to court documents, and is the likely subject of a grand jury investigation because of it — a two-year contract extension.

The extension is for an administrative services position, separate from a coaching contract. Salon’s Katie McDonough flagged the announcement buried in the local business section of the Ohio Valley Star:

Two-year administrative contracts for Charles Kokiko, administrator; Bryan Mills, assistant middle school principal; Reno Saccoccia, director of administrative services; Joseph Yanok, middle school principal; Melinda Young, director of programs; and Sara Elliot, school psychologist.

Covering up the sexual assault, which became front-page news across the nation this spring, would be a violation of Ohio law. But Saccocia’s players were so confident that he’d have their backs that the morning after the assault took place, Trent Mays, who along with Ma’Lik Richmond was found guilty of raping the teenage girl, texted a friend: “I got Reno. He took care of it and shit ain’t gonna happen, even if they did take it to court. Like he was joking about it so I’m not worried.”

A 16-year-old girl is assaulted, a player thinks “shit ain’t gonna happen” because he has a coach who will cover it up, and the coach willfully obliges. For that, the coach doesn’t get fired, but instead gets treated with the same “shit happens” attitude he apparently instilled in his players. There are no winners in Steubenville, no matter what Saccocia’s record on the football field says, because Steubenville is what America’s rape culture looks like.

Steubenville High School’s football team burst into national headlines last fall after video surfaced of former students joking about, in grotesque fashion, an apparent rape that had occurred at a house party attended by several of the team’s football players. The trial of two football players accused of raping a teenage girl from a nearby town begins this week, but the case has already divided Steubenville between those who rallied around the football team and those who believed the town’s reverence for that team played a role in the entire situation.

Two activists are now attempting to use the horrifying Steubenville case to raise awareness about the incidence of sexual assault in high school sports and to help prevent further assaults before they occur. Connor Clancy, a college football player, and Carmen Rios, a former campus sexual violence educator, launched a petition drive asking the National Federation of High School Associations to offer a course in sexual violence prevention for all high school coaches. The petition, hosted on Change.org, already has 25,000 signatures, according to a release:

“As a football player, I believe we have immense responsibility to be role models for younger boys,” said Connor Clancy, who co-launched the campaign on Change.org. “I want to help make sure what happened in Steubenville never happens again, and that starts with educating the people who young athletes look up to most, their coaches.”

“The issue of sexual violence has a monumental and overwhelming impact on the lives of girls and women across the world. We know that education, discussion, and action on the issue results in real, positive, and tangible changes in those lives — so why wait to create a new world?” said Rios. “We have the power to foster a culture without violence, but first we must all come together to build it.”

From Notre Dame to Steubenville to the higher rates of assault that occur among professional players, sexual violence is pervasive in American sports and in football in particular. That has happened, in part, because of how the sports world looks at and talks about both its athletes and its women, and educating young athletes about sex and sexual assault seems to be one clear way to positively address the problem.

That, as Clancy and Rios realized, begins with the men who coach those athletes, who at the high school level often spend more time with their coaches than with any other adults. And coaches aren’t just coaches — at the high school level, they are educators too, entrusted with the responsibility not just to teach classes but to mold young men in a positive manner. Despite that, many of the sexual assaults that occur at the high school level (and they aren’t hard to find in the news) often involve coaches looking the other way until it is too late not to. In Steubenville, assistant football coaches were reportedly at the party where the rape occurred and the head coach has been accused of helping to cover up the entire episode.

No one class will by itself fix the rape culture that pervades American sports (and America in general). Even in Steubenville, the players’ defense is arguing that what happened doesn’t qualify as rape because the victim “didn’t affirmatively say no.” But if eliminating that culture involves changing the way players’ view women and sex, educating the coaches who influence them is a good place to start. And it shouldn’t be hard to do. As the petition notes, the NFHSA covers 18,500 schools and 11 million high school athletes and already offers online training classes in a number of sports and education-related subjects. Adding a course on sexual violence wouldn’t be hard, and empowering more men in positions of authority to take a stand against sexual violence and teach their athletes to do the same is a step the world of sports needs to take.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s Catholic Youth Organization banned 11-year-old Caroline Pla from playing in a boy’s football league earlier this year, even though she had played in the same league for more than two years and had been voted onto the league’s all-star team after the 2012 season. Last week, the CYO reaffirmed that decision, upholding its ban on female participants in grades 5 through 8.

The original ban was about safety, the CYO explained then, even if there were no indications that Pla was in any more danger than any of the 11-year-old boys playing football. When they upheld the ban, the reasoning shifted to fears of “inappropriate contact” between male and female players, even though neither Pla nor her family had ever given thought to such an issue before.

At nearly the same time, a football league far larger than the Catholic Youth Organization took a step in the opposite direction. In 2012, the National Football League formally instituted a rule allowing women to participate in its league, and next week, the annual regional scouting combines for amateur players will feature its first female participant.

Lauren Silberman, a 28-year-old former college club soccer player, is attending a regional combine with the hope of becoming the first woman to play in the NFL. The odds that Silberman, a kicker, will make a team are longer-than-long, but that doesn’t matter: the NFL provided a path for women to participate, and for the first time, one will. There are more than 1,600 girls playing on boys’ high school football teams, and multiple women have played college football, so Silberman almost surely won’t be the last woman to go out for the team.

But these stories aren’t as much about football and making the team as they are about just having the chance to play. Women now enjoy far more access to sports than they did 40 years ago, when Title IX became law, but female participation still doesn’t match that of men. Neither does funding, even though sports participation has substantial health, education, and economic benefits for the women and girls who participate. It’s wonderful that the NFL is expanding access to women, but those efforts are undermined when youth leagues like the CYO, where there are more girls who want to play and fewer who have access, refuse to let the Caroline Plas of the world play the games they love.