Let’s stick to the collective as the NIL contract appears to have been between Lucas and the Collective.
But the problem with all such contracts is defining any damage to the Collective. A court is never going to enforce specific performance, meaning no court will ever say to Lucas, ‘you signed a contract with the UW Collective so now you have to play for UW’. So that form of “damages” is unavailable.
From a larger perspective, the entire point of civil suits is to make the plaintiff “whole”. Meaning that the plaintiff lost ____ due to some action by the defendant, and it will cost $X to make plaintiff whole again. In a car accident plaintiffs are typically paid a multiple of their injuries. In a contract dispute, often the parties will agree on the damage if either party breaches the contract. Or sometimes damages are easy to prove.
For example, let’s say a particular musician is supposed to play at a club and the club sells 500 tickets at $40/ticket=$20,000. Then the artist does not appear. The club will argue that it should receive back any money paid to the artist, as well as $20,000 from lost revenue due to the artist not appearing.
In this particular case the collective has no method of quantifying how much money it is “losing” by Lucas not playing. And that does not even take into account that Lucas may have a bad season, or may be injured thereby lowering his speculative worth.
And you are correct that the Collective still could have asked Lucas to fulfill his contractual obligations. But they did not because presumably Lucas’ value to the UW Collective decreased dramatically once he left school. Another reason why damages are hard to prove.
So in the end, UW wants a Wisconsin state court to say that UW and its collective have an enforceable NIL contract and that UM interfered in the contractual relationship between the UW Collective and Lucas. But there is no damage to award beyond that, and another court in the future may rule in opposite to this court based on different state contract laws. Not to mention that the decision of a Wisconsin state court will not be binding legal precedent; arguably not even in the state of Wisconsin, but certainly not in any other state or court. So even a declaratory judgment that UM did all the things alleged, will be legally meaningless.
Think of the USFL suing the NFL. The USFL won the lawsuit and was awarded $1. That is what this lawsuit is worth
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