While presenting a unified front publicly and in the courts that athletes are being treated fairly, NCAA leaders privately agonized over the growing use of athlete images in commercial products, with one senior executive proposing to drop the term "student-athlete" after a half century of official use.

The philosophical divide emerges in depositions and frank emails unsealed this week in a class-action lawsuit by former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon and other players who challenge the NCAA's licensing of their images to video games manufacturers and other third parties.

In one internal email sent after the lawsuit was filed in 2009, University of Nebraska chancellor Harvey Perlman wrote to then-Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe that he disagrees with the NCAA's legal defense that it can sell publicity rights without any compensation to the players.

"This whole area of name and likeness and the NCAA is a disaster leading to catastrophe as far as I can tell," wrote Perlman, a former member of the NCAA Board of Directors and law professor specializing in intellectual property. "I'm still trying to figure out by what authority the NCAA licenses these rights to the game makers and others. I looked at what our student athletes sign by way of waiver and it doesn't come close."

Objecting strongly to Perlman was Chris Plonsky, a longtime University of Texas administrator who oversees women's sports for the Longhorns. She wrote that athletes "voluntarily" sign the standard release waiver that is required for participation in NCAA sports.

"We're like a version of the Army," Plonsky wrote. "We have certain things we have to do a certain way to raise funds and pay for the scholarships and other things s-a's (student-athletes) and their parents expect."

In a separate exchange, Wallace Renfro, NCAA senior policy advisor, wrote a memo to new president Mark Emmert after Emmert was hired to run the organization in 2010. Lawyers for the plaintiffs cited the memo, an analysis of issues confronting the NCAA titled "Looking Forward," in a deposition of Renfro on June 26.

"Maybe we don't call them student-athletes any longer and just refer to them as students," Renfro wrote.

In the email to Emmert, Renfro, who has worked at the NCAA since the 1970s, notes that the term student-athlete is one "that Walter Byers created to counter the criticism that we are paying college athletes when we began providing grants-in-aid." Byers was the first executive director of the NCAA, retiring in 1988 after 37 years, and a grant-in-aid is the term of art used by the NCAA to describe an athletic scholarship.

The lawsuit claims the NCAA violates anti-trust laws by preventing universities from allowing athletes to be compensated above the value of a grant-in aid -- room, board, books and fees. The discovery submitted to the court represents a small fraction of the documents collected in what has become a landmark test of the NCAA's governance and notions about college athletes.

"I'd rather not comment on the evidence itself," said Michael Hausfeld, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, when contacted Tuesday by ESPN. "But I will say the documents expose how the principle of amateurism was not a bedrock against the NCAA's commercialization of college sports."

An NCAA spokesman did not respond to an ESPN request for comment on the legal disclosures, and how they might affect the viability of the NCAA defending itself in the case. The O'Bannon case is scheduled to go to trial in early 2014, pending a judge's ruling on class certification.

A stalwart of the NCAA's economic model that redistributes money from revenue sports to other parts of the athletic department and university, Renfro proposed a re-focusing of sports on the educational mission of universities. At the same time, he conceded that the philosophy underpinning the model has become antiquated -- and even posed whether the time has come to allow athletes to hire agents.

"We have always had a cradle-to-grave approach to amateurism," Renfro wrote. "You are born an amateur, but like innocence once lost, it cannot be regained. But our commitment to amateurism and the commitment of our public's has often been based on something other than how we define amateurism in our own constitution. In the most romantic sense we think of amateurism as playing sports for the love of the game, for the camaraderie among competitors, for the pride of victory for school or colors, and then we use this romanticized sense of amateurism to define the entire enterprise of collegiate athletics."

Renfro said that Emmert never responded to his memo. When pressed by lawyers in the deposition, he characterized his ideas in the memo as discussion points, not endorsements.

In one note, Plonsky disparaged football and men's basketball players for bringing the lawsuit. Plaintiffs include former Arizona State quarterback Sam Keller, and basketball stars Oscar Robertson, Bill Russell and Tate George, whose lawyers have proposed to the court that athletes receive a cut of licensing and broadcast contracts with monies going into a fund that can be accessed after their college careers.