Welcome to the New World of NIL

[Bobref]

[Muda69]

The Government Shouldn't Stop College Athletes From Making Money: https://reason.com/2023/01/12/the-government-shouldnt-stop-college-athletes-from-making-money/

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Only 1.6 percent of college football players make it to the NFL. And even if they do make it, the average NFL career is just over three years. Given the incredibly limited amount of time college athletes have to earn money based on their hard work and natural talents, it is both unconstitutional and unethical for states to restrict their earning potential. 

But that's exactly what they do.

In 2021, the Supreme Court made some progress for college athletes in NCAA v. Alston by striking down NCAA regulations limiting the education-related benefits that schools may offer to student-athletes, such as scholarships or internships. Following the decision, the NCAA began dismantling restrictions on athletes making money off their names, images, and likenesses, commonly referred to as "NIL." 

Allowing college athletes to begin receiving NIL money was a much-needed first step in creating a better environment for college athletes. But as is often the case, this modest step forward was almost immediately met with two steps back in the form of state regulation. 

According to law firm Saul Ewing's NIL Legislation Tracker, 32 states have passed laws restricting student-athletes' ability to enter into NIL deals. For example, Florida legislators passed a law prohibiting athletes from receiving a NIL deal "in exchange for athletic performance or attendance at a particular institution." This means that a fan of the University of Miami cannot give a NIL deal to a high school prospect in exchange for the athlete playing for the Hurricanes.

Although some companies surely want to give NIL deals to athletes for commercial purposes only, it is much more likely that fans who own companies will give NIL deals to top athletes to secure their services. Indeed, billionaire and noted Hurricanes benefactor John Ruiz has already reportedly spent over $7 million on NIL deals for over 100 athletes. Florida's law is placing an unconstitutional prior restraint on Ruiz's fandom. 

Georgia permits colleges to force players to put a portion of their NIL money into a "fund for the benefit of individuals previously enrolled as student athletes" at their institution. That means that the Georgia champions won't receive a dime from the revenue generated by the game—but they can be forced to give up their own NIL money to pay athletes who used to play at Georgia (robbing Stetson Bennett to pay Herschel Walker)! 

A Texas law prohibits athletes from endorsing any product containing alcohol, even if the athlete is 21 years old. So, Texas Christian University quarterback Max Duggan cannot receive money from an alcohol company—but his school sure can. Considering that the Big 12 Conference has had two hard seltzer sponsors during Duggan's four years at TCU, there's no reason why Duggan himself should not have the same opportunity. Even the College Football Playoff has an official beer sponsor. 

None of these restrictions were inevitable. Instead of rushing to place nonsensical restrictions on student-athletes' ability to make money off their own likenesses or outright steal players' NIL money to pay previous players, legislators should have come up with a way to share revenue with the players. 

No one should be surprised that states chose the path of unconstitutional restrictions over reasonable regulations. NIL restrictions ought to be challenged because they place unconstitutionally vague and overly broad restrictions on athletes and fans alike. Florida, for example, asserts that its restriction on fandom is necessary to "maintain a clear separation between amateur intercollegiate athletics and professional sports." However, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh observed in his concurrence in Alston, invoking the "spirit of amateurism" as a justification for restraining an otherwise lawful commercial transaction between two individuals hardly seems to pass constitutional muster. 

Moreover, laws like the one in Georgia authorize state institutions, like the University of Georgia, to take a portion of a player's private contract money without compensation in order to pay former players that attended those public institutions in violation of the Fifth Amendment's taking clause. 

Athletes cannot stand on the sidelines while states trample on their constitutional rights. The unconstitutional and unethical restrictions on college athletes must end. 

There needs to be lawsuits filed in these states that have passed these unconstitutional laws.

NIL is here to stay, and state governments need to butt out.

 

[tango]

2 hours ago, Muda69 said:

The Government Shouldn't Stop College Athletes From Making Money: https://reason.com/2023/01/12/the-government-shouldnt-stop-college-athletes-from-making-money/

There needs to be lawsuits filed in these states that have passed these unconstitutional laws.

NIL is here to stay, and state governments need to butt out.

 

Its pretty simple really... Old, white, male legislators attempting to prevent young, black athletes from making money. 

[temptation]

Sorta off topic:  Over/under 2.5 years until the Colorado football program/Deion are levied with sanctions due to tampering?

Dude doesn't care if you are in the portal or not.

[Whiting89]

4 hours ago, temptation said:

Sorta off topic:  Over/under 2.5 years until the Colorado football program/Deion are levied with sanctions due to tampering?

Dude doesn't care if you are in the portal or not.

From what I’ve read/heard the ncaa is toothless so doubtful 

[temptation]

18 minutes ago, Whiting89 said:

From what I’ve read/heard the ncaa is toothless so doubtful 

Unless you illegally buy a recruit a hamburger…

[Bash Riprock]

Interesting article about Dasan McCullough leaving IU.  An interesting conclusion is that with NIL, a coach will sometimes need to recruit the same player year after year.....

https://www.si.com/college/indiana/football/prized-recruit-dasan-mccullough-walked-but-indiana-coming-up-short-on-nil-money-not-only-reason-why

With NIL, the landscape of college football has changed, and it will never be the same again.....the rich will get richer

Edited January 14 by Bash Riprock

[Muda69]

NCAA to Congress: Stop us before we NIL again: https://deadspin.com/ncaa-congress-name-image-likeness-charlie-baker-1850008475

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The NCAA needs a reality check. This week the vanishingly relevant college athletics institution has once again asked Congress to help it stabilize the college sports system, but unless Hunter Biden is suiting up at linebacker for LSU next season, it’ll be hard to motivate the people in charge to fall in love with this cause.

This isn’t 1922, and the NCAA isn’t America’s Pastime. Baseball’s Antitrust Exemption is 100 years old, but trying to get some bespoke version of that for a college sports labor market instead of crafting it through deliberative policy is like deciding not to work for a living and buying a lottery ticket every week.

The provocative issue is the arrival of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL), which allows college athletes to make money off their status without drawing a salary from schools. It’s been a boon for many players, a bane for schools, and the chaos of a new market means that it isn’t a level playing field, so the NCAA would like Congress to nationalize the rule. Anyone could have seen NIL coming, but rather than trying to get ahead of the storm, the NCAA spent the last decade pouring cash into lawsuits that eroded the institution’s authority and options.

 

After current president Mark Emmert announced he was stepping down, the NCAA tapped former Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker to take over. Choosing a politician to head the organization speaks volumes.

You know who else wants Congress to save an industry from itself? Mark Zuckerberg signaled he was open to legislation starting in 2018 and now is lobbying around Section 230 in a way that would preserve Facebook’s advantage. And professional sports leagues have been clamoring for federal legislation around sports betting as most U.S. states have now legalized it in some form or another.

As unsympathetic as Zuckerberg and most professional sports leagues are, there is broad agreement that both social media and sports betting would greatly benefit from sound legislation. Social media has been found to have some damaging side effects for young people, and sports betting is a snarl of different state rules and little independent oversight.

But even those issues aren’t what’s in line in front of the NCAA’s request. Instead, you have things like HR 263 being brought to the house floor, proposing to ban rules that would outlaw gas stoves. It’s straight culture war nonsense.

Is protecting the NCAA offering the same kind of red meat to the base of these lawmakers? Unless Nick Saban is diagramming plays using Critical Race Theory, or the server with all of Hillary Clinton’s missing emails is buried under the 50-yard line at Ohio Stadium, this is just not a cause that will resonate with this cast of politicians.

But to be fair, this Congress is having trouble just paying the bills already. And it took 15 rounds of voting just to get a Speaker of the House.

Politicians are all about performing their fandom for the voters. In 2018 the mayors of Athens, Ga., and Tuscaloosa, Ala. bet some craft beer and charitable donations on the outcome of the Alabama-Georgia CFP title game. And who can forget Rudy Giuliani’s famous affinity for the Yankees when he was New York’s mayor?

And in some cases, those loyalties can greenlight stadiums and infrastructure. But as Boland notes, plenty of politicians are fans of teams, but a USC allegiance probably doesn’t mean any affection for the NCAA. No one has a Mark Emmert rookie card in a shoebox under the bed.

In fact, there might be more enthusiasm for individual athletes these days now that they can express themselves on social media. Face it, the model of amateur athletics is on the way out.

So here comes the NCAA, asking us to look back to the glory days of your favorite era, as long as it came before the O’Bannon decision, and rewind the hands of the clock. But nostalgia isn’t the solution, although it has preserved the revenue-generating machine long beyond its expiration date.

A system that pays men’s football, and basketball coaches millions while refusing to compensate players is no longer a business model. There is way more money in the game now, and the trade that athletes make for tuition is more restrictive than what other scholarship students are asked to do. NIL is actually a pretty elegant solution since it generates revenue for players from outside the colleges.

Looking to Congress for the Hail Mary won’t change any of that.

 

[Muda69]

Jaden Rashada’s failed Florida NIL deal resembles a coach’s contract — so what’s the issue?: https://deadspin.com/jaden-rashada-college-football-nil-deal-florida-miami-1850083009

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Sports is one of the few industries in which a person’s salary is public knowledge. It’s how we know what Nick Saban, Jim Harbaugh, and Brian Kelly are making. But in the case of former University of Miami, University of Florida, and now Arizona State-commit Jaden Rashada, a quarterback prospect that was once on the verge of receiving $9.5 million and $13.85 million NIL deals at two different schools, we’ve reached the point to where player “contracts” may be on the verge of resembling coaching contracts.

An unjust system that’s made billions off the back of unpaid players for decades is evolving into a place where some of the oppressed are experiencing financial freedom.

And if you have a problem with that, then it says so much about you — not them.

The details of Rashad’s failed NIL deals are mind-blowing

According to recent reports, the details of Rashada’s failed NIL deal with the Gator Collective have been released. And if things would have played out — he would have gotten PAID! The former Gators recruit was set to make $500,000 upfront, similar to a signing bonus that pros and coaches receive all the time. He was then set to make $250,000 per month as a freshman, $291,666.66 per month during his sophomore season, $375,000 monthly as a junior, and $195, 833.33 every 30 days his senior year. To earn that money, Rashada was going to be required to do monthly Twitter and Instagram branded posts, reside in Gainesville, do eight fan engagement events annually, and autograph 15 pieces per year.

Mind you, this was after the deal he reportedly had at Miami that would have paid him close to $10 million.

Check this out from a report by The Athletic:

“That $13.85 million figure exceeded the highest known number for a college player and is barely less than Pittsburgh Steelers first-round quarterback Kenny Pickett’s rookie contract ($14.1 million over four years).

“Then, in mid-January, Rashada did not enroll at Florida as expected. The Gator Collective had reneged on its deal in early December, two days after the initial payment was due, and on Jan. 17 the quarterback was granted a release from his letter of intent. Rashada, once seemingly poised to benefit greatly from a perceived bidding war between Miami and Florida boosters, was suddenly without a school and without NIL dollars.”

 

How is Rashada any different from coaches who get paid?

If you’ve reached this part of the story you probably feel one of two ways. Happy that the kid and his family were about to get life-changing money for playing in a system that shells out billions to everyone but the players. Or, you’re enraged at the idea of “pay for play” and think that NIL has gotten out of hand. If you’re thinking lines up more with the latter than the former, I have a few questions for you.

• Were you this perturbed when it was recently announced that Brian Ferentz — Iowa’s offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach — just got an amended contract based on incentives that include winning at least seven games and averaging 25 points per game?

• Did you get pissed off when the Big Ten signed a new media rights deal with Fox, CBS, and NBC that will pay the conference $7 billion over seven years, in which the athletes won’t get any?

• And were you angry every time a big-named college football coach signed a huge contract filled with incentives? For context, here’s a list Bleacher Report put together outlining the deals, as it includes Saban, Kelly, Mel Tucker, Jimbo Fisher, Dabo Swinney, and James Franklin.

The answer to those questions is “no,” because besides the, “wait, how much is that guy making?” questions that we ask when new contracts are signed, no one cares when coaches get paid for games they don’t actually play in. However, since the inception of NIL, people have gone out of their way to snitch on themselves by showing just how much they quietly enjoy this injustice system we call “amateurism” and take issue with an unpaid labor force receiving some sort of compensation in a capitalistic society.

Ironically enough, last year Miami was connected to another NIL situation that had people upset. Star Hurricanes guard Isaiah Wong became the scapegoat after it was alleged that he would transfer to another school if his NIL deal wasn’t renegotiated after he had outperformed it, and watched as a new teammate who was transferring into the program was set to make significantly more than him.

Wong got crucified when he should have been championed as a pioneer.

In 2014, Dabo Swinney once infamously said that he’d quit if players started getting paid. When NIL began on July 1, 2021 — Swinney didn’t resign. In December, Clemson’s head coach claimed that his program had been built in “God’s name, image, and likeness.”

That’s blasphemous, and God don’t like ugly. Or the fact that the people who are mad that college athletes are finally getting millions above the table is a plantation-like mentality to have. Being pissed off at Jaden Rashada is pointless. Be upset with the fact that he’s even in this situation, to begin with.