In less than a month, new laws in seven states will effectively pierce the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s ban on paying student-athletes — one of the starkest shifts in big-time college sports in a century.
Starting in July, colleges in those states will be barred from prohibiting their athletes from earning money based on their affiliation with sports. The new laws, which fly in the face of the NCAA’s longtime ban on compensation for athletes outside scholarships, is meant to allow the players to profit in a system where colleges, coaches, and corporations have been cashing in for decades. The change will permit college athletes to have professional agents and get paid for things like endorsing products on social-media posts, signing autographs, having their likeness used in video games, and starting a new company or even a nonprofit organization.
But the shift to allow students to monetize their names, images, or likenesses (or NIL) has not come easily and will likely not proceed without some uncertainty and confusion. While states began to pass laws in the fall of 2019, the NCAA has yet to release rules about how they will monitor the process and what kinds of deals will be acceptable. Some form of regulatory guidance or waiver process could be released later this month, when the NCAA could release new rules on limits for such arrangements and how they will be reported.
It’s unclear whether the NCAA will be able to make policy that jibes with all of the new laws, the specifics of which vary considerably. So colleges are moving cautiously to prepare for the change without knowing entirely what their coaches and athletic departments can or can’t do in helping athletes earn money.
“Everybody is floundering trying to figure out what is going on,” said Welch Suggs, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Georgia, who is an expert in college athletics and a former reporter for The Chronicle. “Normally, the NCAA provides guidance, but colleges aren’t getting jack,” he said.
Suggs said his biggest concern is the proliferation of small companies popping up to earn their own profits by helping young and sometimes impressionable students. “This is a level of chaos that college sports is not ready to deal with,” he said.
The new NIL laws will take effect next month in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and New Mexico. Nebraska’s law isn’t mandatory until 2023, but colleges can allow NIL deals at any time before that.
Two major programs aren’t waiting to see what the NCAA comes up with.
At the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, various schools and colleges are developing “pop-up” courses that will focus on “entrepreneurship and skills to build brands and businesses.” The classes will be available to all students. Athletes can also get mentoring through an existing life-skills program at the university.
Nebraska has also hired Opendorse, a social media and marketing company formed in Lincoln in 2012 to work with professional athletes. The company will not be offering deals to athletes, but will advise them on how to evaluate offers and get the most out of their marketing potential.
“We are putting programming in place based on our best knowledge of what we think the final outcome will be,” said Garrett Klassy, Nebraska’s senior deputy athletic director.
The University of Tennessee at Knoxville is taking a similar approach by developing a minor in entrepreneurship through the college of business and hiring the sports-marketing agency Altius to provide advice and guidance to athletes.
But it’s not just the students who will need education, said Andrew Donovan, the senior associate athletics director for regulatory affairs at Tennessee. Coaches will need guidance on what they can say during recruiting, he said, and athletic boosters need to be informed about limits on making arrangements with students.
Both Nebraska and Tennessee are counting on their programs as a good way to recruit top-notch athletes. “We can’t go out and hire marketing agencies to help students,” Klassy said, “but if we have these resources available to students, that gives us an edge.”
The lack of guidance from the NCAA, which has in recent decades resisted efforts for Division I athletes to be paid, has left many issues unresolved. Meanwhile, members of Congress have drafted bills that would set a standard NIL policy nationwide, but none of them are likely to be passed before July 1.
In addition to the seven state laws going into effect in July, another nine states have passed NIL bills that will be enacted between January 2022 and September 2025.
The new state laws are “a first step into removal of economic restrictions for athletes so they can do things other students do,” said Victoria Jackson, a sports historian and clinical assistant professor at Arizona State University who also competed in distance running in college and professionally.
In the past, the NCAA has disallowed students to accept money for anything that might be even remotely related to their athletic participation in the name of preserving amateurism. But that has led to absurd restrictions, Jackson said, that punish athletes for being entrepreneurial.
One example is Ryan Trahan, a cross-country runner at Texas A&M, who was temporarily suspended from participating in his sport because of YouTube videos promoting his own water-bottle company that he started before college. After widespread media attention, Trahan was given a waiver to continue competing, but only if his videos did not “use or reference his participation in intercollegiate athletics or his status as a student-athlete at Texas A&M.”
The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, the nation’s other major college sports association, has already developed rules and a framework for name, image, and likeness deals, Jackson said, showing that “the sky will not fall.”
The new laws are also just the latest in a series of legal and legislative actions to loosen the NCAA’s control over compensation and support for athletes. Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case NCAA v. Alston, challenging the association’s limit on the amount of education-related benefits that colleges can provide to athletes.
B. David Ridpath, an associate professor of sports business at Ohio University, said the NCAA’s big worry is that they will lose their leverage over the students who bring in all the revenue for the colleges and the association.
Ridpath, a longtime advocate for reforming the NCAA, said the association and institutions argue that sponsorship opportunities will distract the athletes from focusing on their sport. Removing limits on educational benefits, especially for big-time football and basketball programs, could lead to an arms race among institutions and cuts in other sports.
But the association has adapted to equally large changes in the past, he said, and the public appetite for college sports is unquenchable.
“At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what happens,” he said, “we will all still watch the games. We’ll adjust.”
