In Part Two of this Three part series, let’s take a dive in to some possible solutions that could provide student athletes with compensation for their Name, Image, and Likeness. Here’s three different options that could eliminate all of the NIL hubbub.
Option One – Eliminate ageism in pro sports. Right now to turn pro, a football player must have been out of high school for three years. A basketball player must be turning 19 during his draft year (prompting at least one year in college). Taking ageism out of the pro game should allow a top athlete to go pro without the arbitrary requirement of attending college. However, this should be paired with a couple of key components. First, schools should limit and standardize the ability to alter acceptance requirements per team. While this suggestion should prompt screams from solid academic schools like Stanford and Notre Dame, there should be less need to ‘massage’ acceptance requirements at schools if those athletes were allowed to go pro in the first place. Second, allow the student athlete to attain an agent and test the professional waters ONE TIME in their college careers. The choice to attend college should not be a limiting factor in an athlete’s chances to go pro. Why only ONE TIME? Coaches still need to plan their recruiting and prep for a team the following season. Transfers and pro declarations will be plenty for coaches to keep up with just to assemble a roster that can win (so the coach can keep their job).
Option Two – NIL as an escrow against tuition. Everyone wants a free lunch. But in business, as in life, there is no such thing. If a student athlete is getting a free education, why not have them apply a percentage of their NIL up to or approaching their cost of tuition toward the value of their scholarship. This seems a bit extreme, however if an athlete wants to earn compensation for their name, image, and likeness, they won’t have much luck here without the college team opportunity to begin with. Though when you ask a kid to work in this environment, then you should rightly allow that kid to hire an agent if they so choose. That agent would be responsible for reporting the amount of NIL earned by the athlete, a fraction of which gets paid to the university. You could then require full disclosure of income for an athlete. Right now that is not disclosed because the income isn’t supposed to be happening. (Remember Cam Newton’s family payout of nearly $200,000 for attending Auburn? Cam’s payoff is not an anomaly in the world of college sports.) With this option, athlete amateurism in college may go the way of the dodo bird. This would also shift the presumed power conferences. The Big East and PAC 12 Conferences would move well ahead of the Big Ten and SEC by virtue of having many more teams located in metropolitan areas with greater NIL opportunities.
Option Three – The College Sports degree ‘lite’. This NBA season will have an asterisk beside it as it does not have the same components of a normal NBA season. How about offering a sports ‘lite’ degree at the Power 5 schools. A Power 5 degree with an asterisk. As I highlighted in Part One, some of the athletes being ‘massaged’ in to their respective schools could not have attended had they not been accepted for their athletic prowess. Instead, allow each team to offer up to a maximum number of ‘lite’ degrees which don’t have the same rigor as the normal classes. Combined with the NIL possibilities that the NCAA has posed for a vote as soon as January 2021 (see this Sports Illustrated article for details) a student athlete may be able to have their cake and eat it too. Amongst the many problems here is a team of players where the top dogs have an easy course load (lite) while the balance of the players are stressed with the intensity of a legitimate degree course load at that same school. What are you doing tonight awesome Joe baller? Nothing much. What are you up to? I’ll be up til 2:00am studying physics… ‘That’s cool’ is probably not what physics teammate will be muttering after that exchange.
As part of any of these offerings, schools should include required courses in the business and life of professional athletics. Sally Jenkins’ Washington Post article provides a poignant (but slightly misguided) approach to this idea. “We’ve told ourselves that athletics actually interferes with education”, she ponders. Athletics provides a great place to learn competitiveness, effort, etc. I personally miss teaching persistence on the court even to this day. She later goes on to talk about the many great attributes gained from participating in athletics. She’s right, but if these are so important, why isn’t competitive athletics a general education course at every school? Because this blog author’s 5’11”, non-vertical hops, average athlete body doesn’t qualify. I’m not offended to be excluded from this elite group; as long as the opportunity is equal, (if given the chance, I’m probably not taking out Cam Newton in a throwing contest). If acceptance at his first school, the University of Florida, were truly equal though, then would both of us have been accepted to UF?
There are plenty of other possibilities out there for Name, Image, and Likeness compensation. So the question is, where do we go from here. In Part Three I’ll give you my pie in the sky snapshot of what NIL and the NCAA to professional sports bridge should look like…
Paul MacDonald - Sports Broadcaster 