Is the end of college amateurism the beginning of another Wild West?
Didn’t the Supreme Court rule that athletes could be compensated in certain ways as long as those payments were tied to education?
Since then, all hell has broken loose across the country with states that have NIL rules in place and states and schools that don’t. It appears that athletes can make money for anything except actually playing the games. That means they can get paid for endorsements of retail products, placing advertising on their social media websites and personal appearances.
The SCOTUS ruled that colleges could no longer restrict the income-earning power of the athletes, even though being paid to play the games is still off the table.
The big problem is uniformity, who is going to manage all of this for universities that at this point still don’t know the rules they can play by?
In the state of Georgia, schools will be allowed to keep 75% of the endorsement money made by the superstar athletes, so they can form a pool through which they will pay all of their athletes.
That sounds like a good idea, but haven’t we learned by now that we can’t trust anything that goes on in the state of Georgia?
North Carolina has yet to pass any laws about its NIL for athletes, which means colleges in the Tar Heel state will be able to make their own rules for the time being. But who will work with hundreds of athletes in departments already understaffed with underpaid employees, thanks mainly to cutbacks caused by COVID?
While this may be the end of an era for college athletics, it seems like a dangerous path right now. Simply because no one seems to know for sure where that path is leading.
Athletic directors and coaches will go crazy trying to construct this and manage it for the time being. Even if schools come up with a set of NIL rules, won’t this wind up in the middle of recruiting between competitors with different and perceived better rules?
Isn’t it already going on with who has cooler athletic wear and fancier facilities?
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