Cheers or Jeers on Nil’s First Birthday?
July 1 marks the first anniversary of a new policy that allows college athletes to be compensated for the use of their name, image and likeness (NIL). That acronym seems an odd construct standing, as it does, for nothing—in stark contrast to the contention of NIL backers, who for years likened the college sports system to “the last plantation.”
In the decade long run-up to the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision on June 21, 2021 to open the door to NIL, sports writers, broadcast commentators, and op-ed authors relentlessly espoused the plantation analogy. After all, the system was generating many billions in revenue that enriched coaches and administrators, but left blacks from economically disadvantaged backgrounds – more than half of those playing the so-called revenue sports of football and basketball – with nothing.
In this long-running debate, proclivities for playing of the Race card and engendering white guilt gradually obscured the value of the four-year athletic scholarship many athletes were receiving. No less an authority than Len Elmore, co-chair of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a former All American at Maryland with a ten-year career in the National Basketball Association has stressed many times that the value such scholarships has been “consistently undervalued.”
It is both noteworthy and sad that amid the sea change of NIL’s first year, discussions of its impact on the education of athletes has stirred barely a ripple of concern. All by way of saying that with the genie is out of the bottle; NIL is here to stay. Like it or not, we’ll have to make the best of a new but deeply flawed system. Which means it’s imperative that NIL impacts on the education of athletes be more closely examined and much better understood. Here are a few questions that demand answers:
Can the current “wild west” environment that characterizes the new system based largely on self-regulation prevail? The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision on NIL diminished the NCAA greatly. Thus far, Congress has shrugged off NCAA entreaties to enact a national NIL standard. As a result, NIL regulation has been left largely to the states where parochial interests most often prevail. As a result, many state’s rushed to enact NIL laws to benefit their in-state universities.
One apparently huge and intractable conflict has already emerged The NCAA recently notified member institutions that effective July 1, state laws that permit booster collectives affiliated with universities to pay athletes for NIL endorsements will violate NCAA policy. Meanwhile, legislation in Texas has authorized – effective on the same date as the NCAA directive – the Longhorn Foundation at the University of Texas and the 12th Man Foundation at Texas A&M University to begin raising money to fund NIL deals for their athletes. Similar laws have been passed in Arkansas and Oklahoma. The new law in Texas will even help fans who contribute to booster NIL funds get better seating at home games. These new laws will strip away the last shred of pretense that pay for play prevails and could become the subject of protracted litigation between the NCAA and adherents of NIL.
Another thorny NIL issue is the time it will take to consummate and fulfill commitments to sponsors, In many cases, compensation will based on the athlete’s following on social media. The more the merrier is axiomatic. But cultivating and responding to a large social media audience can be all-consuming. How much time will that leave for chemistry experiments, archaic passages from Chaucer, and advanced calculus? Competition for an athlete’s time will ratchet up enormously. Typically, one playing a revenue sport in one of the Power Five Conferences already practices as much as forty hours per week. Game time and travel are in addition. Something’s got to give, but it’s unlikely to be on the NIL side. Overreach has already prompted NIL extend the NIL option to high school students. Bronny James, son of the NBA superstar, a secondary school student, has deals worth $7.2 billion from Nike and other sponsors.
Many other questions about NIL can be cited, but one in particular looms over all: What will be the impact on the nation’s leadership supply? Many of America’s greatest leaders have come from the ranks of that great American icon—the scholar-athlete. Byron “Whizzer” White was an All-American football player at the University of Colorado, first in his Yale Law School class, and an influential justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. The son of a former slave, Paul Robeson became and All-American football player at Rutgers, finished at the top of his class, and earned a law degree from Columbia University. His deep, melodic voice landed him on the New York stage and eventually made him one of the world’s most recognizable men.
With the stressful demands NIL places on players, it could curtail the leadership elite that has served our nation for generations from local communities to the highest offices in the land. We don’t want NIL – or anything else – to diminish the fun and exactment Americans derive from college sports. We must be vigilant, too, about protecting the nation’s supply of indispensable men and women.
