Can the NCAA really crack down on pay-for-play deals disguised as NIL?
By: Floridastate.rivals.comThe genie isn't only out of the bottle, he apparently has been doing backflips from campus to campus around the country, sprinkling college athletes with millions of dollars in deals to either keep them at one school or entice them to another.
But this week, according to numerous reports, NCAA officials are expected to at least try to rein in some of the pay-for-play contracts that have been masquerading as Name, Image and Likeness endorsements.
An announcement could come as soon as Monday.
“This is the time we have to put our stake in the ground. Enough! This is not acceptable,” Colorado athletics director Rick George told Ross Dellenger of SI.com. “What we’re doing is not good for intercollegiate athletics, and it has got to stop. ...
"Just because we have NIL, it doesn’t eliminate the rules. Everybody is like, ‘It’s NIL!’ I am totally in favor of NIL done right. It’s really good. [Athletes] should be able to monetize their NIL, but a lot of what’s going on out there is not NIL.”
In the initial months following the NCAA's announcement last summer that NIL deals would be permissible as long as they followed state guidelines and didn't take the form of recruiting inducements, most college athletes earned extra money through public appearances, selling merchandise online or endorsing products through social media.
Then the 2022 recruiting cycle kicked into high gear, and reports surfaced of schools and/or their representatives promising recruits hundreds of thousands of dollars if they signed with those programs. Meanwhile, dozens of NIL "collectives" began popping up, with school supporters pooling their resources to provide compensation for athletes under the guise of NIL.
The debate over whether some of these deals cross the line into tampering and "pay for play" boiled over last week when rumors circulated that star Pitt wide receiver Jordan Addison was offered seven-figures if he transferred to Southern Cal before he had even entered the transfer portal.
Addison ended up going into the portal a few days later and is said to be considering USC, Alabama, Texas and several other schools.
Boston College receiver Zay Flowers also told ESPN's Pete Thamel last week that he received multiple six-figure offers, as high as $600,000, if he left the Eagles and transferred to other schools. He has decided to stay put.
"What's happening in that space is what we were all fearful of," Ohio State athletics director Gene Smith told Dennis Dodd of CBSSports.com. "What's going on -- on campuses [with existing scholarship athletes] -- currently is fine. It's the inducement pieces. We gotta kill that. If we don't kill that now, forget it."
Smith, who is part of an NCAA panel of college officials working to address NIL improprieties, said the group is determined to put new guidelines in place that would limit the activities of boosters in the process and also establish enforcement guidelines.
If boosters are shown to have offered inducements to prospects or transfer candidates, Smith said, those supporters could be banned from associating with their respective universities. And if school representatives are involved, the penalties could be much more severe.
“We pulled the police officers off the highway and everyone is now going 90 miles an hour,” Smith said. “Now we’re trying to put the officers back on the highway."
The question is whether they can do that.
The first stumbling block could be legal challenges from athletes claiming that the NCAA is limiting their ability to earn compensation. It was concerns about those lawsuits that reportedly led the organization to not outline stricter rules and penalties last summer.
But after what has transpired over the last few weeks and months, Smith told CBS, the NCAA is prepared for that challenge.
"We know we're going to get lawsuits," he said.
The next issue, of course, is enforcement.
Partly due to staff reductions during the COVID pandemic and partly out of fear that Power 5 schools will break away and create their own governing body, the NCAA has seemingly been reluctant to investigate improprieties and enforce regulations that have been on the books for years.
That was never more apparent than last month, when NCAA President Mark Emmert presented the national championship trophy to the Kansas men's basketball team -- three years after the school was hit with several NCAA infractions in that sport but has yet to be penalized.
The idea that the NCAA is now going to switch course and flex its muscle seems far-fetched and little more than saber rattling, but several administrators are at least saying they mean business.
"Either the NCAA is going to get its act together in enforcing this," Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff told ESPN, "or I'm going to be pushing for a smaller group to figure out how to create and enforce the NIL rules that we all agree on related to inducement and pay for play. The amount of an NIL payment should be commensurate with the work done as a backstop to make sure we're not using it related to inducement and pay for play."
We'll see this week if they at least take the first step.
