TOP STORY
1. Essential Business
by Sara Germano, Financial Times
photo: Concordia University Chicago Athletics/Design: Alex Brooks
"In the autumn of 2019, Bo Nix set scoring and passing records as the starting quarterback for Auburn University. He led the American football team to nine wins and helped drive more than $97m in revenues to the prestigious college football programme, but Nix, then 19, earned nothing for his efforts.
For nearly a century, as US college sports ballooned into a more than $14bn industry, student athletes have been forbidden from receiving any pay for their performances or for rights to their name, image, and likeness, or NIL, as the National Collegiate Athletic Association payment policy is known. The governing body has long argued that paying players beyond tuition scholarships would take the emphasis away from education, and make sports for undergraduate university students indistinguishable from professional leagues.
But this year the NCAA, defenders of some of the most steadfast amateurism rules remaining in sport, in effect threw open the floodgates. Under pressure from imminent changes to state laws that from July 1 would have explicitly given student athletes the right to payment, and a landmark Supreme Court ruling which blasted the NCAA’s business model as “flatly illegal”, the Indianapolis-based organisation voted to suspend enforcement of the NIL policy entirely.
The result is a dealmaking free-for-all between college stars such as Nix, who now has his own lawyer to vet deals, sponsors and an emerging cottage industry catering to the new marketplace. Confusion remains, however, as to how a thickening patchwork of state laws and possible federal legislation will regulate this fledgling image rights market for college athletes."
>> Quotable: “It’s clear that the status quo in college sports is not going to hold,” says Amy Privette Perko, chief executive of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, an advocacy group which has long argued that athletes should be compensated beyond being given scholarships and having the costs of attending university covered."
>> Quotable II: "But, given the traditions around one of the most treasured facets of American culture, “no one wants to be held responsible for ruining college sports”, says Victoria Jackson, a former college athlete and sports historian at Arizona State University, who is critical of the NCAA for not creating a sensible NIL framework earlier."
>> What's Next: "The bigger question for the college sports industry is whether and when there will be some form of overarching regulation, either by the NCAA or by Congress."
>> Continue Reading | 
Still The Ones
Beavers on the Move
No comments:
Post a Comment