NCAA stuck in quagmire of its own making with latest NIL mess

It is a weird time in college athletics, perhaps the weirdest ever.

Let’s count the ways, shall we?

In December, the NCAA president himself proposed a plan that, if adopted this summer, would permit schools to directly strike name, image and likeness (NIL) deals with athletes as well as pay them through a trust fund. Within the next 18-24 months, depending on whom you trust, schools will pay athletes salaries as their employees or share revenue with them as their partners in a billion-dollar industry.

And yet, over the last three weeks, reports have emerged that the NCAA (1) is investigating Tennessee and Florida over violations related to NIL deals and (2) levied major sanctions on Florida State over violations related to NIL deals.

Confused?

You are not alone. Even those at the NCAA are aware of the confounding situation in which college sports reside (just look toward their own proposal opening the door for direct athlete pay).

Let’s use a popular meme to explain.

How it’s going: Athletes can be paid, not by schools, but by third parties — boosters and booster-led collectives — who offer five, six and sometimes seven-figure salaries to football and basketball players while masquerading the payments as endorsement and commercial “NIL,” yet they cannot “induce” such athletes with salaries and cannot attempt to enhance their school’s roster by using salaries.

How it will eventually go: Athletes are paid directly by schools or conferences for both their NIL as well as their services to play the game of football or basketball, operating from a regulated framework that binds them with contracts and permits them, when that contract is complete, to move about, perhaps, for better — you won’t believe this — salaries.

For now, college athletics sits in a sort-of purgatory — stuck, it seems, between…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/ncaa-stuck-in-quagmire-of-its-own-making-with-latest-nil-mess-230729158.html

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Publish date : 2024-01-30 23:07:29

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