NCAA to give athletes chance to cash in
Manziel-style endeavors are allowed under new guidelines in the works
COLLEGE STATION — Johnny Manziel’s exceptional timing on the football field helped win him the Heisman Trophy in 2012. In retrospect, the flashy quarterback’s primary drawback was bursting on the scene a decade early.
Who would have thought that when Manziel was faced with an autograph scandal in the summer of 2013, the lightning rod of a college idol was simply ahead of his time?
The NCAA on Wednesday
plowed ahead with a groundbreaking plan — groundbreaking by NCAA standards anyway — for college athletes to cash in on endorsements, social media, personal appearances and their own entrepreneurial endeavors. For starters, anyway, while somehow still trying to keep boosters out of the mix.
“Allowing promotions and third-party endorsements is uncharted territory,” said Michael V. Drake, chairman of the NCAA’s board of governors and Ohio State’s president.
Indeed it is, and the NCAA still must draft legislation in the fall with a vote on the proposal by its members in January. If the revolutionary changes are adopted, the new guide
lines should kick in by August 2021.
The broad plan is to allow athletes to strike deals with third parties but require them to disclose those agreements with their schools. The NCAA and schools want to regulate for improprieties so payments aren’t actually recruiting inducements or pay-for-play schemes.
Seven years ago, Manziel sat out the first half of the Aggies’ 2013 season opener against Rice after he violated an NCAA bylaw stating one of its athletes can’t sign a large number of items for an individual, knowing that person intends to sell the items for profit.
Had Manziel, who acquired rock-star status from 2012-14 at A&M, played under the proposed changes, he’d certainly have cashed in quite handsomely. While Manziel was making plays at Kyle Field and beyond in the Southeastern Conference, his coach at the time, Kevin Sumlin, was making $5 million annually.
Coaches’ salaries have only mushroomed since, and current A&M coach Jimbo Fisher draws $7.5 million annually. The proposal is for college athletes to (legally) make extra money while competing for their universities making millions of dollars a year from football.
“(NCAA) member schools have embraced very real change that’s necessary to modernize our name, image and likeness rules,” NCAA president Mark Emmert said.
According to a release from the NCAA, “While student-athletes would be permitted to identify themselves by sport and school, the use of conference and school logos, trademarks or other involvement would not be allowed.”
In addition, a college could not pay one of its athletes extra for “name, image and likeness activities.”
What would this have meant to Manziel starting eight years ago? He could have signed autographs for pay until his hand wore out. He could have released a clothing line while in college instead of as an ex-NFL player (although it likely would not have carried the moniker “COMEBACK$ZN” for Comeback Season).
The NCAA also will seek federal guidelines so individual states cannot pass their own laws on whether to pay collegians. California got the ball rolling on these changes — essentially forcing the NCAA’s hand — with its “Fair Pay to Play Act” passed last September that allows college athletes in the state of California to cash in on their celebrity.
The act won’t go into effect until 2023, but some states have followed suit, notably Florida in the summer of 2021, and the NCAA has countered that the states’ rulings would create bedlam in terms of who exactly is eligible — including entire universities — to compete for NCAA championships and the like.
“It’s clear we need Congress’s help in all of this,” Emmert explained.
Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde best summed up the NCAA’s forward movement on Wednesday, a movement helping diminish what in reality has gone on across the country since the dawn of college football: eager boosters paying players beyond their scholarships to play football or basketball (mainly).
“Taking some of the eternal under-the-table payments to players above the table might be a legitimizing enterprise,” Forde wrote. “All those SEC football players who seem to be driving late-model Dodge Chargers might actually now be paid to endorse local Dodge dealerships. (And) the free meals and drinks that are everywhere for athletes in college towns might now be included in compensation for a star quarterback billboard for the popular local restaurant.”
Will it all work? That’s to be determined, and there are too many unresolved issues to count. But the NCAA, in the end, believed it had no choice.
“The difficulty of it,” said Big East commissioner Val Ackerman, who was part of a working group that arrived with the recommendation to the NCAA, “doesn’t mean we can’t try.”