Showing the motives
It’s their own, too, if NIL takes hold
Commentary from Luke DeCock on the ugly side of college athletics.
As it attempts to reckon with the rising tide of state laws giving college athletes the right to capitalize on their name and image, the NCAA has contorted itself into knots trying to apply restrictions without coming off looking like a villain.
In a webinar last week staged by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, Tom McMillen, a former Congressman and basketball star now the head of a lobbying organization that represents athletic directors, just went ahead and gave the game away.
“I do think our ADs are very concerned about conflicts and displacement, losing income because it goes to the athlete,” McMillen, president and CEO of LEAD1, said.
Talk about saying the quiet part out loud.
The NCAA has made glorious announcements lacking almost entirely in substance, lobbied hard in Congress for an antitrust exemption and shunted decisions to slow-moving committees, but always under the guise of finding a way to make name, image and likeness rights (NIL) work within the NCAA system because it was the right thing to do.
That was the spin, anyway: “Developing fair approaches.” Instead of restrictions, “guardrails.” One lawmaker asked whether the NCAA’s willingness to adapt was a bait and switch, but there was at least the sentiment that some sort of NIL reform was inevitable and justified.
But McMillen left no doubt what’s really going on, while hinting at a growing disconnect between the Power 5 conference schools and the NCAA itself. NIL might be the splinter that becomes a wedge.
After all these years of profiting off the backs of unpaid athletes, keeping millions upon millions for themselves, schools are pushing back on NIL not because it disrupts the socalled collegiate model, but because some of the money schools are raking in now might actually go to the athletes who actually generate all that money.
Greed, greed, greed, greed, greed, pure greed, despicable greed.
One of McMillen’s allies in the fight against NIL is North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham, who is the author of a letter to a nonpartisan group that suggests and coordinates legislation nationally, arguing against any grant of NIL rights to college athletes.
Cunningham even told The Athletic that he thinks the NCAA should preemptively sue California, the first state to pass a law guaranteeing NIL rights. Similar bills to California’s “Fair Pay for Play Act” have been introduced in Congress and in other state legislatures.
Cunningham’s criticism of current NIL proposals is more nuanced than McMillen’s — he fully supports finding ways to utilize group NIL rights that would create new revenue, like video games or trading cards — but he does believes this will irreparably damage college athletics as we know it.
“I’m all for more choices for kids, but this financial model for intercollegiate athletics is built on different principles,” Cunningham said. “It only works if you collect the money and spread it among many.”
Over the course of his time at North Carolina, Cunningham has typically been one of the more forward-thinking athletic directors in the country, a pragmatist who has moved with fiscal caution in the aftermath of the school’s NCAA issues as his peers throw money to the wind, thinking the spigot of TV revenue would never turn off.
He never wanted to become the face of the opposition to NIL — that’s what McMillen gets paid to be — and it’s a little jarring to hear him line up on the wrong side of history, even if he believes fighting NIL is necessary for the survival of college athletics.
Especially when the NIL wave has yet to crest; it’s clear that whether by court or by Congress, athletes are going to be able to monetize their images in some way, shape or form. The NCAA, as an organization, came to that conclusion this winter and has been fighting an organized retreat ever since.
No matter what the NCAA might say, claim or pontificate, no matter what Mark Emmert says to Congress, no matter how hard it begs for the antitrust exemption it shouldn’t get, we now know what this is really about.
McMillen tore away the shroud, deliberately or inadvertently. It’s about what this has always been about: Making sure the athletes who actually generate the money don’t get to keep it, and the people who have always kept that money still do.