Bowlsby: NCAA’s hands-off position as NIL policy developed was the wrong call

IN TWO YEARS AS CHAIR of an NCAA working group convened to develop rules around athletes’ name, image and likeness rights, Bob Bowlsby saw a group that began as largely opposed to player compensation of any sort gradually relax its stance, accepting that players be paid for giving lessons, making public appearances and working at camps.

They even came around on letting players be paid as influencers, so long as there was third-party oversight to make sure they were paid appropriately for legitimate work and those payments were not recruiting inducements.

Those recommendations never made their way into NCAA policy.

“As hard as it is for someone that has been in it a long time to swallow hard and say, ‘Yeah, the time has come,’ we finally got there,” Bowlsby said. “We got close to the [more progressive] end of the continuum. But we could not get the NCAA to put it in place. And the reason we couldn’t is because Mark Emmert and their legal team believed we were going to get sued.

“They were right. We were going to get sued. But at least we would have articulated an architecture that was based upon principles that would give us some structure. And it also would have informed state governments as to where they could and couldn’t go without challenge. It was a colossal mistake in my estimation.”

When the Supreme Court ruled against the NCAA in the landmark Alston case, making it clear college athletes could be compensated while playing, Emmert decreed that the NCAA would step back from the issue, leaving policy up to individual states.

“It could have been different,” Bowlsby said. “And when we went to Congress, we would have been able to say: ‘This is what we think it ought to look like.’ We completely ignored our responsibilities to the members when we chose not to put anything out there.”