How NIL should've been handled

ouchmyknee · Jan 21, 2022

I've been decently tied into NIL, as one of my companies has been involved in a few projects with some athletes. I've given a lot of thought around the good, the bad, and the ugly of it all. In its current state NIL is essentially the wild wild west. I believe a big part is because the NCAA (for right or wrong) had basically thrown its arms in the air and said, "you deal with it".

Anyways, I do believe that there is a fix. I don't know if we can get there though. In my opinion the biggest issue with the current NIL guidelines is the lack of any guidelines. There is no limitation in the amount of compensation to an athlete or how the compensation is earned. That should've been the biggest issue addressed at the onset.

I don't believe there should be a cap on athlete earnings, but I do think there should be rules around acceptable compensation vehicles (no pun intended). For this too fully work, we may need the students to consent to being part of an NCAA players association of some sorts.

Acceptable income streams should be:

Officially licensed merchandise by the school - this includes jersey sales, t-shirts, etc.
Cut of licensing deals with said NCAAPA - think bringing back EA NCAA Football & March Madness video games and evenly splitting the proceeds from the licensing deal
Camps - income would need to derived from each registered camper to preclude a booster from paying $1M for the camp
Content income - if a student athlete has a YouTube page, they should be able to turn monetization on based on views, etc.

These streams allow every athlete to earn extra money, but makes it hard for any specific outsized return. In theory a booster could buy $1M in jersey's but that's fine because it's going through a retail channel and i don't think they'll want to have all those jersey's lying in their living room.

Thoughts?

UMRU · Jan 21, 2022