Consider This from NPR - How Name, Image, and Likeness Contracts Are Transforming College Sports

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

The NCAA's March Madness Tournament is upon us, and after over two years of pandemic restrictions at sporting events, stands are packed to full capacity with fans. Transformative changes are happening off of the court too: for the first time in March Madness history, college athletes can cash in on endorsement deals because of changes to the NCAA's Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) policies, which are a result of a Supreme Court ruling last summer.While the new arena in college sports has been lucrative for athletes, with contracts reaching 7 figures, NIL advocates are concerned about the lack of legal and financial protections for students. We speak with Stewart Mandel, Editor-In-Chief of college football at The Athletic, about how the current nature of NIL deals may risk exploiting student-athletes.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Last week, the NCAA's March Madness basketball tournaments kicked off, and the arenas felt, dare I say, normal. And Alexander Haynes is back! It counts! And one for Trey Alexander! The stands were packed with fans, back at full capacity for the first time in two years. They're not going to count it! They are not going to count it! It was after the buzzer! But something new was happening off the court, too. It's Selection Sunday, and Drew Timmy has a choice to make. Nah.

Mmm. No. No. That little shaving cream ad featuring Gonzaga basketball player Drew Timmy? Well, it wouldn't have been possible or legal before last summer. There it is. Mom, I found one. See, the NCAA has never before allowed student athletes to make money off their name, image, or likeness.

Those deals are called NIL for short. That's meant no sponsorships, no endorsement deals, all while the NCAA made millions from March Madness, $850 million just from the TV rights to the men's tournament last year. But then, a Supreme Court case changed everything last year. Here's Justice Brett Kavanaugh at the oral arguments. It does seem as if the schools are conspiring with competitors, agreeing with competitors, I'll say that, to pay no salaries to the workers who are making the schools are conspiring with competitors, agreeing with competitors, I'll say that, to pay no salaries to the workers who are making the schools billions of dollars on the theory that consumers want the schools to pay their workers nothing.

Last July, the court ruled that the NCAA could no longer limit student-athletes from using their own name, image, or likeness. And in a mad rush, hordes of brands, big and small, look to cash in. What does NCAA basketball star Buddy Boeheim eat for breakfast? I can't worry about the pain in my feet. The Goodfeet Ars Report has allowed me to move swiftly. With the new changes in the NCAA, I thought it was time to get some help around here

in communicating the importance of oral health. Who better than the best defender in the country, Josh Paschal? But here's the thing. Because NIL policies are brand new, they are still kind of like the wild, wild west. It's happening on the fly in just rapid, rapid pace. And I don't think anybody really knows for sure what they're doing. That's sports writer Stuart Mandel. He says there aren't established guardrails to protect students. A lot of these athletes are being taken advantage of. They don't know what they're signing. They're signing away exclusive rights to their image. Consider this. Student athletes can finally cash in on their own popularity. But as some contracts exceed seven

figures, do these deals have the players' best interests in mind? From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. For student athletes in the U.S., July 1st of 2021 was a day that reshaped college sports forever. For the first time, college athletes could be compensated for their name, image, and likeness. Seemingly overnight, thousands of student

athletes became brand ambassadors for companies like Nike, Yahoo, and Gatorade. Now, this didn't actually happen overnight. Momentum had been building for decades. One day in particular marked a shift in the college sports world. Chairman Wicker, Chairman Moran, and Ranking Member Blumenthal, thank you for inviting me to speak on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of men and women who represent the current, former, and future student-athletes. In February of 2020, former college athlete Kendall Spencer stood before the Senate. See, back in 2020, a handful of states had a patchwork of rules allowing student-athletes to have NIL deals. The NCAA fought legal battles against many of those laws and demanded clearer federal guidelines. Spencer was after clearer guidelines too, but he was concerned that students weren't

equipped to navigate the complicated landscape of NIL rules. The notion of expecting student athletes to potentially hire an agent to manage their brand on top of perhaps an attorney to ensure compliance with this patchwork of state laws is unreasonable. Today, even after the Supreme Court ruling, Spencer, who is now a lawyer, says he worries there aren't enough protections in place for students, especially in a hyper-online world. We're dealing with a highly unregulated system, and that has all sorts of dangers in it. You know, when a deal goes bad, who are the student athletes going to go after?

Are they going to go after the institutions? Are they going to go after their agents? You know, if I can't keep Adidas from just snatching a photo of me and putting it wherever they want to or anyone else on social media like Instagram, then how valuable really is this new ability? And there are other points of contention in the sports community, like the value of these deals and where that money's coming from. What NIL was intended to be used for, which is players can get a commercial or an endorsement and make a little bit of money.

And I don't think anybody has any problem with that. That's Stuart Mandel, editor-in-chief of College Football for The Athletic. He recently broke the news of an unnamed football recruit who landed an $8 million deal, a deal that he says worries NIL advocates. As is often the case in college football, people are looking for ways to exploit it and use it to get recruits to come to their school. And so what we've seen are these, what are being called NIL collectives that are basically, you know basically boosters, donors who are fans of a certain school, rallying other boosters and donors to pool their money and use it to make big offers to a five-star recruit that they want to come to their school. In this case,

they offered that player, and I saw that he signed it, a contract that is money we've never really heard of, certainly for a college athlete. You say that is money we've never really heard of, certainly for a college athlete. You say it's money we've never heard of for a college athlete. How far outside the norm is $8 million? Well, we know that last year Nick Saban, Alabama's coach, said that his star quarterback, Bryce Young, was making close to seven figures. We know that Quinn Ewers, a quarterback from Texas,

who first went to Ohio State and has now transferred back to Texas, was making around a million, maybe a little over a million. So this contract will pay the player more than $2 million a year, which could come out to over $8 million if he plays there for his whole career. How evenly is this money generally spread across college sports? Like, are men's basketball and football kind of sucking up a lot of the oxygen here? Yeah, I mean, there's no question that the big money is going toward, in general, football and men's basketball. Now, we have seen individual players, especially in women's basketball, gymnasts, volleyball, individual star players in those what we call non-revenue sports who are landing good endorsement deals. And that is something that a lot of people

saw coming and thought would be obviously a good development for these sports. But in general, it's football and men's basketball. College athletes have been pushing the NCAA to give them more power and autonomy for years on many different fronts. And the contracts that we're talking about are just one piece of that puzzle. How much more are players still hoping to get from the NCAA? Well, there are advocates out there who think the athletes should be full-on employees of the school. That's not necessarily a majority opinion. I think that's a very contentious issue because then you really are turning college sports into professional sports.

Players can be fired. There's all sorts of implications of that. But that doesn't mean there aren't people that are still going to push for that. Would you say that on the whole, this shows that the NCAA is on the decline, is losing power? Is this a trend that's likely to continue? The NCAA has lost tremendous power over the last decade, as they've lost several of these high-profile court cases. And I think the huge mistake the NCAA made was not reading the room and proactively developing their own policies that would have allowed for athletes to make this NIL compensation. And not a dollar – it's not costing their schools a dollar. These NIL deals are coming from third parties.

But they fought and fought and fought in court and lost every case. And like you mentioned earlier, obviously culminating in the Supreme Court 9-0 decision last year in the Alston antitrust case. And so because of that, nobody fears the NCAA anymore. That $8 million deal I talked about is pretty blatant, buying a recruit, which is still very much against the rules. But clearly the parties involved don't fear that the NCAA is going to do anything about it. And so what do you think the next shoe to drop is going to be? You know, I think we're going to see a really messy next couple years as this stuff starts to sort itself out. Because I think what's happening is, you know, the contract I saw

was negotiated by a legit attorney and is, you know, obviously, he considered that to be a favorable outcome for the athlete. A lot of these athletes are being taken advantage of, they don't know what they're signing. They're signing away exclusive rights to their image. And what we're probably going to see in the next two to three years is a lot of lawsuits and a lot of messy situations where the athlete wants to try to get out of what they signed. Or let's say this $8 million kid gets to college and turns out to be not very good, which is kind of a 50-50 crapshoot,

even with the most highly rated recruits. Now that NIL collective is going to be trying to figure out how to get out of paying him that money. So everybody's figuring out the new rules of the game. It's happening on the fly in just rapid, rapid pace. And I don't think anybody really knows for sure what they're doing. And so it's a little early to say, for instance, oh, if this kid get $8 million, the next guy's going to get $9 million. We'll find out soon if that was an outlier or a sign of things to come. Stuart Mandel is editor-in-chief for college football at The Athletic. It's Consider This from NPR.

I'm Ari Shapiro.