NCAA finally waves white flag on NIL

They won’t legislate student loan debt forgiveness or reduction but two old white dudes can’t wait to legislate what a poor black kid can and can’t do.

 

Tuberville and Saban are friends? REALLY?

The SEC is no different than the WWE backstage locker room.

 

Aren't the conflict of interest rules pretty standard in most places? Like the player can't cut a deal with Nike if they're at an Adidas school?
There has to be some happy medium on all of this stuff. It's quickly become the wild west, and faster than anyone imagined. Not sure I want the federal government involved, but there's got to be some middle ground where the players get their money while some basic rules are put in place to preserve the product of college sports. The latter is in everyone's interest.

 

You get ground rules by collectively bargaining. To collectively bargain, you have to recognize the players as employees.

That doesn’t have to mean they stop being students. Other than pay scale, you could treat them like the grad TAs or the desk clerks in the dorms. But the schools all want to do Avery Brundage cosplay and act like the gates of heaven are crumbling because someone other than them is getting a cut of the loot.

 

Why does there have to be a happy medium? Why can’t it be the Wild West?

As Dixiehack said, if you want rules, negotiate with the other side. Don’t dictate. I’d be surprised if Manchin and Coach Abortion actually spoke with any “student-athletes” and gotten their input.

 

It’s still real to me, darn it! PAWLLLL!

 

I'm thinking more of the transfer portal than NIL with this. And it's for the same reason you have rules regarding player movement in the pro leagues. At some point, it becomes detrimental to the product and kills the golden goose.

 

That's not the individual players' problems.

Of course it's inconvenient for coaches if players transfer on short notice. Tough shit.

 

Player movement in the pro leagues is negotiated, not dictated. When free agency began in MLB, Charlie Finley suggested signing everyone to one-year contracts, making everyone a free agent each year and make the players compete with each other for contracts. MLB didn’t take him up on it because it would have created chaos, plus they were looking to collude anyways.

Point is, coaches are allowed to jump their contracts at will for better opportunities. Why should players, who supposedly are also students, obligated to have to stay at a school just to participate in an extracurricular activity?

 

There are still rules regarding it in the pro leagues — when players can move, how the process works, what you can and can't do in recruiting them to your team. Those rules create order out of what would otherwise be a chaotic process. That's the kind of thing I think needs to be re-examined at the college level, because the current process is creating chaos on some level for a lot of people. I'm not familiar enough with the inner mechanisms to know what the specific answers are or how to negotiate them, but it seems that the current system is having a detrimental effect on the product.

 

Why does there have to be a compromise? The compromise always comes at a cost to the players.

 

Those “rules” are collectively bargained.