What NCAA President Charlie Baker wants Congress to do on NIL
The House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing today on “name, image and likeness” – the NCAA standard that allows athletes to earn money while playing college sports.
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The House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing today on “name, image and likeness” – the NCAA standard that allows athletes to earn money while playing college sports.
NIL is a huge issue in college athletics. And it’s getting plenty of attention this week, with the Final Four kicking off Saturday in Houston. Go UConn Huskies, by the way.
The ability for college athletes to get paid while they compete has changed the landscape of amateur athletics. Yet as of now, the NIL outlook is the Wild Wild West in many ways. Athletes have just started to earn money and universities are grappling with setting up programs and instituting standards.
Charlie Baker, the former two-term Republican governor of Massachusetts, recently took the helm of the NCAA. Baker won’t be testifying at the E&C hearing today, but he expects to in the near future. We spent some time speaking with Baker Tuesday about what he wants to see Congress do in the NIL space.
Baker said he has gotten an “enormous amount of incoming” from Capitol Hill about NIL since becoming NCAA president earlier this month. We’ve seen Baker on the Hill numerous times recently. He’s met with members of both parties and leadership about NIL and other issues.
Baker’s top priority in the NIL space is to have Congress pass a law to create transparency in the contracting process. He wants lawmakers to institute a “uniform standard contract” for student athletes to use when they sign an NIL deal – not dissimilar from a mortgage contract.
Baker also wants a public “registry of NIL agreements” to shine light on what players are making across the country. Baker said this would benefit student athletes and their families to ensure that they are getting the money they deserve and for corporations so they don’t overpay.
“There’s no sort of basic market mechanisms in place you would normally see in a market like this,” Baker said. “One [athletic director] said to me, ‘Everybody lies.’ And that’s a problem for kids and families and everybody else.”
Baker added that the NCAA is going to try to create an internal program to make NIL agreements public. But he worries that a patchwork of state laws will be unwieldy and is pushing for federal action to set one standard. Here’s more:
“I view this mostly as an opportunity to create some consumer protections for families and student athletes and to help people figure out exactly what this so-called market looks like.
“They don’t know that much about these agreements outside of the ones that they’ve done themselves. And there are no market signals here at this point in time.”
Of course, we all know the big caveat here. It takes a lot of pressure to convince Congress to act on anything. But the NIL market is huge – as is college athletics – so we’ll keep an eye on this going forward.
– Jake Sherman
First time I’ve seen a concrete ‘ask’ from the NCAA to congress. Thoughts?
