NCAA president Mark Emmert told Sens. Mitt Romney and Chris Murphy he needs Congress’s help to settle the future of collegiate athletes’ name, image and likeness (NIL) rights.
Emmert’s pivot from previously opposing any sort of change to the NCAA’s NIL policy comes as multiple proposals and working groups have popped up in Congress and bills at the state level multiply.
Emmert met with Romney, Utah Republican, and Murphy, Connecticut Democrat, behind closed doors on Capitol Hill Tuesday morning. The senators launched a bipartisan Senate working group focused on college sports earlier this month.
“I just left Sens. Romney and Murphy, where I said, ’We need your help right now,’” Emmert said at a “Future of Sports” panel sponsored by the Aspen Institute. “I think that the debate and the discussion is well past the ability of a group of states to resolve it … In terms of addressing these issues and creating a legally valid model in which the schools can provide more than they do now, whatever that might look like has to be created at a national level.”
An issue separate from the debate over whether institutions should directly compensate athletes beyond scholarships and room and board, NIL rights cover whether the athletes should be able to profit from selling their autographs or endorsing products, for example.
California enacted the “Fair Pay to Play Act” at the end of September to prohibit California colleges from preventing their athletes from NIL compensation, and at least nine other states have since introduced similar bills into their legislatures.
Days before California’s bill was signed, Emmert called it an “existential threat” to college sports. Just a month later, the NCAA Board of Governors voted to permit student-athletes to “benefit” from NIL rights and left it up to the three divisions to draw up new rules by January 2021.
Emmert said Tuesday a state-by-state approach “just doesn’t make any sense,” because he believes the differences among various states’ bills could create an unbalanced playing field.
“You can’t figure out how to make all of the relationships between schools and across the conferences … That implies that you need a federal solution, and that leads us back to Congress too,” Emmert said.
Emmert expressed support for student-athletes to profit off endorsements “if it could be done in a way that’s consistent with” the NCAA’s core principles.
Those constraints are sure to define whatever the NCAA decides to enact. Emmert reiterated that NCAA member institutions don’t want students’ relationships with institutions to become an employee-employer relationship — calling that requirement “inviolable.”
Romney, whose nephews Gunner and Baylor play football for Brigham Young University, has expressed support for finding a way to compensate college athletes in the past. Appearing on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” in October, he said not compensating student-athletes is unfair, “particularly in a time where they come from poor families in many cases.”
But he added, “What you can’t have is a couple athletes on campus driving around a Ferrari when everybody else is basically having a hard time making ends meet.”
Romney and Murphy aren’t the only lawmakers interested in reforming college sports. U.S. Rep. Mark Walker, North Carolina Republican, introduced a bill last March that, in essence, would force the NCAA to lift its restriction on athletes profiting from NIL rights.
In a statement, Walker criticized the senators for meeting with Emmert, calling it an “ignominious start to the Senate working group” for Romney and Murphy to rub elbows with “the chief apologist for an exploitative system.”
Walker also spoke at the Aspen Institute, though he was not on stage at the same time as Emmert. There, the representative claimed that Emmert has refused multiple requests for meetings with him.
“I have my doubts that the NCAA really has a desire to resolve this,” Walker said. “In fact, just months ago they said they weren’t. Then they did a 180 degrees (turn). So I’m hoping that they’re genuine in their efforts to try to resolve this.”
Walker, who recently announced he won’t seek re-election in 2020, described his bill as pro-free market.
“If I’m on a music scholarship, I can go play a gig and get paid for it,” Walker said. “If I have an education scholarship or not, I can pick up tutelage and earn. It’s only the student-athlete that we have carved out a specific segment in our society to say, ’No, you’re the only ones in our country that we own you and your likeness while you’re at this university.’”
• Adam Zielonka can be reached at azielonka@washingtontimes.com.
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