FERNANDINA BEACH, Fla. — Football coaches and athletic directors from ACC schools had been meeting for about two and a half hours here on Monday when the NCAA, at last, released long-awaited guidance concerning name, image and likeness. The news spread quickly behind closed doors during the ACC’s annual spring meetings at the Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island.
Coaches and ADs pulled the NCAA’s news release up on their screens. The NCAA’s “guidance is intended to provide clarity,” the statement said, “in a rapidly evolving NIL environment.” The guidance had been “developed by a task force of national leaders” with money-making opportunities for athletes “at the forefront” of all discussions.
It took the NCAA almost three full paragraphs and 159 words to start getting to the point: “NCAA recruiting rules preclude boosters from recruiting and/or providing benefits to prospective” athletes, the release said, and now the NCAA had provided guidance to schools that supposedly made it clearer what was and wasn’t allowed concerning NIL.
The problem: The guidance wasn’t all that clear at all.
When the first day of the ACC’s spring meetings concluded, most coaches and athletic directors didn’t linger. Most football coaches moved with a quickness past a small gaggle of reporters who’d been waiting.
Pat Narduzzi, the head coach at Pitt, might’ve had a lot to say about NIL and what it has become. Narduzzi appears likely to lose his best returning player, wide receiver Jordan Addison, who has entered the transfer portal.
Addison perhaps unwittingly represents this “rapidly evolving” NIL landscape: Here’s a player who has had much success at Pitt but who is close to leaving amid apparent more lucrative off-the-field financial opportunities elsewhere. Reports and rumors abound that Addison is likely headed to Southern Cal, but it is not yet official. If it happens, it’d be the sort of players-first move many will applaud in this new era of college athletics but one that would clearly come in contrast to the intent of NIL-related allowances the NCAA conceded almost a year ago.
Did Narduzzi have anything to say about NIL, inducements or the NCAA’s belated attempt to rein in the predictable free-for-all that has turned things into pay-for-play by another name? Did he have anything to say about the specter of losing his best returning player due to an inability to match the value of an NIL deal that player might be able to secure elsewhere?
Narduzzi likely had a lot to say about all of those things. But not publicly. Not now.
“You know I’m not talking about anything,” Narduzzi said, as he whisked past reporters early Monday evening. “Come on.”
Those who did stop and talk expressed a skepticism that the NCAA will be able to control an NIL environment that has devolved into college athletics’ latest arms race.
Since the beginning of time, or at least since the beginning of television rights deals that bloated the coffers of major-conference athletic departments everywhere, schools have competed as fiercely outside the lines as between them. Coaching salaries and the never-ending facility wars are at the foundation of the traditional battlegrounds. The new frontier includes NIL collectives and deals designed not only to market athletes and enhance their brands — but to keep them happy, and enrolled.
College athletes have never had more rights than they do now, and that’s widely accepted as a positive. Yet the unrestrained NIL market quickly moved beyond its original intent and into a domain that’s likely to prove difficult, if not impossible, to turn back.
“I hope it gets reeled in on some level,” Boo Corrigan, the N.C. State athletic director, said after the meetings on Monday. “I think all of us do. I think all of us looking at what’s going on support the ability for name, image likeness, but I don’t know that this is what was the intended idea behind it.”
Earlier in the day, N.C. State backers launched what they are calling “Pack of Wolves,” an NIL collective that, according to its website, is “a community of passionate fans, alumni and supporters” of Wolfpack athletics who are “committed to empowering” N.C. State athletes “to maximize their personal brand value” via NIL “while creating meaningful and lasting connections” with supporters.
Pack of Wolves is not unlike NIL collectives that exist elsewhere, including at North Carolina. Those schools without such collectives now face the risk of falling behind in the NIL game. Or perhaps now, collectives are discouraged, given Monday’s news and the NCAA’s impending attempt to crack down on boosters who’ve been using NIL as a guise to lure athletes to a particular school.
“The guidance,” the NCAA’s statement went on Monday, “defines as a booster any third-party entity that promotes an athletics program, assists with recruiting or assists with providing benefits to recruits, enrolled student-athletes or their family members. The definition could include ‘collectives’ set up to funnel name, image and likeness deals to prospective student-athletes.”
What did it mean, exactly? That boosters couldn’t at all be involved in any NIL deal? That a prominent booster with, say, a hog-farming empire, a la longtime N.C. State mega-supporter Wendell Murphy, wouldn’t be allowed to strike an NIL deal with any athlete at N.C. State?
Corrigan considered the hypothetical, first noting that boosters weren’t allowed to be involved in recruiting “for 100 years.”
“That was kind of part of it,” he said, “that a booster couldn’t be involved. And now they can, from that standpoint, right?” he asked, referencing the ability for boosters to sponsor NIL deals.
“I think part of the challenge with the whole thing is there’s no market value associated with (NIL) right? You know, the way it’s set up right now. And I think that, to me, has been the challenge from the beginning.”
Without a standard of market value, it has been impossible to separate, with any kind of definitiveness, a legitimate NIL arrangement from one that might exist solely to persuade an athlete to go to or remain at a certain school. And even if such a distinction could be drawn, who would make it and how would the NCAA enforce the guidelines it released to members on Monday?
Those are questions nobody here could answer on Monday. One ACC football coach, speaking off the record on his way to dinner, rolled his eyes at the thought that the NCAA could get in front of pay-for-play masked as NIL, or even come close to stopping an onslaught of deals that more resemble pro sports free agency than anything else. Almost a year has passed now since the NCAA reluctantly granted athletes NIL rights, after fighting the possibility for years, if not decades.
What has resulted is the so-called “wild west,” which has already become a memeable cliche to describe what’s happening throughout major college athletics these days. The Addison case is, in a way, Exhibit A.
“I’m excited that the NCAA is, you know, seemingly ramping up the enforcement plans — the priority of it,” Graham Neff, the first-year Clemson athletic director, said on Monday. “Just, I know there’s been so much uncertainty with (NIL) over the past 10 months, 11 months.”
So how would these new NCAA guidelines be interpreted, Neff asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered.
At Clemson, he said, he and other administrators have engaged in regular discussions with coaches about “what the rules are.” Those coaches, Neff said, have told him, “I want to play by the rules.” But then there’s the inevitable follow-up: “Like, what are the rules?”
About an hour after the NCAA’s new NIL guidelines became public on Monday, there wasn’t any greater sense at the ACC’s spring meetings that anyone could answer that question with any authority.
