This is the online version of our daily newsletter, The Morning Win. Subscribe to get irreverent and incisive sports stories, delivered to your mailbox every morning. Here’s Mike Sykes.
The name, image and likeness space in the NCAA is absolutely the wild, wild west.
Sure, it’s been fun. And some of the deals we’ve seen have been cool. But there’s lots of money being thrown around with no parameters behind it.
There’s no security with these deals. A player can receive a deal today and it could be gone tomorrow, just like Jaden Rashada, who reportedly had a $13 million NIL deal from the Gator Collective just fall through.
That’s why it’s hard to say that NCAA President Charlie Baker is off with this call for regulation in the NIL marketplace.
He joined Greg Gumbel and Clark Kellog during the NCAA Tournament’s in-studio pregame show to talk about these issues and he called on “the folks in Washington” to help with developing “consumer protections” for the NIL landscape.
New NCAA President (and former Governor of Massachusetts) Charlie Baker says he wants "consumer protections" around NIL, saying he's "gonna talk some with the folks in Washington."
Charles Barkley responded, as only he can. pic.twitter.com/w1XURZ0sEm
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) March 24, 2023
“I would love to create some accountability and trasnparency around that so the families know what they’re getting into. And I would really like to see some sort of uniform standard contract, so that when somebody signs it they know they’re signing the same kind of agreement everybody else is signing.”
These are some good, positive ideas. But if the NCAA is calling on the federal government to help with it, something like this could take a while.
That’s why Charles Barkley called him out for it. He doesn’t want politicians to help — he wants the NCAA to create its own committee for this stuff and solve its own problems. And that’s a good idea, too.
But, uh, aren’t we galaxy-braining this entire thing?
It’s great that players are finally able to profit off of their own names as the NCAA has been doing for decades with student-athletes at this point. But this still does not solve the core problem here, which is that players are still not being compensated at all for their labor.
Only the most famous faces you know are making the big bucks. Everyone else is still making pennies on the dollar for the same work. There are massive gender pay gaps and racial disparities in the NIL landscape, too.
Charlie Baker, I know you’re new around here. But do you want to know the real way to solve these issues? Pay the players.
The NCAA is trying to have its cake and eat it, too. All this NIL business is is the NCAA allowing others to do the work that it should be doing in paying its workforce. OK, fine. But now you want to regulate it, too? How does that work? You can’t do both without any pushback. This is the NCAA telling others how to do the job that it should be doing.
Washington regulators can get involved as much as they want. But thinking that more regulation will ultimately solve what was already an imbalanced marketplace is a fool’s errand.
Whatever they manage to come up with will likely only be a stopgap measure before some booster-based organization finds another way to curtail the new rules, just as they’ve always done. The game is the game, man. It’s been this way for years — even before NIL deals were ever a thing.
The way to solve this problem is ultimately the same as its always ever been. Paying the players what they are owed. Until the NCAA chooses to do that, its problems won’t go away.
Quick Hits: Mick Cronin’s hilarious impatience…The coolest alley-oop ever…and more
— Mick Cronin has to be the most unintentionally funny coach in the world. The guy was so mad he had to wait 33 minutes for his postgame press conference after UCLA’s loss to Gonzaga.
— Markquis Nowell is forever a college basketball legend after Thursday night. He faked an argument with his coach while throwing an alley-oop in the most spectacular fashion. It was glorious.
— Tom Brady is beginning his retired life by purchasing stake in the Las Vegas Aces. Looks like that conversation with Kelsey Plum paid off.
