By Scott C. Lloyd, Attorney
The college sports landscape is radically different now than it was when I was young, and the changes have been bad for college sports. Big money has been behind most of the unfortunate changes.
I know some of you are going to retort, “What do you mean the changes have been bad for college sports? The games are better than ever and the players prepare harder and play better than ever. They prepare and play now as if they were professional athletes.”
Bingo. That’s the problem. College sport is supposed to be special. It’s supposed to be different than professional sport. The enthusiasm of college athletes and their fans is supposed to be rooted in loyalty to their institutions. Alumni and athletes are supposed to have in common that they have walked the same halls and attended the same lectures.
Now, big-time college athletes barely take any real classes. Their curricula are loaded with “Independent Study” and “Directed Reading” courses that never hold class sessions and are available only to athletes. They barely set foot on campus.
We continue a slide away from big-time college athletes being college students, and therefore special, and toward being just more professional athletes.
What has driven this slide? Big money. The sports teams now are just business enterprises owned by the institutions, and they are highly profitable for the colleges. The colleges with big-time teams stand to make—or miss out on–too much money to show character about these unfortunate changes.
Time was when a student picked his college because he thought it was the right college for him, and when he got there, he might go out for the football team. Now, we have coaches sending recruiting letters to eighth graders.
The newest and greatest threat to college sport comes from NIL: Name, Image, Likeness. When people say this, they usually omit the word that should follow the letters: “Money.”
NIL enables college athletes to sell the use of their name, image, or likeness for commercial purposes, such as product endorsements. Shedeur Sanders, a quarterback at Colorado, made $4.5 million off his NIL deals last year.
The legal basis for NIL is a federal law, the Sherman Antitrust Act. In 2021, the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed a lower court ruling that read, “The treatment of Student-Athletes …is the result of a cartel of buyers [colleges] acting in concert to artificially depress the price that sellers [players] could otherwise receive for their services. Our antitrust laws were originally meant to prohibit exactly this sort of distortion.”
The good news: All this is based, not on the Constitution, but on an Act of Congress. Acts of Congress can be changed. Alabama Senator and former college football coach Tommy Tuberville is working now to try to bring NIL under control by a change in the law.
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