About an hour into the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on Name, Image & Likeness on Tuesday at the Hart Senate Office Building in Room 216, some light started coming through the chambers.
"With all due respect," NCAA president Charlie Baker said to Walker Jones, who is the head of "The Grove" collective at Ole Miss. And the booster-run collectives are at the root of all the evil of NIL. Jones says he is fixing that with his conglomerate with two dozen other collectives around the country.
"We do not participate in the recruiting process," Jones claimed, and I almost started laughing. "That is best left to coaches and athletic directors under the strict watch of the NCAA."
Then I really started laughing.
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Jones’ comment was the NCAA’s original guideline toward NIL back in the summer of 2021 when all this supposedly legal cheating started under the guise of athletes making money off their name, image and likeness. Only the elite college athletes in a few sports should make money because they are the only ones people would want to pay for their name, image and likeness.
Collectives give money to virtually all football and basketball players – even the ones not playing yet, or who are not any good. Check some of LSU’s defensive backs, for example. They’re actually being paid. And you can bet that NIL cash is either promised or on the way to most athletes everywhere before they get to their new school.
So, when Baker said, "With all due respect," I sat up in my chair. It rang a bell because that phrase is the central character in of many classic episodes of perhaps the greatest television show of all time – "Curb Your Enthusiasm."
This particular episode, which is called "A Disturbance In The Kitchen," drives home the fact that when someone says, "With all due respect," look out. Because he or she is about to hammer you. Or as Larry David himself says in the show, then "you say what you really want to say."
And Baker said it to the unsuspecting Jones.
Actor Larry David made a lot of sense with his "With all due respect" comment. (Getty Images)
"With all due respect to you, Walker," Baker said. "Nobody knows what’s going on. It’s a guess and a rumor."
Baker is off to a great start as NCAA president, as far as his attitude, approach and demeanor. The former governor (R-Mass.) has only been on since March. But because of his experience in politics and governing that is unique to the bean counter former athletic department types in the NCAA, he will eventually get this NIL mess he inherited from weakling previous president Mark Emmert corrected and reformed.
"Our new NIL bylaw proposal requires student-athletes to disclose certain information to their schools only and offers incentives to use fair contract terms and reputable agents," Baker said previously in his formal statement to the committee. "We want to partner with Congress to go further and curtail inducements and prevent collectives and other third parties from tampering with students. And we would like to have a national standard where a patchwork of state laws (more than 30) currently exist."
If Baker can get just what is in that above statement done with or without the help of Congress, it would be a significant step in the right direction that would weaken collectives. Some may be forthright and above board, but I fear more tend to be a bit mafia like.
With all due respect, Jones had little to say for the rest of the day.
Quite a few of the senators on the committee had several uninformed things to say as they don’t seem to possess a working knowledge of NIL. This is amazing because this was the 10th meeting of this committee.
Charlie Baker has obviously been speaking to those in the trenches outside of Washington D.C. who do understand the mess that NIL has become, One of those is new Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, who is a former Major League Baseball executive.
He is also interested in just how these "collectives" do their collections with the idiotic, instant gratification-laced NCAA Transfer Portal. That new rule with no waiting period after transfer just happened to start at the same time as NIL in 2021.
"We need the ability to effectively identify true NIL deals from pay-for-play or inducement schemes, particularly with the precipitous rise of collectives," he said. He could have added another, "With all due respect" to Walker Jones of The Grove Collective.
"Student-athletes are frequently being induced by collectives to attend specific institutions and transfer from one school to another without a true NIL deal," Petitti continued. "This has resulted in a pay-for-play system primarily controlled by boosters and executed under the guise of NIL. We are concerned that management of college athletics is shifting away from the universities to collectives. They are now trying to create competitive advantages."
And he delivered a clincher that Alabama coach Nick Saban said at the outset of NIL. Collectives are not fiscally responsible, and some have already not paid athletes as promised and have gone under.
"We are already seeing that payments from collectives will not be easy to sustain," Petitti said. "Without action from Congress, we will continue to lack the ability to manage collegiate athletics."
Petitti is also zeroed in on the ridiculous myriad of State U-absorbed state laws around the country that strategically try to give advantages to their schools and disadvantages to those from other states. This has resulted in an unfair playing field across the board.
"There are now more than 30 different state laws related to NIL," he said. "Many states are passing NIL and associate laws designed specifically to provide their in-state universities with a competitive advantage in recruiting through the promise of NIL. To provide equity, a uniform feral statute is needed to preempt this network of state laws."
St. Joseph’s athletic director Jill Bodensteiner also knows what needs to be done. She outlined a need to stop the collectives-inspired bidding wars and conflicting state laws.
"We desperately need reform when it comes to NIL," she said.
This goes against the comments from the liberal end of the press, which keeps saying, "The toothpaste is out of the tube. They can’t do anything about it."
If Congress listens to Charlie Baker, Tony Petittie, Jill Bodensteiner and some others and perhaps not several of its own, it sounded Tuesday as if proper changes could be made. It might be two or five years from now, considering that Congress often operates like Iowa’s offense – No. 130 out of 130. But it could still happen.
It was the 10th meeting of this motley crew, but there was at least a first down on this day.
"What I hear here is really a strong endorsement of college athletes as a unifying force for our communities," U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Ct.) said as if he had just discovered electricity. His statement was true 75 years ago, 50 years ago, 25 years ago and 10 years ago.
"But we need to avoid a race to the bottom in NIL," he said, actually brilliantly.
Get that toothpaste back in there, and put the year waiting period back into transfers so these young people can think about their decisions for more than five minutes.
"We need to avoid a bidding war among colleges that often tempt athletes with unscrupulous deals or agents who put colleges ate the mercy of an uneven playing field," Blumenthal added.
Correct again. But he should know that bidding wars were happening for athletes 75, 50, 25, 10 and five years ago before NIL. Funny thing, though, when those things were illegal, they were more fiscally responsible. Because only the really good players got paid.
U.S. Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) had one of the best comments that should have been said in the spring of 2021 before the NIL mess started. He suggested the NCAA do what it didn’t do back then with regard to NIL.
"Try to get together to come up with a new system," he said, "that looks like someone designed it on purpose."
No one did their homework back then, meaning a study of how things may develop. Finally, a collective effort is underway. And in that regard, with all due respect, a "collective" is not a dirty word.
