SPEAKER_00
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equityandhired.org. Hello and welcome to .edu, the Higher Education Policy Podcast from the American Council on Education.
In a little bit, we're going to be joined by Welch Suggs, who is an associate professor at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, and he's going to come out and explain to us exactly what's happening with NILs and college athletics. But before we do that, I am joined by my excellent, excellent co-hosts, both of them here with me today, Sarah Spreitzer and King of All Media, Mushdach Gunja. Hi guys, how are you doing?
SPEAKER_02
Good, but why is Mushdach King of All Media?
SPEAKER_01
Let's talk college sports, actually.
SPEAKER_00
I am so glad you asked, Sarah. Let's ignore Mushdach and talk about Mushdach instead. Mushdach, do you want to share with Sarah why I refer to you as King of All Media? Uh, I will if you don't.
So, our fans want to know, Mushdach.
SPEAKER_01
So, I did a couple of local TV news hits over the last couple of days because of the Trump arraignment that is occurring as we record this in a couple of hours on Tuesday with fire. The time our listeners hear this, it will have happened. And it was incredibly non-eventful.
These TV hits, mostly I said as I do on this podcast often, I don't know anything. We don't know anything because the charges have not yet been filed. But I was on TV a little bit and my kids were duly unimpressed, sadly.
Oh, yeah. I mean, they gave me a kiss on the cheek, but they weren't really all that interested to tell you the truth.
SPEAKER_00
I did like the way you very humbly ragged some TV hits, plural. You just still slid that in there, the multiple TV pops you had.
SPEAKER_01
Well, you know, I mean, for a co-host on the ace.edu podcast, I mean, I think these things are coming yours and Sarah's way soon too.
SPEAKER_02
Well, and we're not even talking about his jeopardy appearance of a few years ago. So hopefully we can put a link to his Fox 5 appearance in the show notes. But, you know, it's pretty quiet in D.
C. this week. I think we're in congressional recess.
Folks are getting ready for Passover and Easter. So everything seems to be centered around New York.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think that's right. We'll sort of see what ends up happening with these charges. You know, there's some reporting that there we're going to see 30, 35 sort of counts.
And we'll see if those are individuals sort of payments, you know, individuals sort of campaign finance violations all stemming from the same scheme, or whether there's something more complicated going on. But it'll be, it will be interesting to see, but you are no doubt right, Sarah, for once the political intrigue that normally clogs up the D.C. Metro is instead moved up to
SPEAKER_02
New York MTA. So that's, I will note that I did see some protesters today out around DuPont Circle, but I don't think it was related to President Trump's arraignment.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, not sure. I will tell you there were no protesters on Capitol Hill this morning, or at least not as of, you know, 730 or so in the morning when I walk through. So we'll see.
SPEAKER_01
I'm glad that we're talking with Welch about college sports, because I did spend a lot of the last few days watching March Madness and actually a lot of the women's tournament. I don't know, John, Sarah, if you spent much time, but on my, on our personal Slack feed with some friends, shout out to David Ziff, loyal listener of the podcast. We, I think we spent more time talking about the women's Final Four than we did the men's Final Four, which is the first in our Slack feed, which was very cool.
Great games. Were you guys able to
SPEAKER_02
watch? So I was able to watch. Oh, I was going to say, I did notice that LSU won the women's tournament. I guess there was more news about that.
I'm, I actually don't know who won the men's tournament. It's over, right? It's over. Last night.
Okay. Okay. Oh, last night.
SPEAKER_00
Kind of a kind of a snooze of a game too, actually. I mean, especially after the women's Final Four, which was, you know, I think pretty exciting and some really amazing individual performances too. Yeah, I tried to watch as much as I could.
I did not see every game, but I certainly saw both the championship games. And I saw a couple of the Final Four games on Friday or one of the Final Four games on Friday and one of the Final Four games on Saturday. So it was good.
It was a good, you know, good tournament. Interesting. We'll talk a little bit about this with Welch too, but you're beginning to see maybe more teams emerging into the late rounds of the tournament than you used to see.
And I think there's some shifting college landscape aspects that account for that makes it frankly a little bit more exciting, a little bit more interesting. Well, looking
SPEAKER_01
forward to it. And I think this is going to be a great conversation with Welch. Yeah, I can't wait
SPEAKER_02
to learn what is NIL. And why don't we say NLI? That will be the focus. And if you're just as
SPEAKER_00
curious as Sarah, hang with us for a minute. We'll be back after the break. And welcome back.
As we mentioned at the top of the episode, we are joined by very special guests today. Dr. Welch Suggs is an associate professor at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia and somebody very familiar to us and I'm sure very familiar to many of you from his time working at the Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as working on the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and with President Michael F. Adams at the University of Georgia.
So Welch, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Oh, it's great to be
SPEAKER_03
back with you. I've always had great experiences with ACE, so looking forward to the conversation.
SPEAKER_00
Well, hopefully we won't ruin that tradition for you here today. I have my eye on Sarah, mostly concerned there. But you know, one of the reasons we were really excited to have you on is because you are the person who's going to make clear to the rest of us something that I have lived in utter confusion with over the last two years.
And frankly, if you can give us a clear answer, I'm going to be super impressed because the people we have talked to have said, you know, here's this, here's that, but NILs, Names, Images, and like a name, image and likeness, right? This is something that if you follow college athletics even remotely, much like Sarah falls them only remotely, even you are aware of this, right? Exactly. And we're two years into this new environment of college athletics where athletes' abilities to market their names, image and likeness is now available. And it has been, I think in a lot of ways, driving a lot of the discussion around college athletics and frankly, driving a lot of what we see happening in college athletics, particularly around recruiting, but lots of other areas as well.
Can you just talk to us a little bit about how we got here? Sure,
SPEAKER_03
absolutely. So, you know, as a professor, I'm going to restrain myself from going all the way back to the beginning, although that's what I would love to do. But it's worth it just to explain that for generations, the NCAA has maintained this tradition of amateur athletics and the idea that athletes are not supposed to be profiting off any part of their athletic ability or accomplishments while in college.
And that sort of sounds well and good in terms of keeping people focused on what they're supposed to be doing in the classroom as well as on the field. But what's happened is that college athletics has grown into a multi-billion-dollar business. And along with that, questions have been raised about why athletes are subject to restrictions that we wouldn't tolerate on any other student group.
You know, you can't imagine a cellist in the University Orchestra being told that she can't make money off of her TikTok account or by, you know, giving private lessons or things like that. But athletes have never had access to those sorts of opportunities. So the two key historical things, and again, I'm trying not to lecture, but to summarize as quickly as I can, in 2011 or in the early 2010s, the NCAA lost an important court case where the plaintiff was Ed O'Bannon, who was a famous basketball player from UCLA, who had seen his name, image, and likeness used in the EA Sports basketball game.
And so he sued for compensation that, you know, claiming that that had been taken from him. And the Ninth Circuit eventually decided that more or less in his favor. And I don't want to get into the title details, but that decision opened up the opportunity for some negotiation in this space.
Then California became the first state a few years later to create a new law specifically saying that California institutions could not be a part of any association that restricted the ability of athletes to make money off of their name, image, and likeness. And fearing that that would create a competitive advantage for Berkeley and Stanford and UCLA, etc., a whole parcel of other states rushed to pass their own laws, which went into effect, as you alluded to in 2021.
And the NCAA has essentially had to take a back seat because it could not, you know, afford to fight battles on a 50-state front. And so we have a situation where broadly speaking, all athletes in American colleges and universities are now allowed to seek deals for their name, image, and likeness with the sponsors they want, subject to some rules and regulations that tend to vary by state. So it's a chaotic and fluid environment that no one is in charge of.
There's no central authority deciding which deals are okay and which aren't, which is kind of typical with businesses everywhere. And so it's really fair to say that this is as much of a free-for-all as what you would find for influencers in any market, any of the people you see grinning out from your phone and trying to sell you products. And now it's just athletes are part of that new world order that we have with
SPEAKER_02
internet marketing. So Welch, I know very little about this topic, but the fact that there's some laws in some states or other states moving forward with doing laws, is there a federal aspect of this? Like, do you think there is going to be some future authority that's going to try to organize all these different rules? So the NCA would very much like there to be
SPEAKER_03
some federal role or some intervention perhaps in the form of any trust exemption that would allow them to control this marketplace. The NCA has wanted to assert authority and has tried to enforce some of its rules, especially around how NIL gets into recruiting, which I assume we will get to in a little bit. But I would say broadly speaking that the state laws that are out there allow athletes to pursue deals in any state with some minor variations.
And unfortunately, I can't quote you chapter and verse on how different state regulations vary from one another, except some states are moving forward with things like allowing high school athletes to pursue NIL deals. And others have not done so right now. So that part is very fraught.
But the impression I get is that from state to state, it's not like athletes in Louisiana have a marked advantage over athletes in Georgia, for example, or that there are other massive disparities in the regulations
SPEAKER_02
as they are situated right now. So then how does NIL work for a college athlete right now in the
SPEAKER_03
space that we're in? Well, there's two basic flavors of NIL. And one's pretty easy to explain, and the other is a bit dicier. But the easy one is what the law was written to cover, which is the idea that athletes have some value in the marketplace, that they should be allowed to endorse products, or to give private lessons or clinics, or to sign autographs, or do other things like that.
So one of my students actually literally popped into my office an hour ago, and she is a student athlete. She's in her fourth year right now, and was telling me about some of the deals that she has. And those include details with Georgia Milk.
She's been part of that campaign for them. In the past, she's worked with Chipotle, the Burrito Company, and she also signed a really interesting deal with Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment, the WWE, which is recruiting college athletes and something that I find absolutely fascinating. So all of that is again, not really that different from what a normal student would be able to deal, except that this student athlete in particular does have a following because she's good, and because she has a decent sized social media presence, and there are a whole bunch of little girl softball players who really want to be like her when she grows up.
So she has value that she can go and negotiate deals in the marketplace, and her mom kind of functions as her agent. She called her her momager, a lot of the Kardashians. So that part I think is pretty straightforward.
So we can think about that just like we think of pro athletes doing details with Coke or with Disney World or whatever it might be. The other thing, and which is much more controversial is the question about whether particular schools, particular teams are able to offer or promise NIL deals to recruits as recruiting inducement. And this again has been part of college sports since the beginning of time, but the NCAA has never successfully been able to regulate it.
And one of my favorite stories is back in the 19 teams when a football player at Yale got the campus cigarette concession to induce him to come to school there. And oh, I can go through this for all the IVs and everybody else. Nobody has completely clean hands and this kind of thing.
But now with NIL, it's a whole lot more difficult to regulate that market or say that, okay, if someone decides to give $10 million to the University of Tennessee to recruit a quarterback, who's to say that the quarterback isn't worth that? It's just that that guy, that person is kind of the market for NIL. And maybe you require the athlete to do some token media deals or de minimis marketing things on behalf of the booster or if the booster is working through what we can call a collective, then something along those lines. And that is what has people freaked out because of course, that's not what NIL was intended to do.
It wasn't intended to be an inducement in the same way. But there are no controls over this marketplace. And so that is what has prompted an awful lot of hand wringing about what goes on in this space, how can we regulate it? How can we fix that particular problem? Thank you.
That's that's a great explanation. But
SPEAKER_02
one last question from me. Occasionally, I get the question about how does this actually impact international students who are athletes because I work on immigration provisions and thing policy impacting our international students. Are they able to take advantage of NIL?
SPEAKER_03
So the short answer is no. And I guess I would defer to your knowledge. But my understanding is that if you are an international student on a student visa, your ability to be employed is really,
SPEAKER_02
closely restricted. Is that right? Yes, yes, it is. If you are on a student visa, yes.
Yeah. So
SPEAKER_03
that basically has been held to prevent international athletes from marketing with American companies through NIL deals. Now, two pieces to that. One is that if the athlete is a dual citizen, if they hold a U.
S. passport, then they are able to do NIL deals. And I think that's a little more common than one might suspect otherwise.
But then the other piece, I was actually talking with another one of my students who is herself an international student athlete. And she said that the athletic program had said that athletes were free to do deals in their home countries or things off of U.S. soil. And obviously the State Department I don't think has an interest in that. So that's sort of an interesting wrinkle there.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
You know, Welch, when this NIL sort of business first came into our consciousness, starting with the O'Banning case, but then really coming into existence a couple years ago, you know, I think we heard a lot from sort of the chattering class that this might destroy college sports, you know, that things would never be the same. And to be honest, as much as I follow college sports, I'm not totally sure that I have understood the impact of NIL on sort of the college landscape. So Welch, who's getting these deals? You know, do we have a sense that it's mostly men, mostly in basketball and football? Is it more evenly distributed? Like what does it look like on campus right now?
SPEAKER_03
So, Welch, I think the most important thing to remember is that whenever you see a dollar figure or a size or even a scale associated with NIL, take it with a grain of salt. You know, we have no idea at the end of the day really what's out there, what numbers can be relied on, and what anyone's actually making, just for the same reason that we don't know a lot about what a lot of private companies and organizations are doing. I mean, I work for a state university, so you could look up my salary, you all work for nonprofits there under their own rules in terms of disclosures.
But in the private business world, you usually don't have access to those kinds of contracts. And so there's a lot of people that have been assigning value to athletes and to deals. But there's just no way at the end of the day of knowing what the actual amount of dollars changing hands is.
So, having said that, you know, I mentioned the second form of NIL, the recruiting inducements. I heard it has a sports writer friend called Bagman NIL, because that's how we always used to think of boosters carrying around bags of money to hand out to athletes. I think it's reasonable to assume that most of that is going to football and basketball players, male basketball players.
I think it's also reasonable to assume that athletes who have a very high profile are more likely to get remunerative NIL deals. So, an example of that would be Brock Bowers, who's a wide receiver on football team here in Georgia. And I should say he's not one of my students, but I see him on billboards all over the state advertising different things.
So those kinds of things, and on radio broadcasts, the same kind of deal. So he's functioning just like any other pitchman or pitch woman might be for any other kind of endorsement campaign. The interesting thing is that there are a lot of creative ways that other athletes in lower profile sports, female athletes, are getting into this business.
I mean, if you watched the Final Four, you saw Angel Rees from LSU, who has both played fantastic and then handled herself with just incredible grace and presence in the press conference. And she has a deal with coach. She has something like 17 different NIL deals that have been identified.
So she's got a lot of stuff going on. The New York Times got very angsty about Olivia Dunn, the gymnast from LSU, an article that came out back in the fall. Very concerned that because she was an attractive young woman that she was getting details that were not necessarily available to people who were not as conventionally attractive as she was.
And the article framed that as a problem. But I think at the end of the day, what we see happening is that athletes who have large social media followings for whatever reason are able to capitalize those and build NIL portfolios that can be remunerative. So is this a problem? I'm not sure who it's a problem for because the other interesting aspect, especially as regards female athletes, is that women who are at the top of their game in basketball, soccer and other sports are making a lot more money now through NIL than they would be able to make as pros.
So next season, we'll have the opportunity to see Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark from Iowa and Paige Buchers from UConn duke it out and really be able to capitalize on this great surge of interest in women's basketball. And they're around because they see that making money off of NIL is going to be a whole lot better than the rookie pay scale for the WNBA. Do we have any
SPEAKER_01
sense of the magnitude of so understanding, as you said, that we don't know everything? In fact, we may not know most things. Do we have any sense of the scale here of how much Angel Reese is making in NIL deals? How much some of the, you know, the the most popular men's football players are making?
SPEAKER_03
We don't. There are lots of rumors of athletes signing, you know, seven figure deals and things like that in these sports, especially as regards bag man NIL. There is a good article by a friend of mine in runners world recently about college track and cross country athletes making money and an agent asserts that a, you know, kind of mid to high level distance runner at Duke was making over $150,000 a year in NIL deals.
So with that as a range, it's important to realize that also beyond, you know, only what 330 or 360 schools or so are in division one and division two schools, division three schools, there are athletes signing deals. They're just basically for pizza money and stuff like that. And who's the begrudge, you know, division three golfer for making some pizza
SPEAKER_01
money? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's important for us to sort of recognize what the scope of the possible NIL landscape is, right, from a couple hundred dollars all the way up to, you know, potentially seven figures, but those, you know, two, three thousand dollars for some of these athletes is not nothing. And it was it's two or three thousand dollars more than what they were potentially getting before.
One last question for me before we maybe talk about the policy landscape here and, you know, the weirdness of not having sort of a centralized place to regulate all this. Well, what's been the impact that you can see from your studies of these NIL deals on the college sort of competitive landscape? I think this is one of the things that folks were quite worried about that, you know, maybe the rich would get much, much richer and everybody else gets sort of left behind. Hard to know whether we're going to be able to see those effects right away, though I did notice that the men's final four and the women's final four on the college basketball scene had a couple of newcomers.
So it wasn't all the blue bloods. What's your what's your sense of how it's
SPEAKER_03
playing out on campus? Well, I think there is an awful lot of angst about it. I think that you have to take if you're going to talk about the competitive landscape, you also have to remember that the insane loosened up rules on athletes transferring from one school to another. So that has been part of the NIL conversation and concerns about boosters having induced athletes to transfer from one institution to another.
There have been some cases where some athletes have apparently done that or there has been some movement on behalf of NIL deals. Miami has been in the headlines recently, although for odd reasons, I'll get back to you here in a second. But I think it has caused a lot more worry than it's caused actual changes in the makeups of things with basketball with men's basketball.
You have to remember that the one and done era is also an period of turbulence where that's really kind of disrupted the college landscape and you don't have Kentucky able to, you know, basically stockpile first round NBA draft picks to win titles every year that it is becoming much more spread out. There seems to be more of a premium on players who stick around for two, three, four, even five years. If you look at this year's tournament, I think that it is really hard to quantify the impact that NIL has had.
It certainly has put more pressure on universities to come up with deals and to find ways of attracting athletes. So from that standpoint, I would say that probably in the long term, it will reinforce the power structure as it is because the schools in the Power Five, they're able to pay the most for coaches as well as for athletes, potentially collectives, the ones who can get their act together and spend the money in the right ways to attract those athletes will continue doing so. But it's interesting, I talked to a lot of people in athletics who are really uncomfortable about this because they say if I wanted to work in pro sports, I would have gone to pro sports.
I wanted to be in a university environment. I want to be part of watching athletes grow and mature and prosper and leave here better than they came. And I think that's great.
But also if your salary is being paid by what those athletes do on the court or on the field, I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that everyone's allowed to be professional except for those kids. And I use the term kids advisedly. So I don't think we're seeing any long term competitive changes or sorry, I don't think we're seeing competitive changes right now.
Whether those really take root in the long term is something we're going to have to see. It's
SPEAKER_00
probably going to vary sport by sport. Yeah, well, I think this is so fascinating too. In part because I think a lot of the concerns we've heard are those ones that, you know, to much talk's point, the rich will get richer.
It's a huge advantage for certain institutions over others. It fundamentally, you know, reshapes the character and composition of collegiate athletics. And, you know, what I've heard from you at least so far is we haven't seen that so far, right? In some ways it reinforces what was already in place where institutions with an emphasis on athletic programs, high profile athletic programs continue to be doing that.
That said, clearly, and we've seen this publicly, the NCAA is concerned about this. They're concerned about what they see as a wild west kind of landscape where different states can set different roles, where there's no consistency across conferences or across institutions or across states. And really in a way that I think, at least in my experience has been pretty new for the NCAA, they've been looking to the federal government for some assistance.
And curious, you know, I'm not hearing these problems as you recount what the landscape looks like. How much of this do you think is really driven by concerns down the road, you know, an objective look at what's over the horizon? How much of it is that the NCAA traditionally had a very tight reign over college athletics and how that's managed. And some of these points you made about, you know, colleagues who work in sports and why, you know, I came for college athletics, I didn't want to join the pros.
You know, just really curious to hear your insights on sort of where you think this push is coming from, what's motivating it, and how much merit that is to the idea that we need a federal solution to this problem. And I'm putting quotes around all that
SPEAKER_03
last part. Well, first, John, I have to say I am so disappointed. I thought we were going to get through an entire conversation about NIL without using the phrase the wild west.
And just collapsed. Because that's what comes up every single time this is talked about. But the reality, I think, is that the NCAA blew it a long time ago, and the leadership of higher education blew it in terms of trying to confine college sports to an educational opportunity.
And there are all sorts of things you could point to in the past where they could have taken a stronger stand and didn't. But the reality is that over the last, especially the last 20 years, arguably over the last 50 since the Board of Regents case in the versus the NCAA in 1984, what we've seen is money pouring into college sports and into pour into the power five schools in particular, at levels that just could not have even been contemplated in the earlier days of college sports. And we have something like half a dozen schools will make more than $200 million just from athletics this coming year.
We probably have another, you know, several dozen that will make over $100 million a year. They're paying their coaches, you know, seven and eight figures to coach and even not to coach after they fire them in half they divide by a severance contracts. And what I think has happened is that the public has lost patience with the notion that we have to ensure that athletes are kept in this little box and prevented from doing even the things that other students do versus what pro athletes get to do in their time.
And that is why you're starting to see judges be really sarcastic, frankly, in opinions about the NCAA and their questions of what the NCAA's motives are. And the NCAA had a chance to adapt its rules and to take a look at what amateurism really meant in this commercial landscape. But instead, they doubled down with trying to assert that they had the right to decide absolutely under what terms athletes couldn't be compensated and what commercial rights athletes couldn't couldn't assert.
And by doubling down on that and losing time after time, whether it was in the O'Bannon case or in the Alston case, and it looks like in a couple of other cases, they're pending now or moving through the system. They've really lost that opportunity to handle this business for themselves. And so they are looking to other authorities for something.
And at the same time, the NCAA has always been a punching bag for state legislators or anytime they want to blame someone else for challenges that their own institutions face. So they lost through all the NIL conversation at the state legislative level. So now they appear to be putting all of their money on creating some sort of federal law that would standardize either NIL or the NCAA's ability to regulate it or both.
And that is what's being bandied about. I don't know the text of any particular bills or where they've gotten with that. But given the challenges of Congress doing anything, it's really hard to see how this is going to make it high enough on the agenda to actually get a bill that passes both houses and goes to the
SPEAKER_00
president. Yeah. And I would say, let's see, as we talk about often, this Congress is not especially effective at passing legislation, right? So in this area or in any other area, that's unlikely. I think another thing that you touched on is receptivity to the NCAA and Congress is not super high right now.
I think there was just a hearing, love this title from the buzzer beater to the bank, protecting student athletes rights, I think protecting student athletes rights to access NILs or two NILs, which I think even if you don't watch the hearing and I don't know,
SPEAKER_03
did you watch the hearing, Welch? I couldn't bear to honestly. And the reviews I saw were not great.
SPEAKER_00
Well, imagine how Sarah and I feel this is our full time job. But it does the title at least gives you a flavor of exactly what the approach was in the hearing. And frankly, if you're the NCAA and you're looking for help, you don't seem to have a very receptive ear in Congress right now.
So we know what the NCAA wants. What do the schools want, right? Do schools look at this and say, this is an environment we can thrive in? Is this an environment where we would like more certainty? Is this something that says, maybe we need to fundamentally rethink how we engage in athletics and where we put the opportunities? Just curious, you talked to different schools all the time. Well, you know, where are the schools landing? Well, I think they're all over the place,
SPEAKER_03
both internally and externally. I mean, college presidents, ultimately, the vast majority of them don't know that much about college sports. And I mean that kindly, because it's an incredibly complex and nuanced enterprise.
Athletic directors and coaches have a vested interest in something that looks like the status quo, both so that they can make maintain control over athletes, as well as not competing with them for their own salaries and revenue streams and other priorities there. The general student body and the faculty are, I think at most places, and certainly I would say here, you know, like athletes, they like obviously what's come with winning two national football titles. And they're not that concerned with how athletes are treated day to day.
And they think it's perfectly fine if they get to go out and make deals and make money and appear on their social media feeds and things like that. With around college athletics, also there is this powerful need to validate institutions through athletics. Roy Cramer, who is the former commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, once told me that athletics is a form of accreditation for schools.
And that in terms of sort of maintaining the value of saying that because you're in division one, you are competing with the Harbors and the Michigans and the North Carolinas of the world for excellence in students and everything like that. And I think that power of trying to be literally in the same league as major universities, I mean, I see with schools struggling to get into the AAU by the same token, that there is this tremendous need to show that you are big time in sports, therefore you must be big time and everything else. And so right now, it's still hard to see any very many schools just deciding, okay, we're done, we're out of this business.
I know St. Francis in New York just did recently or announced that they were going to do. But down here and stay next to mine, University of Alabama at Birmingham, which is primarily a medical institution tried to get rid of division or FBS level football a few years ago, because it just wasn't a fit with the institutional mission.
And it caused such an uproar among its alumni and among its stakeholders that the president was forced to backtrack and bring back the program at great expense. And so at this point, it's not exaggeration to say that many universities will continue throwing good money after bad to maintain their profile in college athletics, unless it becomes truly untenable, like if a court were to declare athletes to be employees and say, okay, you got to pay your football team and your basketball team X amount. And that will cause I think a lot of schools to DS clay because they simply won't be able to afford to even pretend to be competing at
SPEAKER_02
the same level. So, well, she talked about kind of what the how the NCAA feels how the institutions feel. How do the students feel about NIL right now? And what are you hearing from your students at UGA?
SPEAKER_03
Well, students as a whole, I think actually see it as a career opportunity. I teach in sports media program. A lot of our students want to go on in social and digital production.
And so they see job opportunities here. Among the athletes that I teach, a lot of them have had generally good experiences. I had a football player back in the fall who started a podcast one of his teammates that had sponsors.
You know, it was a it was very well received. It's not quite my cup of tea, but other people seem to love it. I mentioned the athlete before who had a deal with all state or sorry, not all state, a HR block appears to be doing a lot of smaller deals with and I would athletes through NIL.
But I do know that it's a strain. I had another student tell me that she really felt like she couldn't. If you had school NIL in your sport, you could not do all three at an effective level.
And so she had kind of backburnered her NIL activities to try to finish out the season in her academic career. But like I said before, there are others, including the one I mentioned with the WWE deal that saw she had elected to stay UGA for her fifth year, her last year of eligibility, because she was doing so well with NIL stuff. And she thought that would give her a stronger background to go out into the working world and whatever profession she chooses.
So I think it's largely been pretty benign that I see I have not heard any of the terrible
SPEAKER_00
deals or people getting done in by backmen or anything like that. Well, I want to stop here and thank you for taking time. We, as I think my colleagues, they're both nodding as I say this, we could keep talking for a while, right? I'll also say that I started off by saying if you can make this clear to us, I will be very impressed.
Count me impressed. This was I think a really revelatory conversation. I think particularly the perspective you brought to is something that, frankly, often is missing from some of the discussions around here, especially without some of the hyperbole and the scare, you know, the wild west terminology that you've heard too.
So thank you again for taking the time to join us. Really glad we could have you on.
SPEAKER_03
It's my pleasure. Thanks so much for your time today.
SPEAKER_02
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