The NCAA's Division I Board of Directors published new guidelines on Monday to clarify that boosters should not have contact with prospective college athletes, their family members or their representatives.
The guidelines were created by a group of athletic directors and conference commissioners who were tasked earlier this year with reviewing the evolving marketplace for college athletes. The NCAA allowed college athletes to make money by selling the rights to their names, images and likeness. The group's first public response comes amid growing concern that some boosters and NIL-focused companies are offering money as incentives to attend a particular school.
The new guidelines say that boosters or collectives who contact recruits or sign athletes to contracts that are contingent upon a player's attendance at a particular school are breaking NCAA rules. The Division 1 Board of Directors said that the NCAA could pursue sanctions against anyone who has egregiously violated these rules in the past 10 months since NIL rules were changed, but they are likely to focus more on issues that come up in the future.
While the NCAA may pursue the most outrageous violations that were clearly contrary to the interim policy adopted last summer, our focus is on the future, according to the board chair and University of Georgia President Jere Morehead.
The guidelines do not establish any new rules, but are an attempt to clarify the definition of a booster. In recent weeks, coaches and administrators have publicly called for more help from the NCAA in interpreting and enforcing rules that shape the elastic and increasingly murky line between college athletes making money from endorsement deals and professionals getting paid to play sports.
NCAA rules prohibit athletes from taking money as a reward for their athletic performance. The broadly-written rules make it difficult for the NCAA to separate deals made by private businesses for an athlete's services off the field from deals made with the intent of securing an athlete's services on the field.
The industry has emerged in that gray area. Dozens of businesses have opened their doors in the last year. Most of the collectives have slightly different approaches to how they do business, but generally they seek to collect money from boosters or fans and then find ways to channel that money to athletes at their chosen school through NIL deals.
The NCAA and schools can't punish athletes for accepting money from third parties. The guidelines could lead to legal challenges. Athletes in states without laws that specifically address college sports compensation can file lawsuits that claim any limits the NCAA places on their ability to make endorsement money violate federal antitrust laws.
The NCAA has taken a hands-off approach to regulating the new NIL market because of the risk of litigation, according to a sports law professor. There are other risks to the business model of college sports.
The current marketplace for athletes may make it harder for the NCAA to fight off a pair of complaints currently under review by the National Labor Relations Board that say college football and basketball players should be considered employees. In the past, the NCAA has argued against antitrust complaints, saying that without amateurism fans would lose interest in college sports and their business would suffer. If the NCAA fails to police the way its athletes make money, they will have a hard time making those claims in the future.
I think they are setting themselves up to lose the very thing they fought for by avoiding legal risk and allowing these payments to continue.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
