NCAA trying to come down on NIL and collectives

Why did the Miami Collective guy immediately start deleting tweets when this all came out?



I also found Spyre's statement curiously worded. Nico is not a "University of Tennessee student athlete" until he signs his LOI. If they were totally unworried you'd think they would say "we'll keep working with high school athletes also where State law allows".

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Both sides are posturing. The Supreme Court decision was not even about NIL. Things aren't as clear cut as either side would hope. I see the NCAA is keeping the PR campaign going though. Deion said something yesterday, Saban is talking again today.


Deion coming out against NIL is rich, especially after his buddies at Barstool paid the top player in the country to flip to Deion's team from FSU on signing day.

Hypocrisy has a nice home with him and Saban.

Also, Saban's BS statement about how we need to protect parity in college football is laughable. There is no parity right now, and he wants to keep it that way.

The fact of the matter is that Bama and Georgia did not take significant strides to set up NIL collectives, preferring instead to continue to do dirty recruiting the old fashioned way. Now, they are seeing that this wasn't a great plan, so they are going to posture.

I think your analysis on the court case has been very insightful, and having not read the opinion fully myself, I tend to just side with your interpretation. I was particularly happy that you mentioned that Kavanaugh's language is all in a concurrence.

That said, I still have little faith in the NCAA winning a lawsuit during any of our lifetimes. They are simply losers, always have been, and always will be.
 
I think OSU, UGA, and BAMA are just upset they are caught with their players side-eyeing them all spring because they feel lowballed for their elite services. Thus the retroactive NIL rules to lash out at the players in the NIL game.

These coaches and elite teams feel vulnerable. Their teams stocked with elite talent are vulnerable.
These NIL collectives are paying top dollar for elite services and the Old Guards of college football are suddenly paying pennies on the dollar through the old fashioned dark money backroom under the table usual Bubba payouts that built the Bears and Saban's dynasties.

They can sense their players dipping their toes in the NIL/portal waters. This transfer season might have been just a small preview of years to come as the players getting five and six figure dark money deals from BAMA and Smart's machine and the usual powers of college football.

I figure UGA and OSU can play with the big boys in NIL, but I don't know if BAMA can pony up in the top tier. Clemson can't for sure.
 
I'm waiting for the first lawsuit on the NCAA to drop on this
The fact they even tried to retro it is laughable. They had plenty of time to put something in place but nope...Schools and States...burdens on you to deal with NIL for you player...
Big NIL rumor comes out....whoa whoa wait yall can't do that...
 
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I'm waiting for the first lawsuit on the NCAA to drop on this
The fact they even tried to retro it is laughable. They had plenty of time to put something in place but nope...Schools and States...burdens on you to deal with NIL for you player...
Big NIL rumor comes out....whoa whoa wait yall can't do that...

There's already a lawsuit working through the system. The NCAA tried to have it thrown out and lost. It's waiting on the trial date now.
 
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NIL Legislation Tracker

List of schools with State Nil legislation enacted 28* (Alabama Rescinded?)
9 States with Legislation in the works....

More to Follow? Who knows.
IMO, it is going to come down to State Lawsuits before it gets to Federal Courts.
Supreme Court Ruling only puts NIL on the board as it pertains to the individual player
 
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There's already a lawsuit working through the system. The NCAA tried to have it thrown out and lost. It's waiting on the trial date now.
Would've though super rich guys would be smarter and be able to read the writing on the walls.
The days of they're student athletes/amateurs and we want to keep that pure is coming to an end...Billions being made on the backs of players. Nothing amateur about that.
 
NIL Legislation Tracker

List of schools with State Nil legislation enacted 28* (Alabama Rescinded?)
9 States with Legislation in the works....

More to Follow? Who knows.
IMO, it is going to come down to State Lawsuits before it gets to Federal Courts.
Supreme Court Ruling only puts NIL on the board as it pertains to the individual player
The Supreme Court ruling was not about NIL. Neither "NIL" or "name, image and likeness" appear anywhere in the opinion. It's an important decision and one the NCAA would have been better off not having been made but it's not dispositive of all potential questions relating to player compensation in college sports. Later cases will flesh out what reasonable regulation consists of, but the Opinion of the Court (Gorsuch, 9-0) did seem to presuppose that reasonable restraints on compensation exist.
 
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I could be sympathetic for the NCAA if it was a fair and even-handed organization I could trust to handle this in everyone's equal favor.

As a life-long Tennessee Vol, I will pull for the other side on this one.
 
It was a conversation per whether the attorney is just posturing; not who would win.

I get it. You're rooting for the NCAA.
I'm rooting for order not chaos and so will you guys the moment the wild west turns against us and it will, because we won't be able to buy whoever we want in perpetuity, alot of other schools haven't committed to the model yet. Also, I think I was the first person in the thread to say the retroactive part was bull****. Anyway, I thought the tongue in cheek nature of a WW2 analogy in this context would be more discernable.
 
I'm rooting for order not chaos and so will you guys the moment the wild west turns against us and it will, because we won't be able to buy whoever we want in perpetuity, alot of other schools haven't committed to the model yet. Also, I think I was the first person in the thread to say the retroactive part was bull****. Anyway, I thought the tongue in cheek nature of a WW2 analogy in this context would be more discernable.

You're rooting for a monopolized market to support your entertainment preferences. I'm for personal rights and eschew exploitation.

The NCAA has been the epitome of a price fixing racker since its inception. As I used as illustration earlier in this thread, any other business "Association" that so blatantly fixed a market would have been shut down as a monopoly decades ago. Let the Burger companies create a coordinated minimum burger price between all companies.

The NCAA is artificially enforcing a lack of pay for the work of athletes in a multi-billion $$$ industry. Now, they're going even further to limit their ability to profit from their own marketing. It's a fixed market and exploitation.

So, that appears to be the difference between you and I. You ask, "How will this affect the school I pull for?" I ask, "Is my entertainment worth infringing on the rights of others?"

If NIL and pay for play blows up the entire college landscape, I'd still be lobbying anti-trust against the NCAA. If the NCAA can't survive and profit without exploitation, does it really deserve to exist?
 
You're rooting for a monopolized market to support your entertainment preferences. I'm for personal rights and eschew exploitation.

The NCAA has been the epitome of a price fixing racker since its inception. As I used as illustration earlier in this thread, any other business "Association" that so blatantly fixed a market would have been shut down as a monopoly decades ago. Let the Burger companies create a coordinated minimum burger price between all companies.

The NCAA is artificially enforcing a lack of pay for the work of athletes in a multi-billion $$$ industry. Now, they're going even further to limit their ability to profit from their own marketing. It's a fixed market and exploitation.

So, that appears to be the difference between you and I. You ask, "How will this affect the school I pull for?" I ask, "Is my entertainment worth infringing on the rights of others?"

If NIL and pay for play blows up the entire college landscape, I'd still be lobbying anti-trust against the NCAA. If the NCAA can't survive and profit without exploitation, does it really deserve to exist?

NOTE: I know the following is long, feel free to skip, I am talking to Orange Crush and giving him a response I've owed him for awhile.

It seems to me that you guys are going a bit further though. You are saying that a league of teams where guys voluntarily go play a game in exchange for tuition, room, board and living expenses, etc., totalling in many cases, in excess of $ 100,000 per year, not to mention social and networking perks, CANNOT be allowed to exist. But why can that league not exist where participation is voluntary? Should that league be punished because it's popular? The fact is it's popular because people have fanatical loyalty to the schools more so than the players, and the players choose to play in that school league to "exploit" the fanaticism people have to those schools and gain greater exposure and a better chance of being noticed by pro football teams. You see I would watch UT football if it was high school level talent. I really don't give a dang who the players are or how talented they are. I suspect there are quite a few people like me. The players take advantage of that attitude also, it's not a one way street.

I actually am not against college players getting paid though, especially for their name, image and likeness, but you are being extremely naive if you think alot of the payments being made right now are actually because company's see a value in the players name, image and likeness. Hell naw, most of these agreements, probably 99% don't have a chance in hell of turning a profit. The payments are being made to steer the players to a certain school (or keep them at a certain school) not because those "marketing" rights are really worth that much value wise. And when I say value, I'm talking about like if a shampoo company pays Tom Brady for his NIL rights to put him in their commercial, the shampoo company is banking on being able to sell enough shampoo as a result of Brady's endorsement (compared to without his endorsement) to offset the cash they are paying Brady and still make more money than they would have otherwise without Brady's endorsement. If the player's NIL is really that valuable, why is it necessary to have the "hooks" in the agreement (daily appearances signing autographs at Tuscaloosa businesses for example) to make it impossible to play for another school? Why should it matter what school they play for? (Note: as I said on like the first page of this thread Nico's deal should be grandfathered in because retroactive enforcement of these more express rules that just came out last week is complete crap, it's not fair to him, when the rules could have come out last year).

Back to the main issue though, let's say we get a semi pro league set up where these kids get drafted straight out of high school, play for 4-5 years, no school to worry about and are employees of the league, with benefits, etc., the whole 9 yards. What if there are kids who STILL want to just play football in exchange for a free education? Should they be allowed to do so? At what point should the ability of this voluntary education based/amateur league to exist be taken away? When the players become too good? When the education related league becomes too popular again? You see the players gain something by being associated with the school also, in fact if these two 18-23 year old leagues, one semi-pro/minor league, one education/ school based amateur league were allowed to exist side by side, I bet the education based league would still be more popular because of people like me, who are really rooting for the school of their state or that they went to. The University of Tennessee Vols will always be more popular than the Knoxville Argonauts or whatever.

I think the amateur-education based league should be allowed to exist and the association of schools should be allowed to enforce their amateur status. And there is no law against the development of a semi-pro league right now though. The NCAA isn't going out and trying to shut semi-pro leagues down. Truth is, the folks that want the semi pro approach are the ones doing that, they don't want to compete with the education-centric/amateur league, they want to take a short cut by taking over the education-centric/amateur league, effectively destroying it, and co-opt the popularity of the schools and their brand. That's not fair either. Rather, both leagues semi-pro and education-centric/amateur, should be allowed to exist and the education-centric/amateur league that exists should not be destroyed simply because the semi-pro people find it hard to compete with.
 
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Disagree. Never catching a pass or shooting a ball doesn't matter. Before the rule change a HS kid could go straight to the NBA and never shot a ball of college or Pro ball. Some even had shoe contracts. The only ones that will be getting those top bucks are the very top players in the nation, especially QB's who will be the face of the their team which makes them more marketable right from the start. I can pretty much guarantee you that Spyre and the smart ones have all done their homework on this one.
Until Joe Walk-on who's part of a multi million dollar team decides to sue for his share of the pie.
 
Kavanaugh didn't write the opinion of the Court though. He wrote a concurrence, which is for 1 guy, him. Gorsuch's opinion (which was the 9-0 opinion) said the antitrust laws prevented "unreasonable" restraints on trade, not every restraint on trade. The Opinion of the Court (the Gorsuch opinion) also agreed that the NCAA did not have to use the "least restrictive means to serve its legitimate business purposes". All that indicates that "reasonable" restraints will pass muster and that the NCAA has "a legitimate business purpose" in the Court's eye. That's what the next cases will be about, i.e. what are reasonable restrictions? Obviously, they can't restrict compensation entirely but there is an amount of regulation/restriction that is consistent with the antitrust laws.

Certainly the next question is whether the catch-all definition of “booster” is reasonable will come under scrutiny somewhere.

With this latest release, it appears the NCAA is just trying to restrain the other side of the NIL transaction.

If the boosters back up their financing with numbers demonstrating they represent fair market value, the NCAA should get its hat handed to it yet again.

Let’s see if they have any brains!
 
Again, what I suspect they are going to do, is what is already done with doctors and hospitals. Doctors are recruited to move places and set up practices by hospitals. There are regulations which prohibit hospitals from paying doctors more than "fair market value" or giving incentives for a doctor to move to an area which are "commercially unreasonable", etc. In the context of doctors and hospitals, what the government does not want, are hospitals buying up all the doctors to insure that they get all the patients and that their competitors get none. The government wants doctors spread out throughout the country so that people all over the country have access to health care. So what they do is they look at the contracts doctors enter into with hospitals and analyze whether it makes business sense on it's face. If the contract is a huge money loser for the hospital on it's face, the government will say "well, the reason you are willing to lose all that money on the doctor's salary or on benefits etc. is to insure that you get all the referrals or that your doctor doesn't go to the competition".

I suspect they'll follow a similar model which says, "gee Collective, you are paying Joe High School 2 million dollars for his NIL and he's never caught a pass in D-1? That's commercially unreasonable/not fair market value, what you are really paying for is for this kid to play for the university you say you aren't associated with, not for the value of his name, image and likeness". This argument will be considerably strengthened if there are clauses in the contract which require the kid to eat lunch every day and sign autographs at the Tuscaloosa deli, etc., something which makes it practically impossible for him to play anywhere other than Alabama. That's where I think they are going with this. I could be wrong but that's a legal framework that has held up in court for decades, that will accomplish their ends of clamping down on blatant pay for play. The Supreme Court opinion didn't rule out something like that, again the Supreme Court has seen that legal framework before and given it the thumbs up.

You’re just a caveman, though. Did little demons get inside my phone and type this analysis? You don’t now.

But what I do know is that I think you nailed it, counselor.
 
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NOTE: I know the following is long, feel free to skip, I am talking to Orange Crush and giving him a response I've owed him for awhile.

It seems to me that you guys are going a bit further though. You are saying that a league of teams where guys voluntarily go play a game in exchange for tuition, room, board and living expenses, etc., totalling in many cases, in excess of $ 100,000 per year, not to mention social and networking perks, CANNOT be allowed to exist. But why can that league not exist where participation is voluntary? Should that league be punished because it's popular? The fact is it's popular because people have fanatical loyalty to the schools more so than the players, and the players choose to play in that school league to "exploit" the fanaticism people have to those schools and gain greater exposure and a better chance of being noticed by pro football teams. You see I would watch UT football if it was high school level talent. I really don't give a dang who the players are or how talented they are. I suspect there are quite a few people like me. The players take advantage of that attitude also, it's not a one way street.

I actually am not against college players getting paid though, especially for their name, image and likeness, but you are being extremely naive if you think alot of the payments being made right now are actually because company's see a value in the players name, image and likeness. Hell naw, most of these agreements, probably 99% don't have a chance in hell of turning a profit. The payments are being made to steer the players to a certain school (or keep them at a certain school) not because those "marketing" rights are really worth that much value wise. And when I say value, I'm talking about like if a shampoo company pays Tom Brady for his NIL rights to put him in their commercial, the shampoo company is banking on being able to sell enough shampoo as a result of Brady's endorsement (compared to without his endorsement) to offset the cash they are paying Brady and still make more money than they would have otherwise without Brady's endorsement. If the player's NIL is really that valuable, why is it necessary to have the "hooks" in the agreement (daily appearances signing autographs at Tuscaloosa businesses for example) to make it impossible to play for another school? Why should it matter what school they play for? (Note: as I said on like the first page of this thread Nico's deal should be grandfathered in because retroactive enforcement of these more express rules that just came out last week is complete crap, it's not fair to him, when the rules could have come out last year).

Back to the main issue though, let's say we get a semi pro league set up where these kids get drafted straight out of high school, play for 4-5 years, no school to worry about and are employees of the league, with benefits, etc., the whole 9 yards. What if there are kids who STILL want to just play football in exchange for a free education? Should they be allowed to do so? At what point should the ability of this voluntary education based/amateur league to exist be taken away? When the players become too good? When the education related league becomes too popular again? You see the players gain something by being associated with the school also, in fact if these two 18-23 year old leagues, one semi-pro/minor league, one education/ school based amateur league were allowed to exist side by side, I bet the education based league would still be more popular because of people like me, who are really rooting for the school of their state or that they went to. The University of Tennessee Vols will always be more popular than the Knoxville Argonauts or whatever.

I think the amateur-education based league should be allowed to exist and the association of schools should be allowed to enforce their amateur status. And there is no law against the development of a semi-pro league right now though. The NCAA isn't going out and trying to shut semi-pro leagues down. Truth is, the folks that want the semi pro approach are the ones doing that, they don't want to compete with the education-centric/amateur league, they want to take a short cut by taking over the education-centric/amateur league, effectively destroying it, and co-opt the popularity of the schools and their brand. That's not fair either. Rather, both leagues semi-pro and education-centric/amateur, should be allowed to exist and the education-centric/amateur league that exists should not be destroyed simply because the semi-pro people find it hard to compete with.

I agree with most of this. My wife knows I would watch or cheer for UTK in any sport. Always remember, fan is short for fanatic. Also if i am really honest with myself, I am not concerned with getting players money because they deserve it. I just want to win. I see the NIL as the means for UTK to get back to the head of the pyramid. NIL will eventually fix itself by the market. We just need to exploit it now to get back to the top before it levels out. I think i would think differently if we were the Alabama & Clemson fans. Their teams have the most to lose.
 
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Spyre has made a valuation and believes Nico will generate more than 8M in advertising revenue. They are taking a risk that he will not. If he goes over that total everyone wins. If he stays under the number Spyre loses. This is the essence of free market.

You’re assuming Spyre guaranteed the value.

No good business writes a check it thinks it might not be able to cash when due.

I have every confidence at this point that Spyre is a well run business. Their team has been down this road before with professional athletes.
 
Laugh all we want, but the NCAA is looking for someone to be the target of their investigation and retroactive rule application, and right now, it looks like ole Jere Morehead (uga President) and the committee will turn their sights on Tennessee. Shocking, I know, that the President associated with the trash program that is uga would focus on a potential rival, but there ya go. Meanwhile, the under-the-table NIL network commonly called the State of Alabama will continue on, albeit with less 'legitimate' competition.

Amazing how this is all playing out. Almost as if the current powers want to remain the current powers or something. Weird.

Then we must circle the wagons and bring our best to bear.

I believe we hold the high ground on a number of levels.
 
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I think if we've learned anything from making it through first grade at age 7, it's the that jibber-jabber will not stop the relentless forward march of rule-making. I will say that this won't be easy to audit. It's going to take somebody with a strong stomach. So I suspect they will be having some brainstorming sessions to come up with some compensating action instead.

Glad it's not my money. Holy cow.

I smell legal fee$$$!
 
This 100% Give each player one opportunity to transfer without penalty and that is all! If they want to transfer beyond that, they must sit a year.

That is the rule. This year has been crazy, but I think it's pent-up demand (to transfer) being let out. Should be less crazy in future years.
 

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