Category: Blog

On April 29, 2020, the NCAA Board of Governors supported rules changes to allow student-athletes to have opportunities to receive compensation for third-party endorsements. And on July 1, 2021, the NCAA finally approved and finalized the ruling and for the first time in history, collegiate student-athletes are allowed to earn compensation on their own name, image and likeness deals.

Student-athletes have many opportunities to earn compensation, if they so choose. For many of the bigger and more valuable deals, student-athletes will need to look into having an agent or third party involved in this operation. It will be difficult for student-athletes to negotiate deals with businesses, sponsors and other entities without having any experience in this type of business. 

In addition, compliance offices are now busier than ever trying to manage the influx of questions about NIL ahead of the 2021-22 academic year. It will be important for student-athletes to know that compliance offices will have some answers, but not all. University employees won’t be able to help student-athletes negotiate deals or help find opportunities; the compliance office can only regulate per the NCAA’s evolving ruling. 

Male and female athletes will have the same rules, guardrails and regulations provided by the NCAA. Everyone will be on the same playing field and level. Student-athletes will all have the general opportunity to earn compensation for their name, image and likeness, but the number and value of opportunities will vary immensely. There are many factors involved with how and why student-athletes could receive more money than others. 

I conducted an ample amount of research in June of 2020, and I realized that there will not be a general framework for student-athletes to follow. There is not a model that can be replicated for each athlete’s situation. Every athlete’s situation and opportunity for compensation will be different. 

The NCAA has a tall task ahead. I do believe the implementation of these new rules is moving the collegiate athletic experience in the right direction, but there will be a lot learning along the way. In addition, the NCAA has not had the reputation for “sticking to their guns”.

“For decades, the NCAA and its members considered cost-of-attendance stipends anathema to amateurism. And then they didn’t. That pretty much describes the NCAA attitude toward amateurism throughout its 115-year history.” (Maisel, 2020).

Student-athletes have already shown what the power of social media brings to the table. The name, image and likeness ruling will help out student-athletes who have major numbers in followers but don’t go to a Power Five school.

“For example, Phoenix Sproles is a wide receiver at North Dakota State University and has 147 thousand followers on Instagram and Tik Tok, which is by definition an “influencer/star status” (Cousin, 2020).

The power lies with the student-athletes. The problems come as the NCAA will attempt to regulate the opportunities to comply with Title IX rules and keep things fair, which isn’t totally a bad thing. It will just be difficult. 

There are so many factors that go into student-athletes compensation opportunities:

-Institution

-Sport played

-Social media followers

-Geographical location of school 

-Competition with other schools 

Let’s not forget that student-athletes will have to file taxes on the money they earn.

“We have discussed the impact of name, image and likeness in our director’s meeting, but we didn’t even think about the tax implications,” said Jeff Pritsker, Assistant Athletic Director for Business and Administration at San Jose State University (Davis, 2020).

An example of how this would work with student-athletes includes a student-athlete receiving a car from a dealership for a year after appearing in commercials. As with any normal taxpayer, a return must be filed if a student-athlete makes $400 from self-employment. 

This will also get messy when a student-athlete is from one state, but attends a school in a different state. 

“For example, a student-athlete from a high school in Georgia (which has a state income tax) enrolls at a university in Florida (which does not) and plays for the football team. He receives free meals from a restaurant in Florida in exchange for endorsing the business. If the athlete is still considered a Georgia resident by that state’s laws, the benefit is considered income subject to Georgia’s state income tax even though the activity took place in Florida” (Davis, 2020).

This is going to get crazy.

The NCAA has had a long history of maintaining amateurism rules in the realm of collegiate sports. Because collegiate student-athletes are amateurs, up until July 1, 2021, you were not allowed to be compensated for anything that involved your name, image and likeness. Earning compensation would throw you into the “professional” category and you would be deemed ineligible to compete for your school. This includes get paid to sign autographs, earning compensation for a sponsorship, advertising a brand on your own social media, profiting off your own jersey sales and pay-for-play situations. There are so many other examples, but those are some basics.

In January 2021, the NCAA Board of Governors voted on the name, image and likeness ruling that has been in debate for a few years now, and, after months of debating, student-athletes now have the opportunity to get paid for outside endorsements and compensated for name, image and likeness qualities. 

Back in the summer of 2020, I was able to talk to a few of the student-athletes I work with every day about NIL. It was interesting to hear what student-athletes did and did not know about related to the debate. Their understanding of name, image and likeness rules in relation to social media, outside companies and brands was basic. In the past, the student-athletes report to their coaches, compliance officers or athletic communication directors when they have question about an NCAA rule. In a lot of cases, those administrative positions sometimes don’t have all of the answers either. 

Basically, the NCAA’s rules don’t have all of the answers because the lifestyles of collegiate student-athletes have changed immensely, so the rules don’t always align to what is going on, especially in the social media world.

So, when the new ruling was voted on and successfully implemented for the 2021-22 academic year, people wondered how will student-athletes know what their opportunities are? The universities and institutions won’t be allowed to take any part in the student-athletes’ business relations.

Jill Bodensteiner, the director of athletics at St. Joseph’s and member of the NIL Committee, mentions student-athletes having the opportunity to take classes like sports management, marketing and digital storytelling at their schools (Rueb, 2020). That would be great, but, what if you have a student-athlete who has a heavy course load in, for example, a pre-med track and can’t afford to take one of those classes?

We also can assume that this process won’t be a free-for-all right from the get-go. These rules will have to be slowly implements and then examined after they are live. Things will be adjusted and changed over the course of the first couple of years. The NCAA also left up a lot to interpret in the opening legislation. 

“… If you couple the name, image and likeness to a (proposed) one-time transfer, what’s to say that the University of Alabama likes my player and they come to him and approach him on a side deal? ‘Listen, come here, we’ve got this car dealer that’s going to pay you $50,000 a year to advertise for them and you’ve got an opportunity to win a national championship and you can play right now.’ That’s more like the wild, wild west in my opinion.”

Louisville head football coach Scott Satterfield

The rules the NCAA will create must be air-tight when it comes to recruiting. The goals of this new legislation are not to really change the landscape of recruiting that dramatically, and without strict rules, it very well could. 

Student-athletes should have resources that can help them through this process if they so choose. If you are a student-athlete, you must keep in mind that there are only a small number of athletes that could earn life-changing money. For student-athletes with smaller followings, the money they could earn is not substantial. 

I think student-athletes will find that the work that would need to go into earning compensation and advertising for brands is not worth the return. In my Zoom interview with five student-athletes I work with, all of them mentioned not being involved in searching for money-making opportunities during their playing seasons. They all said it would be a distraction during competition season, and they mentioned it could cause drama within the teams. 

But, that does not mean they shouldn’t be educated on what their opportunities could look like. Breaking down the rules, what they were and how they changed, will help student-athletes know and what to expect as they progress through their time as a student-athlete. For some, this time of playing for an educational institution would be the closest thing they could have to playing professionally, as well, especially for female student-athletes. 

Why not try and earn some extra money?

 

In 2019, college football and basketball coaches were categorized as the highest-paid public employees in 40 states (Hruby, 2020). According to USA Today, Nick Saban, Ed Orgeron and Dabo Swinney are the three highest paid coaches in college football. Together, their earning top 26.5 million dollars.

Up until July 1, 2021, the student-athletes who are physically doing the hard work, were not allowed to earn compensation on their own name, image and likeness. 

The ruling went back-and-forth between the federal government, individual state’s governments and the NCAA. Not to mention, the fans who have no stake in the game whatsoever, had plenty to say.

There has been a very distinct split of people for and against this new name, image and likeness ruling. Despite coaches getting paid the big bucks, student-athletes did not get a chance to receive anything more than the value of their scholarships and a little cost-of-living change (Hruby, 2020). 

One side says…student-athletes are already spoiled and don’t deserve to make more. They don’t recognize the worth of their scholarships. 

On the other hand, there are those who agree with Pulitzer-Prize winning civil rights historian Taylor Branch who argued that NCAA amateurism was vastly unjust. 

“…a bill attainder, stripping from college athletes the rights of American citizenship.” -Taylor Brand in “The Shame of College Sports” from The Atlantic

Over the course of 15 years, the collegiate sport industry’s revenue rose from $4 billion to $14 billion, and in the end, student-athletes don’t benefit from the earnings at all (Hruby, 2020). Brand explains in his 2011 story for The Atlantic that, yes, student-athletes are taking money and benefits under the table, but the real scandal is within the structure of NCAA amateurism and college sports in general. 

“…a bill attainder, stripping from college athletes the rights of American citizenship.” -Taylor Brand in “The Shame of College Sports” from The Atlantic

Breaking down the revenue generated from the Southeastern Conference (SEC), which was the first conference to crack a billion-dollar earning mark in 2010, you have numerous aspects of a gameday experience that bring in wheelbarrows of money. The money conferences earn together come from concession sales, ticket sales, merchandise, licensing fees and other sources. The bulk comes from television contracts (Brand, 2011).

Outrage comes when schools and student-athletes are found to have violated NCAA rules. The institutions lose Bowl and post-season eligibly, student-athletes can lose out on their future seasons and a dark cloud of shame is posted over those institutions for years to come. 

“For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited.” Branch said. “It’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes.”

-Taylor Branch, The Atlantic

On June 4, 2020, I sat down (virtually, of course) to talk to a few student-athletes of whom I work with every day in a normal week at Quinnipiac. They were all female and all play on the same team. I was curious to know what they already knew about the name, image and likeness rules and how I could take the information they gave me to apply it to my NCAA NIL Student-Athlete Toolkit.

A few things I discovered:

-The student-athletes knew the basics of what exactly name, image and likeness means.

-They knew the very basics of the old name, image and likeness rules. If approached by an outside party/sponsor about promoting a brand, they all knew to double-check with myself or our compliance office before taking any action. They knew they were not allowed to post anything on social media that promoted a brand that was not Quinnipiac. 

-One student-athlete brought up California being the first state to bring up legislation about student-athletes being able to compensate off their NIL before the NCAA.

-When asked if they would be open to taking advantage of opportunities that may come to them in a year, they said they would be open but “wouldn’t go out looking for them” and “would not want the added distraction during competition season”.

-They did not know about the new rule about institutions not being allowed to be involved in these new opportunities. 

-They mentioned that they don’t follow the NCAA on social media, and they normally get the new information from teammates or coaches.

From the information I gathered, I created the Table of Contents for the Toolkit:

Section 1: What is Name, Image and Likeness?

            This section will explain the basics of what NIL is and how it pertains to student-athletes. 

Section 2: Old Ways: What Were the Rules?

Section 2 will briefly explain what the old rules were, and how the new legislation came to fruition, including the California law. 

Section 3: What Are the New Rules?

This section will be two pages (leaving room for the new rules that are added down the line) and will explain in easy-to-understand language what the new rules entail. 

Section 4: What Does the Timeline Look Like?

This section will explain the voting timeline and when student-athletes would actually be able to being compensating off their NIL.

Section 5: What Opportunities Do I Have?

Section 5 will give examples for student-athletes to think about how they could profit off their NIL. From Instagram posts to signing autographs, there are many different ways student-athletes can earn money.

Section 6: What Will These Opportunities Involve?

How exactly will student-athletes make relationships, money and how will they deal with contracts? Will they need third parties’ involvement? This section will go into what is needed to make an opportunity happen.

Section 7: Differences for Male and Female Athletes?

There is no difference in the rulings for male and female student-athletes. But, this section can help female athletes understand the opportunities they have due to not having the same professional career opportunities that male student-athletes have after school.

Section 8: How Much Money Could I Realistically Make?

This section breaks down a chart from FiveThirtyEight that explains how much money student-athletes could potentially make based on their school, sport and following.

There is a lot of information to break down, but after hearing what student-athletes had to say about this ruling, I think it is essential to make the language easy to read. Breaking down the rules and the timeline will help student-athletes learn what is possible for them.

During this week of organization, I also created a Production Journal on Adobe InDesign. The Production Journal acts like a check list for each week in the remaining four weeks of the class.

Project management is important. It is how creators stay organized and accomplish tasks in a timely manner. Notion is a cool project management system that I decided to use for my project management process to develop a toolkit/booklet for NCAA student-athletes and the new name, image and likeness rules. 

Research 

The research phase of the project process will be ongoing and growing throughout the next five weeks. An annotated bibliography will be used to compile all research tools and sources throughout the process. On Notion, I noted the week-by-week process of adding annotations to the bibliography. 

Pre-production 

This phase of the project will include planning out pages and information, along with conducting interviews with student-athletes at Quinnipiac. This phase will be used to prepare and organize information before the production phase. I am interested to see what student-athletes know about the NCAA name, image and likeness regulations. The information I gather from the student-athletes will be used to decipher what information is especially important to use in the booklet. 

I came across the National College Players Association and was curious to see if student-athletes know what that organization is. The mission of the NCPA is to protect future, current and former college athletes. The NCPA is a great resource for student-athletes, but I am not sure many even know about it. I will use the Zoom interviews to see what they do know.

Production 

The production phase will include assembling the pages of the booklet in an Adobe InDesign document. InDesign is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite and is an awesome software for desktop publishing, so I decided to use that for the booklet. 

I will have to organize the booklet based on the information the NCAA has released and stated in the new rulings, and what information seems to be necessary for student-athletes.

Post-Production 

This phase will include editing the booklet and proofreading. Reorganization of pages could be needed, so this phase will be essential after I have gone past the first three phases. 

Since the inception of the NCAA, student-athletes across the country have played the sports they love at an amateur level. An amateur engages in a pursuit or hobby, most often a sporting competition, on an unpaid level. 

NCAA and individual compliance offices have monitored the benefits that student-athletes have received for decades. As the influential platforms of social media grew, the compliance jobs proved to be more difficult as student-athletes have a public forum for their name, image and likeness. The restrictions that student-athletes currently have include influencing a brand or company that is separate from the student-athlete’s institution. 

Basically, student-athletes cannot act as influencers. But, the main problem here lies with the large amount of money that the NCAA and institutions make off of student-athletes’ success. 

Zion Williamson played one season of basketball at Duke University during the 2018-19 academic year. He is regarded as one of the most electric, young basketball players to watch since LeBron James in the early 2000s. The “Business of Zion” as Michael Smith put it in the Sports Business Journal, was created from Williamson’s influence on social media, TV viewership, ticket sales and the sneaker industry. 

In ESPN’s most-watched game of the year, Duke vs North Carolina, Williamson infamously got hurt after running a hard cut that tore his Nike sneaker. That incident proved to be “ground zero for debates on the NBA’s one-and-done rule and amateurism in college” (Smith, 2019). The average price for this consistently-anticipated rivalry game went for $3,200. And when the Blue Devils hit the road, ticket prices jump 194 percent (Smith, 2019). Everyone wanted to see Williamson.

The superstar has over 2.6 million followers on Instagram and Twitter combined. Influencers, or people with more than 1 million followers, can make up to $20,000 per post according to the Sports Business Journal. But, at the time when Williamson was a Blue Devil, he would not have been allowed to act as an influencer. 

Many debates have sparked after Williamson’s injury about amateurism in college athletics and student-athletes’ limited opportunities to play professionally, especially with female athletes. On April 28, 2020, the NCAA Board of Governors took a step forward in the ruling and outlining of specific categories in which student-athletes can have the opportunity to earn compensation for their name-image and likeness (NCAA, 2020). 

The new rulings state that “student-athletes are able and have the opportunity to receive compensation from third party entities/endorsements related to athletics that are separate from the university, school and conference” (NCAA, 2020).

The second ruling states “compensation for other student-athlete opportunities, such as social media, new businesses and personal appearances, without institutional involvement or the use of trademarks/logos” (NCAA, 2020).

This is a massive change to rulings that were very strict beforehand. As an Assistant Director of Athletic Communication at Quinnipiac University, I work with student-athletes and social media very closely. Before this new legislation passed by the NCAA, student-athletes could not even tag brands in their personal social media posts. I work to make sure student-athletes are in line with the current NCAA amateur rules to maintain their eligibility.

By the 2021-22 academic year, the final legislation will be ready to go and student-athletes will be allowed to compensate off their name, image and likeness. But do they understand what this means? Do they know their rights and abilities? 

I plan to create a booklet/toolkit that will aid student-athletes in this interesting transition. This toolkit will help student-athletes learn what exactly the new ruling is about and how they would be able to use it, if they so choose. 

There are plenty of restrictions that will come with this ruling and the student-athletes should have all the information in ways that are easy to understand. 

There is also a reality to understand once this legislation is passed. Some athletes won’t really be able to benefit. Everyone won’t get to be an influencer. There is only a small group of athletes that will earn a large amount of money. According to a projection created by FiveThirtyEight, there are seven student-athletes (a few just coming out of high school) that are projected to earn more than $1,000 on a post. 

This is due to the number of followers they have, the sport they play and the institution they are at or are planning to attend. Paige Bueckers is a rising freshman set to play basketball at UConn. She has the potential to make a total of $670,783 off her social media posts alone. With over 500,000 followers and a post value of $20,000, she could benefit immensely from the name, image and likeness ruling. On a different side, Mikayla Colohan is a soccer player at BYU with a little over 2,000 followers on Instagram and has the potential to earn $267…not the same earnings, but still earnings at the least.

As you can see, there are various earning levels that athletes can have. I am not sure how this ruling will play out. And next year, as an employee of an athletic department, I won’t have the opportunity to help student-athletes will this ruling, except for explaining violations. The new legislation won’t allow any involvement from the student-athletes’ institution in the instrumentation of compensation from outside parties.

I hope this booklet with be something to help student-athletes understand more about the ruling and opportunities they will soon have with their name, image and likeness.