In October 2019, the NCAA ruled that college athletes can be allowed to profit for the use of their name, image and likeness.
The original goal was to implement it by January 2021. As expected, however, typical red tape has become an issue.
“The implementation is a mess, and sadly so,” said Notre Dame director of athletics Jack Swarbrick in a meeting with media this week. “We’ve got a number of state laws, we’ve got Congress, who I think will act this spring in this area, and we’ve got the NCAA struggling to figure out what the final legislation may look like given that environment. I wish the implementation could enjoy a little more clarity, and I think it’s going to.”
Like a top professional athlete who has lucrative endorsements beyond the playing field or arena, so too could a college athlete monetize his skill. What if fifth-year senior quarterback Ian Book, for example, could be allowed to receive a percentage of sales from his No. 12 jersey sold at Notre Dame?
In April 2018, after Notre Dame junior basketball player Arike Ogunbowale converted a couple of dramatic buzzer-beating baskets in the NCAA Final Four to help the Fighting Irish win the national championship, she became an instant mega-star across the country and was even selected to compete in “Dancing With The Stars” competition on national television.
The NCAA granted her a waiver that allowed her to keep any prize money from the show with the reasoning that her appearance there is “unrelated to her basketball abilities,” thus making her eligible to participate in DWS.
Consequently, the next step is a Pandora’s Box on how to properly execute and balance student-athletes receiving compensation for their talents while still maintaining their “amateur” status. The board asked each of the NCAA's three divisions to create the necessary new rules.
Whenever that might come to fruition, Notre Dame president Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., and Swarbrick have been on the record as supporting it.
“We see it as an opportunity to work closely with our student-athletes to educate them on how to appropriately maximize name, image and likeness value,” Swarbrick said. “We look forward to doing that.”
Notre Dame’s reasoning is that this situation with a student-athlete is no different from another student at the school who might possess, for example, superb musical talents and could be compensated handsomely playing for an orchestra while still a student at the school.
“We support it based on our fundamental view that we want the experience of the student-athlete to be much like the experience of the non-student-athlete at this university as much as possible,” Swarbrick summarized.
However, there is caution thrown to the wind on how implementing this can create new problems — especially in recruiting.
Plus, does one player receiving large compensation while other complementary or role players get overlooked create rifts or even jealousy in team chemistry? Does the student-athlete become a de facto employee of the institution?
“There’s going to be a lot to navigate through,” Swarbrick admitted. “We have got to make sure it doesn’t make an already unstable recruiting environment even less stable.
“We’ve got to make sure it doesn’t create unintended consequences where a decision by one student-athlete has a negative consequence for the rest of the student-athletes or the other members of his or her team. We want to maximize the value of it.”
One-Time Transfers
Next Wednesday (Dec. 16), the Division I Council is slated to vote on permitting immediate eligibility for all college basketball transfers this season.
Not everything has been uniform in this area, and it has shown even at Notre Dame. Whereas women’s basketball player Dara Mabrey received her waiver earlier this fall that allows her to play for the Irish after transferring from Virginia Tech this summer as a junior, classmate and men’s basketball player Trey Wertz, who played at Santa Clara, is still waiting.
If the measure is passed, as is expected, all Division I student-athletes, if eligible, could compete right away. This has already been prevalent in football, especially among quarterbacks, from Ohio State’s Justin Fields (from Georgia) to Georgia’s JT Daniels (from USC), or even Boston College’s Phil Jurkovec (from Notre Dame).
“I couldn’t be happier that that’s going to be available because I found nothing more distasteful in my recent dealings with the national rules than the waiver process surrounding transfers,” Swarbrick said.
“I think it was a system that encouraged young people to make really harmful misrepresentations in order to try and gain a transfer [waiver]. We should never have sent a message like that to students on a national basis. It became clear what you had to say to get your waiver granted.”
Swarbrick said he saw what amounted to carbon copies of letters/petitions from applicants.
“Just the grievant's name was changed,” he said. “They just took the facts from some other person and put it in their letter. Really, really unseemly stuff that we encouraged by virtue of the national rule.”
Confederating Sports?
With the COVID-19 pandemic wreaking havoc on collegiate athletic budgets, minimizing travel costs is a goal among administrators. However, with the immense realignments of conferences in the last decade, “geography went out the window,” per Swarbrick.
Nebraska is far closer to Colorado (now in the Pac-12) than Maryland or Rutgers, but the Cornhuskers, Terrapins and Scarlet Knights are all in the Big Ten. Same with West Virginia and Texas in the same Big 12 conference.
“I think there will be a lot of discussion about confederating sports — which I don’t know how I feel about it right now,” Swarbrick said. “We need to have that discussion. Can we align more closely, for example, with the national governing bodies in some sports to continue to ensure opportunity for athletes, but perhaps spread the costs a little more effectively? Can we develop more partnerships that help us?”
What particularly bothers him is how universities bear 100 percent of the NFL’s development costs and have no reciprocation from the NFL.
“In all the other pro sports, those leagues bear some measure of development costs,” Swarbrick said. “The NBA with the G-League, minor league hockey, minor league baseball. … We need to figure out how to have a more fair approach in football.”
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