There has been a push by some institutions to have the NIL collectives managed by the schools themselves. The primary reason being it would give them an opportunity to better monitor and police the usage of NIL funds across all sports plus have the ability to coordinate it with normal fundraising. The biggest fear many of these universities have is the money pouring into the collectives with significantly negatively impact the normal fundraising cash flow. Let’s face it. There are only so many cookies in the cookie jar.
The way things are stacking up in the courts, restrictions on transfers by the NCAA will being going away. The only way to control it most likely will be players being treated as employees and contracted for services for a certain number of years. And this opens up an entirely different “can of wormsâ€Â. And if that happens, you already had those talking unionization of players.
The most irritating thing for me is knowing for years the NCAA knew the courts would fall in favor of players in terms of NIL. They formed a committee three years prior, and the committee did nothing. No recommendations, no critical thought, and nothing in way of even attempting to place impactful guidelines in terms of preventing chaos.
Unfortunately it will get worse before it gets better. And I’ll be spending football Saturday in the fall doing something else.