Friday Flakes: SEC and Pac-12 Commissioners Will Meet With U.S. Senators to Ask for Help with NIL

It’s the wild west out there and many of the schools are not liking it. ESPN reported yesterday that the SEC and Pac-12 Commissioners are going to meet with members of Congress to ask for help in dealing with NIL.

This is because the NCAA has failed to put up any sort of guardrails at all. This is unsustainable.

From the ESPN article:

“I have been invited to meetings with several senators tomorrow to discuss the issues we’re seeing with name, image and likeness, and with the existential threat of our student-athletes being deemed to be employees,” Kliavkoff told ESPN on Wednesday.

...

“The goal is to discuss a few of the issues facing college athletics with influential senators,” Kliavkoff said. “I think it’s more likely that we eventually get federal legislation on name, image and likeness, but we’re also interested in discussing all of the harm that will come to student-athletes if they are deemed to be employees.”

...

“Either the NCAA is going to get its act together in enforcing this,” he said, “or I’m going to be pushing for a smaller group to figure out how to create and enforce the NIL rules that we all agree on related to inducement and pay-for-play. The amount of an NIL payment should be commensurate with the work done as a backstop to make sure we’re not using it related to inducement and pay-for-play.”

I think the transfer portal needs to be adjusted and so does NIL. I don’t want either to go away completely but there needs to be some guardrails put up to some extent.

Unfortunately, I’m sure whatever comes out of Congress will likely make things worse.

SPORTS! SPORTS! SPORTS! SPORTS!

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