A new federal law introduced Thursday would make it illegal for the NCAA or other college sports associations to impose restrictions on the type or extent of endorsement agreements that college athletes could sign in the future.
The bill, co-authored by Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) and Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Massachusetts), is the latest in a series of proposed national laws designed to help college athletes make money and build a multi-college sports industry. of a billion dollars which, according to several members of Congress, is fundamentally unfair. This proposal is the only option to date that does not provide the means for Congress, the NCAA, or any other governing body to regulate which products athletes can endorse.
“Major college athletics doesn’t look any different from professional competitions, and it’s time for us to stop denying college athletes’ right to monetize their talents,” said Murphy, who said he has accepted the current rules of the competition. NCAA sees it as a civil rights issue. . “If predominantly white coaches and NCAA executives can have unlimited endorsement deals, why shouldn’t predominantly black athletes have the same opportunity?”
The new bill also specifically prohibits the NCAA or conferences from doing anything that would prevent athletes from organizing under collective representation to sell their license rights as a group. These types of group licenses are usually required to negotiate media rights, the sale of shirts, and items such as video games, such as the college football video game EA Sports announced earlier this week to be reviving.
The NCAA has so far opposed the possibility that athletes could organize for any type of group licensing activity.
NCAA President Mark Emmert and other elite athletes leaders have asked Congress for help in establishing national uniform rules dictating how athletes can benefit from their names, images and likenesses (NIL). Those leaders want to be able to create “guard rails” that they say would prevent NIL payments from becoming thinly disguised salaries that cross the line between amateurism and professional sports.
Murphy and Trahan, who played volleyball in Georgetown, believe the NCAA crossed the line to professionalism long ago.
“As a former Division I athlete, I am all too familiar with the NCAA’s business model that for decades has used the guise of amateurism to justify obscene profitability while student athletes struggle to make ends meet,” Trahan said in a statement Thursday.
Murphy told ESPN he thinks Congress is unlikely to be able to act on college sports laws in the first six months of the year. That makes it likely that some of the state’s NIL laws will go into effect before a national plan is in place.
Florida has already passed a law making current NCAA rules illegal in the state from July 1. Four other states are also considering legislation to go into effect at the same time.
The NCAA has argued that a variety of state laws, many of which have unique differences, would create a chaotic environment in which schools operated under different rules and would allow potential athletes to choose their schools based on which state gives them the best chance of making money . on approval agreements.
The association stated that it wanted to change its own rules in October 2019. However, they missed a self-imposed deadline to vote on proposed changes last month and it is not clear when they will move forward. The most recent NCAA proposal was significantly more restrictive on athletes than most of the state and federal government legislative options.
“I wasn’t going to support what the NCAA was doing, so I’m not shedding tears in the NCAA’s decision to delay,” Murphy told ESPN. “They would never be able to handle this. I think there is an argument to be made for the various state laws to go into effect so that we can see if the sky falls like the NCAA says it will.”
The bill presented by Murphy and Trahan will be viewed alongside other legislation that provides a spectrum of options for how closely Congress will be involved in shaping the future of college sports.
Democratic senators Cory Booker and Richard Blumenthal introduced a bill in December calling for sweeping changes beyond compensation and NIL rights. Republican Senators Roger Wicker and Marco Rubio have each tabled bills that give NCAA leaders more leeway to determine what restrictions are necessary to maintain amateurism in college sports. Representative Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio) has also submitted a detailed proposal that would open the door for NIL payments while creating some restrictions on the types of products that athletes can endorse.
Murphy and Trahan’s bill also states that any services that a school or conference provides to athletes to help them make the most of their NIL potential should be available to all athletes under their jurisdiction. In other words, if a school hires a consultant to help build the brands of its football stars, all other athletes in the school should be given the same opportunity.
The bill also calls for an annual report, funded by the federal government, to assess how much money college athletes are making from endorsement deals and break down that data by race, gender, and sport to analyze the market.