UCF Kicker Ruled Ineligible After YouTube Channel Gets Him in Trouble with NCAA
UCF kicker Donald De La Haye has been ruled ineligible after he refused to give in to the NCAA’s demand for him to stop monetizing his popular YouTube channel.
De La Haye, a junior kickoff specialist, has a YouTube channel with over 90,000 subscribers that has amassed nearly five million total views. The NCAA took issue with the fact that the videos bring in advertising revenue and said he was no longer allowed to make money off his athletics-related videos if he wanted to continue playing college football. UCF lobbied the NCAA to allow De La Haye to continue to profit off his channel provided he did not collect any revenue from videos related to athletics. The NCAA approved those conditions but De La Haye declined to move his sports-related videos to a non-monetized account and the school suspended him to avoid a conflict with the NCAA.
De La Haye made it clear in an interview on SI Now last month that he wasn’t going to back down from his fight with the NCAA.
“I feel like it’s about time for things to be changed,” De La Haye told SI Now. “…The times these rules were made weren’t really up to par with what’s going on in the real world today.”
