NCAA Must Show It Is Willing To Walk The Walk On NIL Guidelines
Yesterday the NCAA Division I Board of Directors released a set of guidelines regarding name, image and likeness that is geared towards eliminating outside entities from using NIL rules to entice high school prospects to their program or from getting transfers to switch schools.
Schools like USC and Alabama have been so brazen with their pursuit of transfers, and programs like Texas A&M and Tennessee are doing it with prep players, that the NCAA knows something must be done no matter how hard it has tried to avoid doing anything.
The NCAA has released the new guidelines, but that has to be just the first step, and it's a baby step. If this release isn't followed by quick action from an investigation and enforcement standpoint than yesterday's release is nothing more than an attempt to save face, cover their hind parts, pick an expression that means it's all about perception and nothing at all about actually getting anything done.
Nowhere in the guidelines that were released yesterday was a re-emphasis on what happens if the rules are broken provided. At the end of the day, unless there are some very sharp teeth to these rules for rule breakers none of it will matter. These schools already knew these actions were illegal but they didn't care, because they knew the NCAA was too afraid of anti-trust litigation.
Issuing guidelines without reinforcing the punishment, and hopefully adding harsher penalties for rule breakers, does nothing to stop what is going on.
These new guidelines must be followed by the NCAA immediately heading to Los Angeles, Tuscaloosa, Knoxville and College Station and handling business.
The NCAA has a window where it can show that it has a backbone, and that it actually cares about the integrity of the sport. This isn't about limiting NIL opportunities for student-athletes. I 100% support the notion of NIL and actually think the schools and NCAA need to do more. This is about NIL being used as a recruiting enticement, which I am 100% against.
The NCAA also needs to remind schools what the consequences are for tampering with players on current teams. That, to me, is far more problematic than the enticements happening with high school players, which is also a major issue. The NCAA needs to add a level of punishment to tampering that doesn't currently exist.
The punishment needs to fall solely on the institutions and the coaches, not the players. The best way to limit your liability from a litigation standpoint is to not punish the players, but rather punish the schools, harshly.
Not only should there be potential loss of scholarships and financial punishment (no brainers), the NCAA needs to adopt a policy that programs who get caught tampering with players from other programs will lose the ability to add prospects from the portal for two to three years. Throwing in some game suspensions for head coaches would also be something that would have some serious teeth.
I wonder how Lincoln Riley and Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher would handle the activity of their boosters and other collectives if they knew getting caught meant huge fines, a loss of 5 or more scholarships, a loss of access to the transfer portal for a few years and a six-game suspension for the head coach.
Create harsher punishment and enforce the rules on the biggest culprits. We all know who they are, now the NCAA will get its chance to show that it actually cares about this issue from a fix it standpoint, and that this release isn't just a public relations move that was never actually meant to address anything other than the NCAA "leadership" trying to save face.
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