Why Washington Is Trying to Rein In College Sports
The Daily
The episode examines why Congress moved to regulate college sports after five years of NIL-driven chaos. Stewart Mandel explains how name, image, and likeness
Key takeaways
- The Protect College Sports Act passed the Senate 77-22, co-sponsored by Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell
- Mandel says The Athletic found major-conference football programs spend roughly $10-$15 million at the low end to north of $50 million at elite schools like Ohio State, Oregon, Texas, and Miami
Main topics
- Protect College Sports Act
- NIL payments and collectives
Notable quotes
We have no rules and we have no governance.
Conclusion
This episode offers a clear explainer on how NIL, transfers, and booster
Transcript preview
Speaker 4 (0:00) Hi, friends and fellow students. Americans living abroad can legally vote in the U.S. election. Register or get tailored support at VoteFromAbroad.org. Look, state deadlines are super close, so don't waste another second. Go to VoteFromAbroad.org now and click Request My Ballot and ask to receive it by email. All you got to do is fill it out and send it back in. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. VoteFromAbroad.org. Speaker 3 (0:27) From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittrow. This is The Daily. Speaker 8 (0:31) A sport has imploded before our very eyes, and I don't say this hyperbolically. Speaker 3 (0:37) In the five years since student-athletes were allowed to get paid to play, college sports has gone completely haywire. Speaker 1 (0:45) Give it a break. This is not the college Speaker 8 (0:47) football we all grew up with. Each year, it's gotten a little worse. We have a broken system. Speaker 3 (0:52) Players are moving from team to team, chasing a payday. Speaker 8 (0:56) Malachi, Tony, 4.1 million. Carson Beck, 4.3 million. I think my biggest year was six. He's a college Speaker 3 (1:05) kid. Colleges are amassing dark money war chests. Programs that never stood a chance before are becoming champions. Speaker 1 (1:14) The Indiana Hoosiers are the kings of college football. Speaker 3 (1:18) And no one, not the players, not the coaches, not the athletic directors, can agree on what the rules around all this even are, much less how to follow them. Speaker 8 (1:29) We have no rules and we have no governance. This is just a really sad state of affairs. It's not right and we got to find a way to do something. Speaker 3 (1:41) Today, Stuart Mandel of The Athletic explains why this week Washington finally decided. to step in. It's Thursday, October 1st. Stuart Mandel, welcome to The Daily. Speaker 2 (1:58) Oh, we're starting right now? Speaker 3 (1:59) Yes. Speaker 2 (1:59) Okay. There was no real warning there, but I'm ready now. Thank you. Glad to be here. Speaker 3 (2:04) So, earlier this week, something very rare happened. A bill passed the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support. And even rarer, that bill is attempting to regulate sports, which is a part of American life that Washington generally keeps its nose out of. So... We are turning to you to explain this moment. Help us understand what's going on here. Speaker 2 (2:29) Well, for the past five years, ever since college athletes were finally allowed to make money and specifically paid for their name, image, and likeness rights, what we now call NIL, everybody's been talking about how college sports is in chaos, a term you often hear is the wild, wild west. And so the industry, the NCAA, the conferences, the schools, have spent a lot of time and a lot of money lobbying Congress saying, we need your help. So this bill, the Protect College Sports Act, which was co-sponsored by Ted Cruz, a Republican, and Maria Cantwell, a Democrat, it covers pretty much everything you can think of in college sports. But what most people focus on is how it regulates name, image, and likeness payments, and then how often the players can transfer between schools. Got Speaker 3 (3:20) it. Speaker 2 (3:21) And on Monday night, it passed in the Senate and it passed in a landslide. Final vote was 77 to 22. Now it goes to the House. Nobody can really predict what's going to happen then. But in the meantime, a huge bipartisan slam dunk for the people who sponsored the bill. Maybe not so much for the people who are on the other side of it. And Speaker 3 (3:42) this is being described as historic. Talk about why. Speaker 2 (3:46) It's historic because. Nobody can remember a time when Congress set out to regulate an entire sport. You know, they've regulated certain parts like NFL television rights and whatnot. But here is Congress basically saying, hey, we're dictating the rules now. They want to take over regulation of all of college sports. Speaker 3 (4:07) OK, we're going to get into the specifics of the bill, what it actually does. But before we do that. I want to talk about the state of college sports right now. At this point, I think everybody has an opinion about college sports. There's a lot of dark money flowing through this world. And you, as a part of the amazing team at The Athletic, which is a sports publication owned by The Times Company, have done a lot of vital work to help give us a clearer picture of the landscape here. So let's tell the story of how we actually got to this point where Washington is intervening in this way. Speaker 2 (4:41) Well, I think it's safe to say that college sports has changed more in the last five years than it had in the 50 years before that. And that all has to do with a pretty important demarcation, which is prior to July 1st, 2021, throughout all of our lifetimes, it was understood college athletes cannot make money. They cannot receive any compensation above and beyond their scholarship. In fact, at one point in the NCAA rulebook, it said, You can give them a bagel, but not a bagel and cream cheese. That was a real rule. Wow. But throughout the 2010s, public opinion is shifting to, well, why don't the athletes receive a cut of all this money? Speaker 2 (5:21) People are reading about television deals that are worth billions of dollars. They're reading about coaches making five, six million dollars a year, which is quaint now, but it was a lot then, and saying this is not fair to the athletes. They deserve a cut. And that eventually leads to state politicians around the country making their own bills, making their own laws that say athletes can make NIL money in direct conflict to the NCAA's rules. And then a really big moment came in 2021 when the Supreme Court took up an antitrust case in which the NCAA was sued, not specifically about NIL. The issue in that one was a cap on educational expenses that schools offer the athletes. But same principle, right? There was a restriction in place on a form of compensation and the Supreme Court ruled nine nothing against the NCAA. And in a concurring opinion that Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote, he kind of expanded the scope of their decision to cover a lot more than just this one issue. He wrote that the NCAA's business model in any other industry would be flatly illegal. Speaker 3 (6:31) That's a quote. Speaker 2 (6:32) Yeah, that's what he wrote. So that's when the NCAA caved. And so July 1st comes and athletes can now do endorsement deals. Speaker 5 (6:44) If I can sign with Gatorade. You can too. Speaker 2 (6:49) Jared Speaker 8 (6:49) Casey, you just made one of the greatest game-winning catches in Kansas football history. Speaker 2 (6:55) Where are you going now? Where am I going? I'm going to Applebee's. So pretty quickly, you started seeing college athletes appearing in TV ads for sports drinks, for fast food chains, local mom-and-pop shops in some of these college towns where they're big celebrities. Speaker 5 (7:09) Hey, this is Dakota Speaker 2 (7:11) Scroffer, a ride receiver from Louisiana. When your Speaker 5 (7:13) AC isn't Dakota's, you call SOS heating and Speaker 2 (7:16) cooling. SOS. And of course, social media ads. All of these things that we would consider to be fairly benign. What nobody foresaw was that once they opened that Pandora's box, that NIL rights would be used for a completely different purpose, which is boosters paying their athletes to come to their favorite school. Speaker 3 (7:37) And just say what boosters are exactly? Speaker 2 (7:40) Boosters are donors to a university's athletic department. And the NCAA considers you a booster if you buy season tickets. But what we think of are the rich guys who donate tens of millions of dollars and have their names on buildings. And they just want to win a national championship. And so here's an opportunity to basically be the owner of a college sports team and pay the players yourself. Speaker 3 (8:04) And how are they doing that? Speaker 2 (8:06) Well,