I copied this from a LinkedIn post from Richard Rogers, the attorney. Very interesting take.


I wonder if anyone in this so-called NIL debate gets the fact that the illegal sale of College Athletes' NIL to the Networks in exchange for the broadcast revenue that the Universities receive, without owning what they are selling, is felony theft among other crimes? That's essentially what Judge Claudia Wilken said in O'Bannon, when she noted that if the Plaintiffs' hadn't dropped their Unjust Enrichment claim, they would have prevailed?

And if I need to complete the circle, it's the broadcast revenue from Power Five Conference FB and MBB that would pay their FB and MBB players, and no one else. If you don't bring in revenue, you aren't an employee, who can dream of being paid. About 5K college FB players and 1K MBB players would qualify as "employees." This is a major issue for the majority black players at this level, but a minor one for Congress. Talk about changing the racial wealth disparity, these majority black men would earn their average lifetime income in just four years.

Everyone must know that Congress can just revoke the NCAA's charter and bar it from any participation in college sports. The various Conferences could run their sports very well. Who needs the NCAA? All of the colleges and universities who get a cut of its profits from March Madness, which is every D-I, D-II & D-III school. The major conferences started their independence the month after O'Bannon was decided. It's time for them to finish and withdraw from the NCAA--they don't need it. Nobody else does, either, unless they're being paid to belong, which is the majority of the NCAA's members, who won't be paid anything, once the money makers leave.

NIL is the wild west right now. Because the NCAA held onto not paying their athletes with an iron fist for so long and refused to budge towards something like NIL until a literal act of congress forced them to. If this allegation of using an NIL deal to share the broadcast revenue is true, it would be absolutely absurd to think that something like that would be done.

There's clearly no guard rails or guidelines that are followed. That or they're so weakly enforceable that anyone can do almost anything. I just fee like it's completely ruin the integrity of college sports in general.

Congress has HAD NO bills or action in regards to NIL, instead it's been a stream of state legislatures, and well, it's kind of hard to have 50 different sets of rules. It's coming to High School next.

I stand corrected. I remember congress applying pressure, but I guess thr individual state legislatures actually passed the laws.

End result does remain the same, an unwillingness to adapt to the times and make incremental for decades, all for it to collapsed within a summer once the snowball started rolling downhill

Yes and no, in some states there were roadblocks to paying players to start with. I think we can all agree it's a mess. Right now a national law is the ONLY thing that will change the situation, because the NCAA is simply powerless.

The real issue began when the Supreme Court -- in a ruling about a tangentially related case -- volunteered in their ruling that the NCAAs business model was illegal. Everybody has known that for a decade, but the NCAA thought that all they had to do was win the PR war to keep it out of the courts.

And as a result, once a state moved there was nothing to be done. Everybody knew the eventual outcome in the courts.

Truly an epic failure from a corrupt, terrible organization. They're lucky FIFA and the Olympic Committee exist, or else they'd be the worst there is.