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Dan Murphy, ESPN Staff Writer
PHOENIX — The NCAA Division I Council voted Wednesday to adopt new rules designed to help athletes avoid unscrupulous agents and unfavorable terms in name, image and likeness contracts.
Starting in August, the NCAA will provide athletes with standardized contract recommendations for NIL deals and aggregated data to help schools and athletes have a more realistic picture of the going rates for endorsement deals. The association also plans to create a voluntary registry of credible and trusted agents that will be based largely on feedback from the athletes who have worked with them in the past.
“We don’t want to do anything to get into the way of student-athletes trying to activate their NIL rights, but we do want to assist them in essentially protecting themselves,” MAC commissioner and Division I Council vice chair Jon Steinbrecher said. The council voted on the new rules during the NCAA’s annual convention this week.
In addition, the council formally proposed new rules that, if passed, will be able to help facilitate deals between athletes and NIL collectives — a move that would likely return some degree of control over roster management back to athletic departments and teams on campus. The schools, and any associated NIL collectives, will still be prohibited from negotiating deals with recruits or transfers before they enroll.
The council is expected to vote on those proposed changes before the start of the next academic year after gathering feedback from school leaders.
While these changes represent a significant shift in NIL policy that previously tried to keep schools at a lengthy distance from endorsement activity, they may quickly become moot if the NCAA decides to adopt even more progressive rule changes in the coming year. Last month, NCAA president Charlie Baker proposed a far more dramatic new policy shift that would, among other changes, allow schools to pay athletes directly to promote their universities through name, image and likeness deals.
Baker said that implementing those more significant changes would likely have to come in tandem with help from Congress providing a federal law that would provide some antitrust protection for the NCAA and carve out a special status for athletes that keeps them from becoming employees.
“There’s no doubt in my mind a lot of these schools would do a lot more for student-athletes if it was done under some framework that looked more like a contractual relationship and less like employment because the employment, one, comes with a million other things that are pretty dramatic,” Baker said Tuesday night.
He said his proposal was designed as a “table setter” to start a conversation rather than establish specific policies. The NCAA Division I board of directors is expected to vote later this week on whether to formally begin discussing those changes. If they decide to proceed, those changes could be in place as soon as fall 2024.
“We’ve only had a few conversations [about Baker’s proposal],” Steinbrecher said. “I don’t know why I’d be scared about any of this. Let’s focus on it. Let’s think about what it means to us and how we want to help craft this. But let’s move forward.”
Council members are optimistic that the rules put in place this week will remove some bad actors from the NIL marketplace. There is currently no comprehensive source of public data to provide a clear picture of how much athletes are making from their deals. Aggregate and anonymous data shared by all NCAA members — there is no plan to share the details of specific deals signed by athletes — could help both schools and athletes have a more realistic picture of what to expect when negotiating deals with companies and NIL collectives.
The standardized contract templates are not yet finalized, but are likely to include suggestions for terms of NIL deals, such as making sure no contracts last longer than an athlete’s college career or that an agent doesn’t take an exorbitant percentage of the proceeds.
Morgyn Wynne, an Oklahoma State softball player and one of two athletes on the Division I Council, said the rules adopted Wednesday are “extremely necessary” to help athletes navigate their endorsement options.
“We were very supportive of the things that were put out for student-athlete protections,” Wynne said. “I don’t believe that there really are any concerns that should follow any of those.”
Among other items, the council also voted Wednesday to adopt stiffer penalties for individuals who violate NCAA rules. Moving forward, coaches who are suspended will be required to stay away from their teams on days between games in addition to missing games themselves. Schools who hire coaches with show-cause penalties from past violations could receive penalties, and the NCAA plans to create a public database of individuals with a history of Level 1 or Level 2 violations.
Baker, who took over as the association’s president last March, is expected to address discussed his proposed changes and other major issues in college sports at his first annual state-of-the-union style address to the convention Wednesday night. He said he was hopeful that Division 1 leaders would vote to start the formal process of weighing his proposal and sorting through its details during the NCAA Convention this week.
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