Florida lawmakers get it right: Let student-athletes profit from their ‘likeness’ | Opinion
For decades, we heard that if you let student-athletes use their visibility and fame to make money, college sports and amateurism are dead. Meanwhile, universities and colleges were free to profit from their top athletes’ image and the fans and boosters they attracted.
Luckily, that view has changed along with the rules that govern how athletes can get compensated. It’s safe to say that college sports haven’t lost their allure.
Florida was among the first states that allowed student-athletes in 2020 to profit from their “name, image and likeness,” also known as NIL, through deals with sponsors. Lawmakers now want to take that law even further. A bill introduced ahead of the 2023 legislative session would lift a ban on colleges serving as intermediaries between athletes and potential sponsors. That ban in place has resulted athletes not being aware of NIL opportunities, a legislative staff analysis of House Bill 99 states.
NCAA changes course
The bill filed by Rep. Chip LaMarca, R-Broward County, would put Florida in line with what other states are already doing. The NCAA has also come around the issue — thanks to pressure from lawsuits and state legislators. The organization changed its policy to allow athletes to use their NIL to earn compensation and to let higher-education institutions provide information about NIL opportunities and arrange space for potential sponsors and student-athletes to meet. LaMarca told a House committee that, under his bill, universities and colleges would not get compensated for facilitating deals. His bill would also require athletes to attend financial literacy, entrepreneurship and life-skills workshops at their school.
College athlete compensation has long been a contentious issue, with critics saying that it could tarnish collegiate sports. But far from being mere amateur events, this has become a big business that enriches universities, coaches, broadcasters and many others. How unfair and hypocritical it is for schools to build palatial training facilities and stadiums while cutting off student-athletes from the opportunity to get paid for, say, commercial endorsements.
“You look at college coaches that are making $9, 10, 11, 12 million here, and they are trademarking their own name, but say they won’t coach anymore if a player is able to make a few bucks,” LaMarca said Tuesday during a hearing before the House Postsecondary Education and Workforce Subcommittee.
Supreme Court ruling
“Name, image and likeness” reforms are probably just the beginning. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that the NCAA violated antitrust law by placing limits on the education-related benefits, such as study abroad programs, that colleges can provide to athletes. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote, in a concurring opinion, that college sports tradition “cannot justify the NCAA’s decision to build a massive money-raising enterprise on the backs of student athletes who are not fairly compensated.” He also suggested that NCAA’s restrictions on any type of compensation, including direct payment to athletes, might not hold up in future court challenges.
The NCAA and college sports fans have long said compensation restrictions are meant to draw a line between college and professional sports. Kavanaugh compared those rules to restaurants in a region coming “together to cut cooks’ wages on the theory that ‘customers prefer’ to eat food from low-paid cooks,” or hospitals capping “nurses’ income in order to create a ‘purer’ form of helping the sick.”
The NCAA does have a point. Allowing schools to directly pay student athletes would essentially erase that line between amateur and professional sports and open the floodgates to unintended consequences. At the same time, allowing athletes to benefit financially from their “name, image and likeness” through contracts with third parties is different.
Florida — home to some of the nation’s most prestigious athletic programs — is right to help student-athletes access at least a slice of the billion-dollar industry that profits from their talent.
