Kentucky coach John Calipari pushes for NIL 'guardrails' at SEC basketball media days
As the sport’s all-time winningest program — and with vast resources and a large, passionate fan base breathlessly supporting it — Kentucky men’s basketball is one of the teams most well-positioned to excel in the nascent era of college athletes being able to profit off of their name, image and likeness (NIL).
Still, Wildcats coach John Calipari believes it’s a system that is in need of reform.
While speaking at SEC Media Days on Wednesday in Birmingham, Alabama, the 15th-year Kentucky coach stressed the need for “guardrails” to legislate NIL in college sports while bemoaning the role it has played in the recruiting process.
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“I think young people, they deserved to share in what's happening,” Calipari said when asked about the biggest current issue with NIL. “They deserve [to make money from] their name on the back of their jersey, their signature, their autograph. They deserve that. It's kind of gone beyond that now and it's different.”
Calipari added that he’s happy some of the Wildcats’ incoming players arrive on campus having already signed NIL deals with entities such as shoe and trading card companies, which takes at least some of the pressure off the university and the basketball program to secure them such arrangements.
So far, the approach appears to be working just fine for Calipari’s program.
Since the NCAA approved a revised NIL policy in July 2021 following a unanimous decision from the United States Supreme Court in the NCAA v. Alston case, Kentucky has signed two top-five recruiting classes — three in the top 10 — including the No. 1 class in 2023. The latest features three of the top six prospects in 247Sports’ Composite player rankings. Three of the Wildcats’ freshmen from that class — Robert Dillingham, DJ Wagner and Justin Edwards — are among the projected top 100 earners from NIL deals, according to a database from On3 Sports.
While his program has managed to attract players who command potentially hundreds of thousands of NIL dollars from various companies, Calipari has noticed the increasingly central place it has in conversations with recruits.
“I tell every kid we're recruiting, ‘If it's about NIL more than basketball, you shouldn't come here,’” he said on Wednesday. “In the big picture of where you're trying to take yourself, basketball should be the overriding factor. Even though you'll do better here than any other place you can go, it's not why you come to Kentucky.”
John Calipari says NIL needs "guardrails" in place going forward. Said players should be able to "share" in the money. But added that he tells every player his staff recruits that "if it's about NIL more than basketball, you shouldn't come" to Kentucky.
— Ryan Black (@RyanABlack) October 18, 2023
Calipari believes there’s a level of transparency needed, with schools disclosing how much their players are making off of NIL contracts.
Later in his answer, Calipari turned his attention to the transfer portal and offered a suggested fix to the current eligibility timeline, which has been thrown off in recent years by the extra season granted to athletes affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In the old days, you had five years to play four (seasons),” he said. “You had five years. Within that five years, if you want to transfer without penalty, you can one time. If you had any other issues, family stuff, mental health, you take the year off to get yourself together, then you play. But you have five years. We don't want to have 28-year-olds playing against 18-year-olds. I'm basically telling you what they do in high school. You get so many semesters and you're done. You can't have a 15-year-old playing against a 21-year-old. It's the same thing, what I think we should do.”
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Calipari, who noted he was not speaking on behalf of Kentucky or the SEC as a whole, acknowledged that his comments are unlikely to bring about change.
“No one listens to me,” he joked. “My wife doesn't listen. I yell to the dog, he runs the other way, so no one listens to me as I tell you this.”
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Kentucky's John Calipari pushes for NIL 'guardrails' at SEC media days
