SEC commish Greg Sankey rails against lack of NIL progress as college sports leaders struggle for answers

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — In late June, the next step in college sports’ pursuit of solutions for name, image and likeness (NIL) unfolded in a large conference room within NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis.

Members of the Division I council — some of college sports’ top athletic administrators — gathered around a table for a report from members of the NIL working group. The report was vague in nature — an outline of a general pathway for a possible permanent solution to an issue that has vexed college leaders for months now.

After the presentation ended, the room fell silent — aside from the voice of the commissioner of the SEC.

“I am concerned that we had the opportunity for observations, comments or questions and I was the only one who spoke,” Greg Sankey said in an interview with Yahoo Sports this week from SEC football media days. “You have a DI leadership group receiving a report from a working group, well presented, and only one of 40 representatives engaged in this conversation.

“We spend more time talking about the committee selection process than we do about the leading issue we are facing, which is name, image and likeness,” he continued. “Maybe for some within Division I, there is an imaginary world where name, image and likeness doesn’t touch them. I think that’s exactly what I described it as — an imaginary world. Those in leadership positions owe their time and position to this topic.”

These comments, perhaps strategically fired toward his colleagues, emanate from a person who is exhausted by the NCAA’s bureaucratic governing process and frustrated at the lack of NIL enforcement from the governing body.

However, change may be on the horizon.

While the NIL working group explores a permanent policy to govern athlete compensation, its members, as well as invited athletes and other administrators, are scheduled to gather next week in Indianapolis for what has been described as a “stakeholders meeting” to further examine future NIL legislative change.

Amid all of this, NCAA and college leaders continue to discuss a potential approach on penalizing schools that, while following their own state laws, defy the organization’s NIL policy. Possible enforcement methods range widely, but the most severe include threatening to make schools ineligible for NCAA postseason tournaments, football bowl games and the College Football Playoff.

All of this speaks to a message delivered by NCAA president Charlie Baker in June at a convention of athletic administrators in Orlando.

“No one else is going to figure this out. It’s on us,” Baker told administrators in his address at the National Association of College Athletic Directors.

Are the wheels of the NCAA starting to creak to life over NIL? The organization may have no other choice. Despite recent Congressional movement, federal legislation remains non-existent as the country plunges into a divisive presidential election cycle — a time when Congressional action normally slows to a crawl.

The impetus for the NCAA’s latest moves is an urgent need for a uniform standard in the face of a new wave of state laws. Through lobbying efforts, schools have engineered their state lawmakers to feverishly rewrite statutes to give them an advantage over neighboring programs.

New state laws adopted in Arkansas, Missouri, New York, Texas and Oklahoma clear a path for their schools to bring NIL programs more under their proverbial roof while also prohibiting enforcement from the NCAA and others.

This new evolution of NIL collectives tests NCAA and SEC governorship, risks federal rules violations and, maybe most important, pushes college sports another step closer to what many believe is an eventuality: schools paying athletes directly.

In an absence of Congressional action, the NIL working group is on a path to what Baker has in the past called an “alternative course of action” — a more permanent set of NIL rules to replace the vague interim policy by which the NCAA has operated for two years.

Details are sparse and a framework is nowhere near finalized, but the group is expected to draw on concepts that were part of the proposed NIL policy released in 2021. Out of legal fears, the NCAA abandoned the adoption of the permanent policy and instead operated through a set of interim guidelines — something that Baker describes as a “mistake” by his predecessor.

The NIL working group, formed in 2019 to explore NIL policy, is made up of athletic administrators, some of which are original members such as Colorado AD Rick George and Ohio State AD Gene Smith. Whatever policy the working group creates is likely to trigger legal challenges. The same goes for any enforcement the NCAA hands down to schools that are violating the association’s rules despite following their state laws.

However, in response to such legal fears, one official quips, “We are ready to go to court.”

Any permanent NIL policy should be permissive enough for athletes so that it receives an endorsement from Congress and, eventually, gives the NCAA protection to operate and enforce it. “We need to do the work and present the model for (Congress),” says one administrator.

Sankey’s advice to the working group is quite simple.

“My encouragement is for the NIL working group, driven by membership, to look at what the key things can be accomplished right now?” he said. “What points of influence or points of pressure exist to change public policy at the state or Congressional level? Let’s get back to some of the basic functions, provide clarity on what enforcement is going to do.”

In the interview with Yahoo Sports, Sankey re-emphasized his conference’s plan, barring Congressional legislation, to create an SEC-wide policy to manage NIL from league headquarters.

SEC leaders have seriously discussed the idea, but there are plenty of issues. A conference-wide policy would necessitate the alignment of all NIL laws in the SEC’s 12-state footprint, some of which prohibit NCAA or conference enforcement over NIL.

Meanwhile, the college athletics world waits for the NCAA to take its first enforcement action over NIL. That includes Sankey.

“I think we’re all waiting to see NCAA oversight of this area, particularly around the involvement of boosters in recruiting,” he said. “Direct communication (from boosters) and making of offers, which doesn’t seem to have any relationship to antitrust law, doesn’t bump up against any laws that I know of. I’m just waiting to see some clarity around how the NCAA is going to enforce.”

One administrator involved in the working group’s process asks a question that many within college sports are wondering: “When is the NCAA going to make teams ineligible?”

Should schools breaking NCAA rules while also following state law be ruled ineligible for the postseason?

“That’s for the NCAA board to decide,” Sankey said. “State laws don’t mandate conflict with NCAA policy. They provide space for that. Where you end up is this notion that state law can bar a voluntary association from enforcing its own policy and there’s probably plenty of ink to be spilled whether that is a viable position.”

The topic is sure to arise next week when administrators and athletes gather at NCAA headquarters for the two-day stakeholders meeting.

Will it produce real movement? Will there be new legislation?

The questions persist. The answers are mostly absent.