Why Ray Tanner, SEC athletic directors will lobby for federal NIL legislation after spring meetings
MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — After a week of SEC spring meetings on Florida's Emerald Coast, South Carolina athletics director Ray Tanner will head to Washington, D.C., to lobby lawmakers to introduce federal legislation regulating name, image and likeness in college athletics.
"We're going up to meet with our constituents, discuss the potential for Congress eventually entering this space, because it's going to be very difficult for the states to be on the same page," Tanner, who will join colleagues from the SEC in Washington, told The Greenville News on Thursday. "We're going to engage Congress, and they have been engaged. There's a lot of interest, but how quickly all of that happens I don't know."
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For most of the NCAA's existence, its athletes were banned from profiting off their name, image and likeness, including through brand sponsorships, jersey/merchandise sales and autographs. However, the organization reversed its stance in 2021 amid a slew of state laws designed to overrule the NCAA by legalizing NIL monetization. The NCAA also lost a landmark anti-trust case in the Supreme Court that was expected to incite further litigation on its limitation of athlete benefits.
The NCAA adopted an interim policy on June 30, 2021, that offered almost no guidance or restriction for athletics departments, stating that athletes only needed to adhere to the laws in their state. More than a year later, in October 2022, the organization offered certain clarifications but few specific rules or structures for enforcement.
States continue to pass new legislation related to NIL, which places the SEC in a challenging position. In the conference's 11-state footprint, Arkansas and Missouri have enacted a law granting NIL access to high school recruits, and Texas now allows schools to bring NIL under university funding structures like a foundation. Neither is currently permitted under South Carolina law.
"This is an opportunity to communicate ... some of the pressures that we're facing and communicate that, given the realities in college athletics, Congress is the place that can fix the issues we have," SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said. "Certainly we can continue to deal with state-by-state decisions, deal with litigation, deal with conference-by-conference decisions, wonder if the NCAA can fix things. We've learned what are the positive attributes about name image and likeness. We heard that from our student-athletes. We also heard some concerns and their desire for a uniform national standard."
This won't be Tanner's first foray into government lobbying: He and former Clemson athletics director Dan Radakovich spent time advocating for the state to pass NIL legislation back in 2021, and both schools were also involved in later efforts to revise that law. South Carolina previously prohibited university employees from facilitating NIL deals for athletes and banned the use of any university branding in NIL-related appearances. That language was successfully repealed in 2022.
Tanner and Sankey both said there is legitimate willingness from Congress to get involved in NIL regulation, but there has been little movement on that front since the NCAA's policy reversal. Multiple bills were proposed from 2019-21, but none gained enough traction to get out of committee.
Tanner said he isn't particularly invested in what specific regulations would be, rather that the regulations are standardized nationwide.
"Everybody wants to have something uniform, student-athletes too," Tanner said. "Right now it's, I don't like to say the Wild West, but it's not inside the guard rails. I don't mean that in a negative way, but we don't know exactly what everybody else is doing and how we should be doing it. It would be nice, because we're used to rules and having guidelines."
This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Why Ray Tanner, SEC athletic directors want federal NIL legislation
