How NIL changes already impact collegiate sports recruiting
Athletics Veritas is a weekly series aimed at helping higher education executives, faculty, and other stakeholders stay tuned in on trending national issues impacting college athletics, especially NCAA Division I. Athletics Veritas is created by senior DI athletic administrators around the nation.
The Summer of Mayhem: How NIL changes already impact collegiate sports recruiting
With college athletes now allowed to earn compensation for their name, image and likeness, the collegiate recruiting landscape is already evolving. High school prospects say NIL is a factor in their decision and college coaches know to discuss it, even as the rules around NIL and recruiting remain a work in progress.
Executive Summary:
State laws permitting college student-athletes to be compensated for their name, image and likeness went into effect across the country this summer, opening the door to a new era in collegiate athletics.
As the NCAA sought to nationalize NIL standards and procedures, the organization and its members agreed there needed to be rules in place to police pay-for-play enticements and NIL promises in collegiate recruiting.
Amid the flurry of offers for NIL deals, school compliance staffers field hundreds of requests for compliance reviews of NIL offers per day and essentially police their own programs, Sports Illustrated reported.
The NCAA has taken a hands-off approach hoping Congress will step in at some point and pass a federal NIL law.
The next big frontier in NIL is how to handle recruiting. Some state laws stipulate that schools can’t arrange NIL deals for athletes while other states have no such requirements; the same uneven rules apply to the use of school branding.
Either way, coaches know to discuss NIL possibilities with prospects, and prospects know the opportunities are there. Reports abound of coaches offering ballpark or exact NIL compensation figures to recruits if they sign with that school.
The difficult task for school compliance and NCAA enforcement staffers is to figure out how to police potential pay-for-play offers in recruiting, an immense challenge with more than 48,000 prep prospects signing national letters of intent to play their sport in college and many more signing with schools without an NLI.
For now, as colleges, Congress, the NCAA and states grapple with NIL rules changes, the recruiters and recruits are quickly adapting to the new world order.
Byproducts come with every new change, and the seismic shift in name, image and likeness benefits rules in college sports started a significant redirection in recruiting.
Once the most taboo subject in college sports recruiting — and the source of many NCAA infractions cases — compensation for student-athletes, and the promise of it for prospects, is now front and center.
Both college recruiters and prospects often address the elephant in the room head on, discussing NIL possibilities during recruiting visits or in conversations over the phone and internet. Even as some state laws prohibit schools from facilitating deals for its athletes (while others don’t), stories abound of college recruiters across the country giving prospects ballpark or exact figures for potential NIL earnings if they sign with the school. And with student-athletes often announcing their deals and sharing them on social media, in addition to news outlets reporting them, prospects can easily see the NIL possibilities at different programs.
“It’s a game-changer for recruiting, period,” On3 national basketball reporter Joe Tipton said in a story about NIL in recruiting.
There is no denying that recruiting for college sports has drastically changed in the few months since NIL laws went into place, especially at the highest-earning programs where athletes can make hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. The question is whether school compliance officers and the NCAA have any hope of enforcing the pay-for-play enticements that were always going to come up the moment NIL changes surfaced.
That, it appears, is going to be a tall, tall task.
In the On3 article, unnamed football recruiting coordinators from the Atlantic Coast Conference and Southeastern Conference, two Power Five leagues, referenced conversations with recruits who mentioned other schools “making specific promises of how much” a prospect might receive in NIL compensation.
The same rumblings consumed the college basketball recruiting community over the summer.
“We’ve had recruits tell us that an SEC school they’re considering promised them they have $1 million deals lined up for them if they sign,” the ACC recruiting coordinator told On3. “I think it’s easily 40 percent of the schools that are making promises to kids about NIL deals. And you’re about to see the other 60 percent do it, too, because they can’t get left behind.”
Former USC coach Clay Helton told Sports Illustrated his staff put together presentations for prospects “to show the advantages of being in a market like (Los Angeles).”
Adding to the challenges of potentially policing the recruiting side of the new NIL standards: uneven rules relating to school logos. In some states, student-athletes may not use school logos or branding in their advertisements, perhaps in some cases significantly decreasing their impact and visibility. But other states have no such policy.
A Syracuse University administrator told SI of prospects specifically asking if they could use SU’s famous “S” logo and other branding in their NIL-allowed sponsorship deals if they play for the Orange. (The answer in New York is yes.) SI also reported the chairman of the University of Michigan’s board of regents visited football practice to “inform players that they could, in fact, use UM’s block M logo in their own commercial transactions.”
Kirby Smart, the University of Georgia football coach, stressed the need for federal NIL legislation to the Associated Press because, he said, “not everybody’s playing by the same rules.” The new ACC commissioner, Jim Phillips, asked in the AP story, “How ingrained and how heavy” will NIL promises get in recruiting?
Because this is new territory, there is significant concern that conversations around NIL benefits may dominate recruitments for prospects with big enough followings to earn money off their name and image. Many worry about student-athletes perhaps not fully grasping the legal and tax ramifications of sponsorship agreements or college recruiters making misleading or outright false promises of big earnings.
Others take an optimistic approach, hoping the NIL rules changes can bring student-athlete compensation above board and even root out pay-for-play temptations in recruiting.
“If I’m a player who was tempted (to) get paid in my recruitment illegally, should I even mess with that when I know I can just go make the money legally and not jeopardize my name or my eligibility or all of that?” University of Oklahoma football coach Riley said to the AP.
How this all shakes out in recruiting — and specifically with recruiting rules on the collegiate side — is an emerging design, a long-term experiment. Like just about everything else related to NIL rules changes, there is complexity and no real direction at the heart of the matter.
There is no confusion, however, over the power that potential NIL compensation now holds in collegiate recruiting. Those conversations are already prominent in the recruiting process.
Athletics Veritas is presented for information purposes only and should not be considered advice or counsel on NCAA compliance matters. For guidance on NCAA rules and processes, always consult your university’s athletics compliance office, conference office, and/or the NCAA.
