The NCAA’s most powerful conferences delivered an urgent plea to congressional leaders last week: We need your help to save college sports – and need it now.
The commissioners of the Big Ten, Big 12, Atlantic Coast Conference and Southeastern Conference quietly lobbied leaders in both parties – including Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries – to back legislation that would set national standards on how collegiate athletes can profit on their name, image and likeness.
Their warning: That a Supreme Court decision two years ago that paved the way for companies to pay student athletes has led to a complicated series of state laws that have undermined collegiate sports and could ultimately lead to the collapse of sports programs across the United States.
“The risk is permanent damage to an enterprise that has meant an awful lot to our country, and to those that have benefited from the experiences,” James Phillips, the ACC commissioner, said on “Inside Politics Sunday.”
Greg Sankey, the SEC commissioner, had a dire prediction if Congress doesn’t act.
“The risk is we see states further build walls around their recruiting grounds, thinking that that somehow provides a competitive advantage,” Sankey said. “The risk is that more and more young people sign agreements that they don’t understand. The risk is we move further and further from the academic nature of college sports.”
In their first-ever joint interview, the four power conference leaders told CNN that the current landscape has created grave instability where collegiate athletes increasingly transfer to different universities based on different states’ rules on profiting off their name, image and likeness, or NIL. Athletes’ increasing use of the transfer portal, they said, has become problematic in college sports, particularly for student…
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