Arizona athletic director Dave Heeke wary of NIL's impact

When Pac-12 coaches and administrators met for annual spring meetings this week, the inevitable name-image-and-likeness gripes peaked on two different levels.

For the coaches, the largely unregulated NIL activity is threatening to morph into recruiting inducements and pay-for-play deals, making their roster management efforts exponentially more challenging.

For Arizona’s Dave Heeke and the conference’s other athletic directors, it’s an even broader problem. Maybe even an existential crisis.

If NIL leads to schools having to pay players as employees, or even if it just vacuums up money from boosters that might otherwise go to the schools, the traditional college sports model of propping up non-revenue sports programs with football and basketball profits could collapse.

“It would really erode our overall Olympic programs or we’d have to be completely restructured,” Heeke told the Star during the meetings. “If that train really goes down, if you really take NILs and everything to the extreme, there is not room for all these other programs beyond football and basketball. There just isn’t.”

The key word there, administrators hope, is “Olympic.”

Non-revenue college sports are now typically referred to as “Olympic sports,” programs such as swimming and track that lose money but sometimes produce athletes who go on to compete for the U.S. Olympic team – developing at the cost of schools, not the U.S. government.

That may be the only leverage college administrators have left in their efforts to get legislators to help place guardrails on NIL activity, something that the NCAA has asked for since state NIL bills started popping up in 2019.

So on Wednesday evening, before the Pac-12 meetings wrapped up, conference commissioner George Kliavkoff was already headed off to Washington, D.C.

After all, he’s the head of a conference that historically produces far more Olympians than any other conference. At the Tokyo Olympics last summer, the Pac-12 was represented by a total of 321 athletes, a delegation bigger than all but 11 entire countries.

“The United States Olympic movement is truly fed by the colleges and universities,” Heeke said. “With most of the Olympic programs, the training mechanisms and the feeder systems for those are our college programs. And without strong programs there, you’d see a big dip in our Olympic efforts.

“You know, if wrestling gets dropped, that (U.S.) Olympic wrestling movement kind of goes away. This is bigger than just a college sports problem. You’re gonna see an erosion of Olympic athletes and training.”

Kliavkoff could not be reached Thursday but told ESPN that “it’s more likely that we eventually get federal legislation on name, image and likeness, but we’re also interested in discussing all of the harm that will come to student-athletes if they are deemed to be employees.”

While the Pac-12 joined several other conferences in meeting this week at a Scottsdale resort, Heeke said the topics of NIL and the transfer portal were not only discussed within conferences, but also in meetings that included multiple conferences – and in the hallways and at dinner tables.

“Lots of conversation, absolutely,” Heeke said.

The transfer portal is already growing every year, with an average of over four players entering per men’s basketball team this spring. Heeke said the “next chapter” could be seeing more and more athletes jump in simply to look around and see what NIL opportunities might be available elsewhere, since they may have much less leverage if they stay put.

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“I don’t know if that’s rampant right now but you’ve obviously had a few cases,” Heeke said. “People could go into the transfer portal to test the water. Kind of like an open free-agency period.”

As it was this spring, basketball guard Nigel Pack, briefly a UA target when he announced a transfer from Kansas State, wound up transferring to Miami amid reports he will receive a two-year, $800,000 NIL deal.

Heeke said administrators are hoping that legislators can provide some sort of “appropriate boundaries,” with three primary areas of concern: That NIL can’t be used as a recruiting inducement, that it can’t resemble pay-for-play and the payments should be reflective of the work being done.

“Right now, that’s not true,” Heeke said. “Providing someone six figures to be the spokesperson to open a new retail store is not appropriate. It’s not commensurate with the duties performed.”

So how does all that get regulated? Will every deal be pored over to see if it is appropriate or not? Are there hard and fast dollar figures? And who would do all that oversight, exactly?

“That’s the $64,000 question,” Heeke said.

Meanwhile, at least, college administrators may be able to work on the transfer portal themselves. Heeke said several football-oriented committees have discussed shrinking the portal to a window of 30, 60 or 90 days after a season but then “turn off” so as to allow coaches to rebuild their rosters as necessary.

As of now, athletes can enter the portal all year, though basketball and football players must enter by May 1 in order to be avoid sitting out a year at their new school.

“We all believe that student-athletes ought to have an opportunity to move like any student, but there needs to be some guidelines,” Heeke said. “I just see some time restrictions on that, so we can plan accordingly and know when our rosters would be set to a certain degree. Extenuating circumstances could be dealt with, and then we just move forward.”

Other noteworthy items from the Pac-12 meetings:

• The Pac-12 is expected to forward a proposal to the league’s presidents later this month that would allow the conference to eliminate football divisions, or at least change the criteria for determining who plays in its championship game — if the NCAA votes later this summer to no longer require divisions in order to hold a championship game.

Such a change might reduce the possibility that the Pac-12 could lose a CFP berth when it has to pit a team in line for the playoff in the Pac-12 title game against a team from the other division that is out of the CFP race.

• The Pac-12 is not expected to reduce football conference games from nine to eight, at least through 2026, since the CFP will remain four teams until then. “So much of this is predicated by what the college football playoff looks like,” Heeke said. “At least for the near future, I don’t look for us to change the number of conference games we play.”

• Men’s basketball programs are being told to continue aiming for an average non-conference opponent NET rating of no worse than 175 (roughly the midway ranking of Division I teams), but Heeke said flexibility with teams on the extremes is necessary.

“It’s important if you’re going to be a good team, you should try to play other good team to position yourself the best,” Heeke said, “and for the lower level teams that are kind of rebuilding (the goal is to) have wins that elevate them.”