SAN FRANCISCO — Between all the promotional stops, interviews and general lightweight fun of the Pac-12’s annual preseason media days last week, commissioner Larry Scott sat down for a more serious discussion with both the men’s and women’s contingents.
For a change, it wasn’t about the FBI. It was about an issue that could be more impactful in the long run, one that could sprout many different consequences and one that the Pac-12 sits directly in the crosshairs of: the new California law allowing college athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness.
Down the line, Pac-12 coaches on both the men’s and women’s side expressed careful support for athletes’ rights and so, to some extent, did Scott.
“If young people want to earn money from their name, image, and likeness and get paid to play, they should have that opportunity,” Scott said. “That’s called pro sports.
“College sports is different. You go to get an education. It’s amateur, they’re students. Those are the defining characteristics, and we’d like to see those lines not get blurred and the interest in college sports become diminished.”
That’s the essence of a long-held argument for the NCAA’s amateurism model, of course. But Scott, several coaches and players also touched on potential unintended consequences of the law, if it were adopted by other states or instead worked into NCAA guidelines prior to the California law going into effect in 2023.
Among them:
1. Nonrevenue sports could suffer if outside money is diverted from athletic departments to star football and basketball players.
Scott said outside sponsorship dollars could be potentially divided in a “zero-sum” game between schools and their top athletes.
For example, a business that gives the athletic department $50,000 for sponsorship rights might instead be tempted to give it only $40,000 and hand the other $10,000 directly to a star quarterback or point guard.
“We don’t think that there are new resources that are necessarily going to be available for compensating student-athletes for” name, image and likeness, Scott said. “It’ll come from money that’s already going to our campuses in my view. It’ll come from donors or local companies that want to support their local program.
“So there will be less resources, I believe, that our campuses will have, and they’ll have to make some adjustments. From conversations I’ve had, I think there is a good likelihood that’ll come out of the hide of other programs — men’s Olympic sports programs and women’s programs.”
This possibility hits new UCLA basketball coach Mick Cronin on a personal level.
“Doug Martin, the golf coach at Cincinnati, is one of my close friends. You wouldn’t want to see his team go by the wayside because money is going to men’s basketball,” Cronin said. “I think we should find a way to make it all work for everybody’s benefit, and that would be for Olympic sports as well. You don’t want it to hurt them.”
But while apparel companies could be especially motivated to divert money to star athletes when they renegotiate deals with schools — UA currently gets about $3.8 million from Nike, including $500,000 in cash — Navigate Research CEO A.J. Maestas says he doesn’t think the impact would be that drastic.
Not counting the potential impact when long-term apparel deals get renegotiated, Maestas said he estimated a school would lose only a tiny percentage of its average revenue in a budget of $100 million (UA’s budget is about $91 million) if sponsors give some money directly to players, partly because it wouldn’t necessarily be a zero-sum game.
Maestas said sponsorships average about 8% of a budget and, based on his experience in pro models, athletes average about 2-3% of that figure.
“So at worst it would have a 1% (overall) impact,” Maestas said. “It would cannibalize sponsorships, but it’s not all that drastic. It’s not dollar-for-dollar.”
2. Sponsor money going directly to athletes would not be subject to Title IX regulations, which college programs must follow in directing resources between men and women.
Basically, it would behave like money does in the rest of the sports world. Scott noted that only one woman, tennis star Serena Williams, cracked a recent Forbes list of the 100 top-paid pro athletes.
“For those that follow women’s sports and gender equity, they realize that women don’t come anywhere close to getting the same opportunities that men have in our country,” Scott said. “While we certainly have a few high-profile women’s student-athletes that might benefit, there’s no doubt in my mind that 99 percent, plus or minus, will go to men, not to women, and whatever resources are spent this way will be taken from athletics departments.
“That runs a significant risk of taking away opportunities for women, as well as men in the Olympic movement.”
Basically, under the new law, sponsors could give name, image and likeness money to whomever they wanted. Maybe that could include Oregon basketball star Sabrina Ionescu, but more often it might be to male athletes.
Asked about the California law, Ionescu said she hadn’t thought much about it but hoped the result would be in “the best interest of the student-athletes,” while Oregon coach Kelly Graves and UCLA coach Cori Close also tiptoed around the issue.
“It’s such a delicate line, right?” Close said. “You want players to have opportunities and you never want to limit opportunities, but you also don’t want unintended consequences to maybe trickle down to how it could affect women’s opportunities and how it could play out in recruiting circles.
“And is this good intention to try to reward image and likeness really going to play out to reward that, or will there be some other things that are taken away that are unintended? And I think that’s sort of my caution.”
3. It could blow open recruiting (again).
The NCAA might have trouble regulating sponsorship money that is not commercially motivated — that is, money that a sponsor gives to a player because it wants to help the program, regardless of whether doing so brings the business any return on investment.
Or, in other words, cash for recruiting purposes.
“One of (the California law’s) several flaws is that it doesn’t contemplate that there’s competitive recruiting between schools,” Scott said. “That money, if it’s allowed, will be used to attract student-athletes to go to school X over school Y, and it’ll be dressed up as an NIL payment for an appearance, an autograph.”
Maestas says that could be particularly common with a car dealer or other local businessman who is also a booster. If he or she opts to give money to a player to make an appearance or pose for an ad, it could be difficult to determine if they are doing it to help their business … or help a coach.
“That’s the hard part to regulate,” Maestas said. “How do you identify what is commercially motivated versus just a bribe to attend a school? Is your endorsement deal pending your attendance?
“Of course the NCAA is going to try to crack down on it. But if you open the floodgates, I would see more money going to athletes for performance and recruiting than I would for actual commercial endorsements, on average.”
In a fierce recruiting world that already attracted the FBI’s attention at Arizona and several other high-profile programs over the past two years, that’s where even more clouds could settle in.
“We’ve actually been in a little bit of a gray area with recruiting issues with the rules in place to begin with, right?” Utah coach Larry Krystkowiak said. “To me it could open a whole can of worms. I’ve read various people’s ideas, but really I’m just kind of in a position that you can’t win. I just want what’s best for our student-athletes. If we can find some common ground, I think that’s great.”
But can they? The NCAA effectively has three years to figure something out before the California law goes into effect, unless other states’ efforts become laws even sooner.
The race is on.
“Certainly, I think a lot of smart people need to get in a room and try to get everybody on the same page,” Stanford men’s basketball coach Jerod Haase said.
“We really need to think not only about the obvious things, about the specifics, what happens initially, but really try and think through what all the consequences will be.”
