Back in 2004, Bob Knight, the late Hall of Fame basketball coach, gave a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. He wanted to make a point about the NCAA’s addiction to passing arcane rules.
He brought a couple of props.
One was a copy of the United States Constitution, everything neatly printed across 15 pages. The other was the NCAA Division I manual, thick and hardcovered, that he dropped on a table with a purposeful thud. Inside were thousands of bylaws and subsets and diagrams.
“This is what’s wrong with college athletics,” Knight said.
Knight’s point was accurate, although in fairness to the NCAA, the only reason its manual grew to such extremes was because coaches, players, boosters, administrators and even shoe companies kept breaking or finding work-arounds to almost every rule it ever made. Additions and adaptations were forever needed.
The simplest of concepts — players may receive only tuition, room and board — didn’t stand a chance against the wheels of capitalism, where your value is what someone will pay you.
“Nine out of 10 schools are cheating,” another late, great basketball coach, Jerry Tarkanian, once quipped. “The other is in last place.”
College athletics is back in the rules business after a brief respite during which name, image and likeness essentially allowed donors to compensate players and recruits as they saw fit.
Within college athletics, this was dubbed “the Wild, Wild West,” although it was really just above-the-table action that has, for generations, occurred under it.
Last Friday, Claudia Wilken, a federal judge in California, approved the so-called House settlement, ushering in a new era with echoes of the past.
The deal allows schools to directly share revenue with their athletes but tries to put a cap on overall payouts ($20.5 million for an entire school), fails to make the players university employees and initiates a complicated system designed to determine what a true NIL deal is (think Caitlin Clark repping State Farm, not a million bucks in exchange for a couple of social media posts).
In theory, it’s not the worst concept (unless you are a full free-market advocate). In practice, though, well, we have decades and decades of college sports history that suggests people are extremely unlikely to follow the rules. Any rules.
“I think [enforcement will] be very hard,” Kansas basketball coach Bill Self said back in March.
The open market of NIL in recent years was a shock to the system of those in college sports, who have taken on some kind of Stockholm Syndrome courtesy of that massive manual. They might have hated it, but then again, at least it was there.
“We’ve been in an unregulated environment with no rules and no enforcement,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said Monday.
True, except competitive balance actually leveled during the open NIL era — certainly in football and men’s basketball, where more teams from more places were capable of fielding national championship contenders. Talent, at least among the top 50 schools, spread out. Geography, “blue blood” history and preferred shoe company status no longer seemed to matter as much.
If nothing else, much of it was out in the open. There were no more false caps. No more bagmen or cars in grandma’s name, or Adidas executives getting hauled off by the FBI.
“I don’t want it to get where they put it back under the table,” Houston basketball coach Kelvin Sampson told ESPN in March. “Let’s keep everything above. Let’s keep everything on the table.”
With open NIL, there was no more pretending. If someone associated with Texas Tech believed a softball pitcher was worth $1.2 million a year, then so be it. That’s what she was worth. Good for her.
Trying to say otherwise goes against business principles and human nature. What is value, especially when athletes remain designated as students and not employees under binding contracts? Can this stand up to legal challenges?
Will coaches and fans accept lesser rosters because they have reached their “salary cap”? Will those who don’t and are accused of cheating just roll over and agree under a new, supposedly streamlined enforcement system? Or will everyone lawyer up, rally around the coach and fight to the bitter end, howling about unfairness as they always have?
Is the new mess just the old mess in a new package?
“Our schools want rules, and we are providing rules, and we will be governed by those rules,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said. “If you break those rules, the ramifications will be punitive.”
College sports leaders seem to be banking on everyone just agreeing to not skirt the rules this time. Meanwhile, nearly every coach in the country is offering up anonymous quotes suggesting doubt.
“I have sat in meeting rooms with each of our coaches’ groups,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said. “And I’ve asked … ‘If you want an unregulated, open system, just raise your hand and let me know.’ And universally the answer is, ‘No, we want oversight, we want guardrails, we want structure.’
“Those individuals don’t have the luxury to just say that in meeting rooms, period,” Sankey said. “They don’t have the luxury to be anonymous sources. They have the responsibility to make what they’ve sought, what they’ve asked for, to make it work.”
Maybe. But, really? What sounds good conceptually is different when it happens to you.
The value of a player who can deliver victories is considerable, even unquantifiable. Coaches maintain lucrative jobs. Schools bask in revenue, publicity and new-student applications. Alums get the immeasurable joy of winning, which can outstrip all practical financial sense.
With NIL remaining a thing, booster collectives continuing to operate, and players still allowed to have agents and marketers, the pathways to additional pay outside the approved amounts or structure are almost endless. If the NCAA couldn’t police extra benefits before, this feels impossible.
“It isn’t going to be perfect,” Phillips of the ACC conceded. “But we’re committed to progress: learning, adapting, strengthening the model to support and protect college sports.”
That’s how that NCAA manual once got so big. Here we are again, though; the era of deregulation is over. New rules. Same game.
