Why shouldn’t NCAA athletes profit off their image? Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran wants to know
How would you feel if your boss were making money on the side by selling your name, image and likeness? In most walks of life, you could sue for that.
Yet it’s happening, right in the open, with colleges and universities profiting off the names and likenesses of their often-destitute star athletes.
Is there another form of legal identity theft like that? Or at least a more brazen or lucrative one?
But it’s even worse than that: The NCAA has actually punished players for making a little pocket money off their hard-won fame and fandom. Heisman Trophy candidate and University of Georgia running back Todd Gurley was suspended for four games in 2014 — nearly a third of the football season — for having accepted a few thousand dollars over a couple years for autographed jerseys and such.
That kind of galactic injustice may be coming to an end. Half the states, prodded in no small part by California’s bold decision last September, have passed or introduced legislation to allow college athletes to profit off their names and likenesses.
All of a sudden, the NCAA actually wants athletes to profit from their popularity. The organization is set to unveil its “name, image and likeness” rules in April, which would go into effect in January.
That’s all well and good, but does the NCAA think colleges should police themselves? Of course not. Then why should we let the organization police itself?
Thank goodness a U.S. Senate subcommittee chaired by Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran is exploring a badly needed overarching federal role in ending the universities’ wholly inequitable profiteering from players’ names and likenesses. His subcommittee took testimony Tuesday from the NCAA and leading institutions such as the University of Kansas.
One would hope that, after the hearing, the NCAA and member institutions realize the size of the tsunami coming at them. Moran’s subcommittee, which appears deadly serious about this issue, will be highly interested in what the NCAA brings forth in April.
“I wish we would have heard about a process that was quicker, more timely,” Moran said after the hearing. “I would like to see the NCAA and their athletes, through a process that includes athlete participation, reach a conclusion. I didn’t hear today that that’s on the immediate horizon.”
To his great credit, University of Kansas chancellor Douglas Girod invited federal action in testimony before Moran’s subcommittee.
“KU acknowledges that it is a new day in college athletics,” Girod said, “and if there is an opportunity for student-athletes to earn value from their name, image and likeness, we should support them and provide reasonable guardrails that will protect them and the integrity of the game while maintaining successful educationally-based athletic programs across the country.”
The NCAA wants to craft name, image and likeness rules that don’t open a Pandora’s box of professionalism in amateur athletics. Understood. Still, vital change is being thrust upon the lurching organization. It’s now on the clock to erase rank inequities for college athletes.
If the NCAA doesn’t hear the urgency, even in the genteel Kansas senator’s characteristically understated way, then it truly is tone deaf.