Name, Image and Likeness? Oh My!
It’s been obvious for years now that bigtime college athletes are more valuable than the cost of tuition.
Here in Oklahoma, Sooners and Cowboys football stars are as famous and popular as Garth Brooks and Toby Keith. National powerhouse programs like Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, Georgia and Notre Dame rake in millions each year from the football team alone.
Those schools reinvest that money into coaches and facilities, which help attract better recruits, which leads to more winning, which raises revenues. It’s a never-ending cycle of largesse, where everyone gets rich – except the players.
Don’t get me wrong – major college athletes have it pretty good. They get full rides, room and board, free meals, and a suite of benefits the average college student would kill for. But last week, the NCAA opened the door for college athletes to finally do the one thing they’ve always been (officially) denied: capitalize on their fame.
College athletes everywhere are now free to sell the rights to their names, images and likenesses for personal profit. This will most frequently take the form of sponsorship deals, where athletes accept money from businesses to endorse a product or service. Athletes can also now sell memorabilia, hold instructional camps, sign autographs, and pursue other money-making ventures that were previously off-limits because of the NCAA’s amateurism rules.
The rules will vary from state to state and institution to institution, but the floodgates are now open for athletes across the country
Ẇhat does all this mean? For the average college football fan, it means very little. The noticeable differences will appear not on the field this fall, but outside the lines.
Fans might see OU quarterback Spencer Rattler, for instance, in a television commercial for Raising Cane’s chicken, where he signed an endorsement deal last week. (I’m jealous. I ate a ton of Raising Cane’s when they opened a location on campus during my freshman year.)
Fans will also notice the return of the NCAA Football video game, an iconic title that disappeared in 2013 amid concerns that game companies were profiting off student-athletes. The games worked around college amateurism rules by not including actual names in the game, but no one was fooled – the players were direct representations of the schools’ current rosters. Now, college athletes might actually get compensated for appearing in the game.
Name, image and likeness rules have long been a logical and elegant solution to the problem of paying players. I’ve mentioned already that schools like Texas and Michigan could afford to pay their football players much like a pro team; however, this isn’t true for most schools. Oral Roberts University, to name just one, probably isn’t prepared to shell out thousands to its basketball players. But with NIL rules now in place, those players can capitalize on their next March Madness run by, for instance, endorsing a Tulsa car dealership or signing some autographs.
It remains to be seen how NIL will affect the competitive balance of college football. Probably not that much, as competitive balance was already nonexistent. But a model in which universities paid players directly was virtually guaranteed to benefit only the giants, like Alabama, at the expense of smaller schools. NIL rules, again, remove that burden from the universities.
Most college athletes will never play professionally. And those that do often have a short career. For most athletes, college is as famous as they’re ever going to be. Consider OU softball players – sure, the best of them have a professional career when they leave. But college softball is far, far more popular than professional softball. Lauren Chamberlain, for example, should have been able to profit off her fame while in college instead of waiting until afterward.
For all these reasons, I think the new NIL rules are a step in the right direction. Yes, it’s another dent in the amateur model of college sports. But it’s high time we recognize college sports for what it is: a business. And it’s a business that doesn’t work without the athletes, who will finally get a small piece of the pie.