US universities beg Congress to limit student athlete pay

The leadership of US college sports is pleading with Congress to prevent states from creating their own rules that will let student athletes profit from their work.

With at least seven states set to allow outside income by student athletes starting next month, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has made a quick pivot from fighting the concept to asking the federal government to do it in a uniform way.

“We need a single national standard, rather than 50 different rules,” the NCAA’s president, Mark Emmert, a former president of the University of Washington, told US senators at a hearing on the matter.

The lawmakers, however, do not appear especially sympathetic and are expected to let the states move ahead on their own, creating what the NCAA fears might be the destruction of a competitive nationwide collegiate sports environment.

Alongside Dr Emmert, the senators invited Rod Gilmore, a former Stanford University football player now best known as a television sports analyst, who agreed that state-by-state rule variations might hurt colleges but predicted that they would clearly help students.

Mr Gilmore accused US colleges and universities of running a $20 billion (£14 billion) sports operation that had long protected “its own self-interest and economic well-being at the expense of players”.

Allowing competition among states and their universities, to see which might offer student athletes the best financial deal, is long overdue, Mr Gilmore said.

Those backing the NCAA included Mark Few, head coach of the men’s basketball team at Gonzaga University, who complained that colleges cannot have “competitive, fair championships if every state has a different rule”.

The seven states – Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Nebraska and New Mexico – will prohibit universities beginning next month from barring their athletes from making money related to their sport.

About a dozen other states have passed laws that take effect within a few more years.

The likely areas of revenue for top student athletes centre on product endorsements arranged by professional agents.

Some universities in those states already are planning to make those moneymaking opportunities a part of their recruitment pitches to top athletes. Some are also planning new courses geared towards such student athletes, focusing on the likes of entrepreneurship and business skills.

There is some support within both political parties for legislation that would layer a nationwide set of rules over the actions by individual states. But there is also bipartisan reluctance, with senators faulting the NCAA for failing to accept the profit-making rights of student athletes until the states forced it upon them.

The potential for legislative action to help the NCAA is further complicated by calls by some senators for additional terms that would require colleges to better ensure the health and safety of student athletes.

That approach was enthusiastically endorsed by Cory Booker, a senator and former American football player at Stanford. Mr Booker, the first black US senator from New Jersey, gave his colleagues an impassioned explanation of the ways that colleges exploit their athletes.

The NCAA “brags” that its athletes have a 90 per cent graduation rate, but the figure in the top-revenue sports is just 56 per cent, Mr Booker said. NCAA policies rob many of them of large earnings in their peak years, he said.

He and Mr Gilmore also noted that at least 30 college football players have died since 2000 from heat-related conditions, while that has happened to only one player in the professional NFL.

But Wayne Frederick, the president of Howard University, warned lawmakers that the costs associated with additional requirements on student health could harm smaller institutions, including historically black colleges.

With those considerations likely to slow legislative deliberations, the NCAA and its allies admitted concern that federal action might not happen before the world of college sports starts adjusting to the state-by-state variations.

Facing that reality, Dr Emmert held out for senators the possibility of the NCAA waging a legal battle against the states that are moving to permit profit-making by student athletes.

Those state actions, however, are just part of a series of events threatening to end the decades-old dominance that US colleges have had in marketing young athletes ahead of their professional careers in the big-dollar sports of American football and basketball.

Other developments include the emergence of Overtime Sports, a company whose plans for a league of elite college-age basketball players have helped it attract investors that include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and acquire an estimated market value of $250 million.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com