Was it a ‘bait and switch’? NC lawmaker speaks out on NCAA’s new athlete initiative
Rep. Mark Walker, who has pushed the NCAA harder than just about anyone in Congress to take the financial shackles off athletes, doesn’t want to downplay what the NCAA announced Wednesday morning.
Philosophically, the NCAA’s willingness to potentially let athletes make a buck or two on endorsements or social-media marketing is the kind of huge rhetorical shift that even critics have to acknowledge.
“I don’t want to beat them over the head too much, because this is monumental progress,” the North Carolina Republican said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
But the NCAA also didn’t go far enough to make the federal legislation Walker proposed last spring moot, nor meet the standards set by California’s Fair Pay to Play Act or the other state legislation that has forced the NCAA’s hand. And there are so many hurdles, pitfalls and caveats that the eventual implementation could end up very different than the broad strokes proposed Wednesday.
“Truthfully, I am hopeful, but does it change the need for legislation? No,” Walker said. “Because to me federal legislation is a backstop to make sure the NCAA doesn’t come back and say of these proposed changes, these three don’t work, and they end up in a ditch.”
In a statement released earlier Wednesday, Walker cautioned against the NCAA using this ballyhooed announcement as a “bait and switch” if it continues to restrict athletes’ rights. It’s not often a sitting Congressman uses a phrase like that in a prepared statement.
But Walker — who has represented North Carolina’s 6th District, which stretches east from Greensboro and includes all of Chatham County, since 2015 — took on the NCAA directly last March when he introduced his Student-Athlete Equity Act, which would revoke the NCAA’s nonprofit status if it “substantially restricts a student athlete from being reasonably compensated” for their name, image and likeness rights, commonly abbreviated as NIL. That includes not only sponsorships and endorsements but side hustles and social-media channels entirely unrelated to athletics, all of which are currently prohibited by the NCAA.
Walker knows that one day’s bold headlines can be all but irrelevant six months later once the NCAA bureaucracy and legal apparatus chews them up and spits them out.
“I trust the NCAA about as much as I trust the Federal government,” Walker said.
The steps announced Wednesday are merely a framework. How they would actually be implemented remains hazy, full of “guardrails” that ensure they serve the needs of the NCAA as much as they do the athletes. Some of those make sense, even to a skeptic like Walker, like prohibiting athletes from using school logos and trademarks in personal endorsements. Others raise major concerns.
Most notably, the NCAA wants to be able to assess the market value of endorsement deals to ensure they’re not being abused for recruiting purposes. That process would almost certainly be an antitrust violation without a statutory exemption from Congress, the very idea of which made Walker chuckle.
“I’m not sure we’re ready to hand out free antitrust exemptions at this point,” Walker said.
The antitrust exemption was on a long list of associated legislative demands the NCAA requested, along with its proposed changes, and the working group that suggested it noted the large number of antitrust lawsuits that have been filed against the NCAA, including the successful Ed O’Bannon lawsuit that helped open the door to the changes that the NCAA has been forced to embrace now.
“It also tells you someone thinks that they may have culpability, too,” Walker said. “It kind of tells you where their mind has been all along.”
All of which is to say, for gatekeepers like Walker who are demanding the NCAA get in step with the times, Wednesday was a step forward, but only one. There are still many left.
