Friday
By Bobby Burton
The president of the United States issued an executive order yesterday regarding the future of college sports.
The main tenets included eliminating pay-for-play schemes, the future of student employment, Title IX guidance, saving non-revenue sports, and reducing long-term liability of the institutions.
I’ll briefly hit on each of these topics below.
But before I do, I want to say this:
Executive orders are largely performative. What I mean by that is, the orders attempt to set direction for others, from the attorney general, to other members of the president’s cabinet. But they are not the rule of law.
In other words, the president can’t unilaterally make the rules, not in the case of the NCAA. The president can’t waive a wand and make collectives illegal or grant anti-trust exemption to the NCAA.
Only legislative bodies (i.e. congress) can do that. Then the courts rule on their legality.
Here are the topics:
- Pay-for-play: the executive does not call out collectives specifically, only that he wants any payments to athletes being purely for brand purposes.
Well, pay-for-play has technically already been illegal in the NIL era. The collectives are paying athletes for their brand. So how this could effect NIL and the future of it is murky at best.
- Student-employment: by addressing this, the EO seems to favor keeping students as non-employees.
- Title IX guidance/non-revenue sports: the EO invokes the desire to keep US Olympic sports competitive as a primary basis for the importance of these two issues. Title IX will be tricky, but the importance of non-revenue sports has been more than adequately addressed in the House vs NCAA settlement. The EO just wants to make sure no scholarships or opportunities are diminished and the House Settlement handles that.
- Long-term liability: this is where there could be real value extracted potentially by NCAA member schools IMO. If the NCAA does not have to worry about infringing on the rights of its players when enacting rules, they can rule with more of an iron fist without as much fear of student retribution via future lawsuits. Some equate this to the possibility of an anti-trust exemption.
In all, the executive order is not a game-changer. It is just another piece of the puzzle we are all wading through to get to a final resolution, which in my mind, remains years away.