In order to understand the high school aspect of NIL you have start with the college side.
College and high school sports were originally designed be amateur. In the early 1900’s some college athletes found it hard to make ends meet and a few who had the talent played summer semi-pro baseball. The great Jim Thorpe did so and when it came to light the Olympic Committee took back the medals and awards that he received at the 1912 Olympics. Eventually, after he died years later the medals were returned to his heirs, but the special awards presented to him by the King of Sweden are still held somewhere, maybe in Switzerland, being hidden by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
George Gipp of Notre Dame football fame was a pool shark and gambler to get spare money, prior to his death in 1920. Gambling. of course, was and is against NCAA rules. Most college players found it hard to make ends meet even on scholarship. In the 1940’s-1960’s a few colleges were caught paying athletes under the table to play. A notable basketball player, Connie Hawkins and a few others lost their scholarships and luckily for Hawkins he was able turn his talent to play pro basketball and eventually earn a spot in the Basketball Hall of Fame.
Then, the IOC began allowing professional basketball and hockey players to participate and the sham of amateurism went out the door. Many athletes at the college level for years felt “used” by their institution when their NIL was used to the school’s profit. I remember Ron Dayne complaining that UW-Madison (1996-99) made a ton of money selling T-shirts and jerseys with his name on it and he earned nothing for it.
The NCAA should have foreseen major future NIL problems. In 2014 former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon sued the NCAA in a class-action court asking for compensation for himself on behalf of NCAA’s Division 1 football and men’s basketball players. He won $42.2 million. The NCAA appealed and lost (O'Bannon v. NCAA - Wikipedia) This case opened the door for the future NIL mess. And it all could have been prevented. For years the NCAA and all of their institutions were greedy and didn’t want to look at the whole picture. It was like jumping out of an airplane without putting on a parachute.
On September 30, 2019, California became the first state to pass a law allowing college athletes to be paid for use of their name, image and likeness. Governor Gavin Newsom signed the law called the” Fair Play to Pay Act” which as initially designed to take effect in 2023. The state later moved the date up to September 2021 but on July 1, 2021, the NCAA decided to allow student-athletes to profit from their NIL rights. The NCAA initially called the California law “harmful”, “unconstitutional” and an “existential threat” to college sports. The NCAA tried to restrict the NIL process by going to Congress and asking that the Federal Government pass a law restricting the proposed NIL process, but they failed. Congress ignored their plea. Could the fiasco that NIL has produced been prevented or slowed down?
Yes, but the NCAA buried its head in the sand and hoped the problem would go away.
In retrospect, Michael Cunningham, writing in the Sunday, March 20, 2022, edition of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper presented a logical way that the NCAA could have solved the problem.
“There are easy, legal solutions to the alleged problems that college sports leaders cite with athletes profiting from their name, image and likeness. All they need to do is admit that athletes are employees and deal with them as such. Just abandon the “amateur” model that has enrichened coaches and administrators at the expense of athletes for a new system that pays the labor fair market value.”
It was a simple solution that the knowledgeable people in power at the NCAA must somehow never have thought about. Cunningham’s idea, or a form of it, in fact had been expressed since the 1940’s but ignored. Now the genie was out of the bottle and there have been a lot of consequences. In October of 2024 former Ohio State quarterback Terrelle Pryor filed a class-action lawsuit against the NCAA, Ohio State University, The Big 10 and Learfield Communications seeking NIL money. Read more for the details: New Developments in NIL Lawsuit Against Ohio State, NCAA and Big Ten Emerge
While the NIL situation was developing, two other things arrived on the scene. First, COVID. This disrupted sports nationwide and for some athletes they were about to lose a year of eligibility under quarantine circumstances. To remedy the problem the NCAA created a player’s ability to get an extra year of playing time, if they chose to do so.
Second, the NCAA Transfer Portal (NCAA transfer portal - Wikipedia) that had actually been created in October 2018 and has it has since been expanded. With the Portal, players have somehow been able to expand their career from the normal four-years (Maybe five if there had been a red-shirt year or a graduate season). However, I’ve seen some players have a six-year college career. The NCAA has just recently decided to allow a junior college athlete to play an extra four years at a regular college. Quarterback Mark Gronowski started at South Dakota State in 2020. He sat out 2021 with an ACL injury and then started 2022-24. That’s four seasons playing college ball and now he’s transferring to the University of Iowa. I don’t know how he get’s another season of play. He’s already appeared in 55 college games over five seasons. Another situation is Washington State which has lost a record 36 players to the Portal since the end of the 2024 year. Allowing this mass movement just isn’t healthy for college football.
Where is all of this leading? It’s leading to the high school NIL. That’s next time.
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