There is about to a seismic shift in the way money flows in and through college campuses with athletes getting set to be compensated.
On July 1, new laws are scheduled to go into effect in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and New Mexico. Basically, coaches in those states can telling incoming players that they can make money off their athletic fame.
ACC Network analyst and former coach Mark Richt thinks the game will change quickly this fall when players will be allowed to profit on their name, image, and likeness (NIL).
“When I was playing college football, my priorities were girls, football and then school,” Richt said, as transcribed by Saturday Down South. “Now it’s going to be money, girls, football, school.”
Bulldogs head coach Kirby Smart addressed the new NIL bill and admitted that there are still a lot of unknowns about how NIL will affect college football.
“You start with education,” Smart said. “You want everybody to understand as much as we can. We don’t know the rules we’re gonna play by, so it’s like playing a game that you don’t know the rules to. So everybody’s kind of on pins and needles. It’s an education process. It’s a great opportunity for student-athletes. Where it goes, I’ll be very interested to see. Because I’m a little bit more like Charles Barkley where I don’t think everybody is gonna be as marketable as some guys. When it’s not equitable, sometimes it’s tough.”
“It’s a little like COVID. The guy that manages that best, manages the egos and the problems or benefits that may come with it is probably gonna be a little bit ahead of the opponent. We’re all trying to manage it as best we can, but right now we don’t know. We don’t know enough about how it’s gonna be enforced, how it’s gonna be enacted at the state level, the federal level. We’re gonna find out in the next couple of weeks a lot about the future.”
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey Sankey has urged Congress to set a coast-to-coast standard to override a blur of state laws.
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“The inherent issue with the NCAA is its bylaw changes that were drafted don’t go as far as some of the state laws, so you’re still going to have tension around state laws and NCAA rules,” he said.
