Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith should be in his Danny Glover “I’m too old for this” phase of his career. The Buckeyes’ longtime athletic director is retiring in 2024 and will likely move somewhere warm because Columbus isn’t the right place. After this season, NIL is no longer his problem.
However, after thirty years as an athletic director at Ohio State and elsewhere, Smith has made it his mission to play a major role in the creation of national NIL legislation before riding off into the sunset.
On Wednesday, Smith testified before the Congress House Committee on Small Business about the need for college athletics for uniform national naam, memagician, and likeness regulations. Rolling back rights after a constituency gains access to them is one of the toughest political tricks in the world, but the NCAA is doing its best and sending Smith as its fulcrum. champion of the Power 4 aristocracy.
During the hearing, Smith complained about the A large number of potential student-athletes are looking for $5,000 from schools in exchange for a visit. For a man who is ostensibly the team president of Ohio’s third professional football franchise, Smith sounded pretty apoplectic about the idea of handing out a bag full of Benjamins. Granted, that would constitute an NCAA violation, which illustrates just how much of a strawman argument Smith let it flow from his mouth. And even if they had recruits charging $5,000 every now and then to secure a visit, it would be a big change. Ohio State’s athletic department could pay each member of ESPN’s top 150 recruits five big and barely a dent in it annual operating budget. Programs like Ohio State hand out part sixfigure payouts just to plan FCS programs for “money games“And don’t blink.
However, the reality of Ohio State’s economic advantage over most of the nation’s athletic programs didn’t stop the Buckeyes GM from going to Capitol Hill complains the fate of college football’s privileged class. Even though Smith delivered it his testimony against the Small Business Committee, the NCAA is anything but. In 2022, the NCAA earned $114 billion in revenue.
“Student-athletes and their parents visit campuses at those universities’ expense to evaluate where they can make a commitment,” Smith wrote in a letter. “A practice has emerged where a school charges a fee to simply visit campus; It has become common to charge $5,000 just to visit. Discussions now arise during visits about how much a student-athlete can expect from NIL.”
In the past, Smith has put forward his own solutions to the NIL dispute, which included allowing schools to create licenses for athletes to determine which school-related NIL efforts they wanted to be involved in. This alternative monetary relief for athletes would only serve the NCAAs. interests do.
“They can do other things,” Smith explained to the committee. ‘We could help them close deals. If you’re an athlete majoring in actuarial science and there’s a company in Cleveland, I can take you to Cleveland and I can help introduce you to the CEO and say, ‘Hey, can you make a deal ?’ with him, and make sure he has a good experience?’”
No, man. It’s too late for all that backtracking. Smith should have been pushing this for a decade before the Supreme Court ruling that effectively ended the NCAAs outdated amateurish rules. Smith’s solution sounds like something the NCAA should have supported years ago before they were forced to cross the name, image and likeness rubicon. Now that they’ve lost the battle, their version of diplomacy is hiring a politician to run the NCAA and suggest that student-athletes agree to surrender.
When asked if his model would allow athletes to sign NIL deals with collectives, Smith replied, “I’ll leave that to your imagination.”
Anything that places significant restrictions on student-athletes in accepting endorsement opportunities is a step back for the student-athlete. And after the landmark Supreme Court case, anything that hinders their access to the lucrative endorsements they’re already collecting will likely face another return trip to the Supreme Court.
The truth about the NIL legislation is that it is not about the players. It’s about top programs and athletic directors maintaining and sustaining their own competitive advantage labor costs down for billion dollars institutions.
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