Latest news with #boosters
Yahoo
17-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
What is ‘true' name, image and likeness in college sports? The courts might end up deciding
Four years ago, the century-old model for college sports was turned on its head. College athletes began earning name, image and likeness money in 2021. It didn't take long for boosters to exploit a loophole and weaponize NIL deals as a means to entice recruits and transfers. NIL collectives sprang up to manage the competitive field. Schools initially shunned them, but soon realized they had no choice but to embrace them. As of last week, those same schools are now at war with those collectives. Empowered by the game-changing House settlement, schools are mounting a grand last stand to declare once and for all that collectives can't claim pay-for-play is a valid business. An entire industry's business model — itself only a few years old — is now at stake, not to mention hundreds of millions in contracted payouts to athletes. The House settlement resolved a five-year-old antitrust dispute between former athletes denied the opportunity to earn NIL money against the NCAA and Power 5 conferences. In agreeing to allow schools to directly pay their athletes up to $20.5 million a year, the defendants gained the authority to implement a new enforcement arm with the authority to approve or deny NIL deals from outside parties. Last Thursday, that newly formed entity, the College Sports Commission, issued guidance regarding the NIL Go clearinghouse, which must approve any outside NIL transaction of more than $600. It's been well known for more than a year that the clearinghouse would determine whether a collective's payment to an athlete for, say, an autograph signing, fell within an approved 'range of compensation.' But this language went beyond that. It declared that collectives themselves do not meet a 'valid business purpose,' and thus can expect their deals for athletes to appear at a golf tournament or promote their merchandise will not be approved. 'Collectives in the form they've been going for the last three years, paying athletes directly with donor contributions, is going to be a thing of the past,' said Utah athletic director Mark Harlan. ''True' NIL is still being allowed, but just like in pro sports, where there is a hard (salary) cap.' 'All of their (athletes') deals are getting shut down by NIL Go,' said a leader in the collective space. 'Even deals of $5,000 or less.' Administrators like Harlan see the House settlement as an opportunity to wrest back control from the boosters and agents that have increasingly dictated the state of their rosters. That's why the Power 5 conferences (before the Pac-12 was gutted) created CSC and NIL Go. Some schools have already either shut down their collective (Georgia, Colorado) or folded it into the athletic department (Ohio State, Texas Tech). But the collectives still standing don't share Harlan's outlook. The head of a Big 12 collective said he convinced his school's athletic director they should keep operating their collective independently. 'Circumventing the cap is not going away,' he said. Collectives have been bracing for NIL Go for some time — many paid their athletes' 2025-26 contracts up front before July 1 to avoid the clearinghouse. According to Opendorse, a platform that processes NIL transactions for much of the industry, collectives' June payments were up 824 percent from the year before. Even so, some did not take kindly to the CSC's blanket decree invalidating their businesses. 'They said the quiet part out loud: We hate collectives and pay-for-play, and our sole purpose is to restrict that money and regain control,' said the head of a major program's collective. 'Now they have provided direct evidence for the lawsuits that will start flying.' In fact, it took less than 24 hours for the CSC's memo to raise the ire of some lawyers. Jeffrey Kessler, the lead plaintiffs' attorney in the House settlement, wrote a letter to CSC and the NCAA demanding they retract that guidance, saying it violated the terms of the settlement. If not, he said, they will seek relief from the court-appointed Magistrate overseeing the settlement. 'There is nothing in the Settlement Agreement to permit Defendants or the CSC … to decide that it would not be a valid business purpose for a school's collective to engage in for-profit promotions of goods or services using paid-for student-athlete NIL,' they wrote. 'The CSC's position that prohibiting collectives from paying athletes for doing nothing more than promoting the collective could be seen as consistent with the goals of the settlement,' said Gabe Feldman, director of the Tulane Sports Law program. 'But it could also be seen as unnecessarily restricting the rights of college athletes (and collectives).' A person briefed on the discussions said the attorneys had been made aware of the language before it went public and did not object at the time. 'They're just trying to advocate for their clients,' the person said. The dispute over what constitutes a 'valid business purpose' boils down to one central question. Between the two sides speaks to a broader question that hovers over the entire industry right now: What exactly is, as Harlan calls it, 'true NIL?' In commissioners' and athletic directors' eyes, it's cut-and-dried: Traditional athlete endorsement deals. Caitlin Clark in a State Farm ad. Quinn Ewers in a Dr. Pepper spot. Hundreds of athletes further down the ladder showing off their favorite brand's energy drink or workout gear on TikTok. 'It's what we've always hoped with NIL, that it wasn't going to be promised to a kid to come play for a school,' said Harlan. But that's exactly what it became. Schools were prevented by NCAA rules from making their own deals, and boosters saw an opening and began pooling their money to license potential athletes' NIL rights. Eventually, they were doing so for entire rosters. According to Opendorse, collectives accounted for nearly 82 percent of an estimated $1.675 billion college NIL market in 2024-25 — an enormous pot that athletes will no longer receive if collectives' deals are invalidated. Revenue-sharing may replace those dollars for some athletes, but certainly not all, including few women's athletes. Most schools are allocating as much as 90 percent of their $20.5 million to football and men's basketball. 'There are only a small amount of athletes that have real market value to command real commercial dollars,' said a second collective head. 'The vast majority are hurt by (the CSC) guidance. That will not play well in the court of law or the court of public opinion. Especially once these athletes start complaining about their deals being denied even though they were 'promised' that compensation.' But those 'promises' are exactly what the CSC is attempting to stamp out. NCAA enforcement made a short-lived attempt at the dawn of NIL to weed out booster involvement in recruiting, notably targeting Tennessee for its collective's eight-figure deal to quarterback Nico Iamaleava in 2022. But in early 2024, that state's attorney general filed an antitrust suit against the NCAA and successfully secured a preliminary injunction that explicitly allowed athletes to negotiate NIL deals with boosters and collectives. The parties reached a settlement a year later, making that policy permanent. The CSC represents the conferences, not the NCAA. And its policy does not say those parties can't negotiate with each other. They are, however, being told preemptively that the deals they're negotiating will not be approved. Which sounds to some like the next legal mess. This article originally appeared in The Athletic. College Football, Men's College Basketball, Sports Business, Women's College Basketball, College Sports 2025 The Athletic Media Company
New York Times
17-07-2025
- Business
- New York Times
What is ‘true' name, image and likeness in college sports? The courts might end up deciding
Four years ago, the century-old model for college sports was turned on its head. College athletes began earning name, image and likeness money in 2021. It didn't take long for boosters to exploit a loophole and weaponize NIL deals as a means to entice recruits and transfers. NIL collectives sprang up to manage the competitive field. Schools initially shunned them, but soon realized they had no choice but to embrace them. Advertisement As of last week, those same schools are now at war with those collectives. Empowered by the game-changing House settlement, schools are mounting a grand last stand to declare once and for all that collectives can't claim pay-for-play is a valid business. An entire industry's business model — itself only a few years old — is now at stake, not to mention hundreds of millions in contracted payouts to athletes. The House settlement resolved a five-year-old antitrust dispute between former athletes denied the opportunity to earn NIL money against the NCAA and Power 5 conferences. In agreeing to allow schools to directly pay their athletes up to $20.5 million a year, the defendants gained the authority to implement a new enforcement arm with the authority to approve or deny NIL deals from outside parties. Today the College Sports Commission issued additional guidance to schools about the definition of 'valid business purpose' and the importance of sharing information about entities involved in third-party NIL deals. More information is available here: — College Sports Commission (@theCSCommission) July 10, 2025 Last Thursday, that newly formed entity, the College Sports Commission, issued guidance regarding the NIL Go clearinghouse, which must approve any outside NIL transaction of more than $600. It's been well known for more than a year that the clearinghouse would determine whether a collective's payment to an athlete for, say, an autograph signing, fell within an approved 'range of compensation.' But this language went beyond that. It declared that collectives themselves do not meet a 'valid business purpose,' and thus can expect their deals for athletes to appear at a golf tournament or promote their merchandise will not be approved. 'Collectives in the form they've been going for the last three years, paying athletes directly with donor contributions, is going to be a thing of the past,' said Utah athletic director Mark Harlan. ''True' NIL is still being allowed, but just like in pro sports, where there is a hard (salary) cap.' Maybe this is just me, but has this group been under a rock? Makes me appreciate the team at the Crimson Collective who knew that after the settlement agreement, the game charged. True NIL….not that hard — Mark Harlan (@MarkHarlan_AD) July 10, 2025 'All of their (athletes') deals are getting shut down by NIL Go,' said a leader in the collective space. 'Even deals of $5,000 or less.' Administrators like Harlan see the House settlement as an opportunity to wrest back control from the boosters and agents that have increasingly dictated the state of their rosters. That's why the Power 5 conferences (before the Pac-12 was gutted) created CSC and NIL Go. Some schools have already either shut down their collective (Georgia, Colorado) or folded it into the athletic department (Ohio State, Texas Tech). Advertisement But the collectives still standing don't share Harlan's outlook. The head of a Big 12 collective said he convinced his school's athletic director they should keep operating their collective independently. 'Circumventing the cap is not going away,' he said. Collectives have been bracing for NIL Go for some time — many paid their athletes' 2025-26 contracts up front before July 1 to avoid the clearinghouse. According to Opendorse, a platform that processes NIL transactions for much of the industry, collectives' June payments were up 824 percent from the year before. Even so, some did not take kindly to the CSC's blanket decree invalidating their businesses. 'They said the quiet part out loud: We hate collectives and pay-for-play, and our sole purpose is to restrict that money and regain control,' said the head of a major program's collective. 'Now they have provided direct evidence for the lawsuits that will start flying.' In fact, it took less than 24 hours for the CSC's memo to raise the ire of some lawyers. Jeffrey Kessler, the lead plaintiffs' attorney in the House settlement, wrote a letter to CSC and the NCAA demanding they retract that guidance, saying it violated the terms of the settlement. If not, he said, they will seek relief from the court-appointed Magistrate overseeing the settlement. 'There is nothing in the Settlement Agreement to permit Defendants or the CSC … to decide that it would not be a valid business purpose for a school's collective to engage in for-profit promotions of goods or services using paid-for student-athlete NIL,' they wrote. 'The CSC's position that prohibiting collectives from paying athletes for doing nothing more than promoting the collective could be seen as consistent with the goals of the settlement,' said Gabe Feldman, director of the Tulane Sports Law program. 'But it could also be seen as unnecessarily restricting the rights of college athletes (and collectives).' A person briefed on the discussions said the attorneys had been made aware of the language before it went public and did not object at the time. 'They're just trying to advocate for their clients,' the person said. The dispute over what constitutes a 'valid business purpose' boils down to one central question. Between the two sides speaks to a broader question that hovers over the entire industry right now: What exactly is, as Harlan calls it, 'true NIL?' In commissioners' and athletic directors' eyes, it's cut-and-dried: Traditional athlete endorsement deals. Caitlin Clark in a State Farm ad. Quinn Ewers in a Dr. Pepper spot. Hundreds of athletes further down the ladder showing off their favorite brand's energy drink or workout gear on TikTok. Advertisement 'It's what we've always hoped with NIL, that it wasn't going to be promised to a kid to come play for a school,' said Harlan. But that's exactly what it became. Schools were prevented by NCAA rules from making their own deals, and boosters saw an opening and began pooling their money to license potential athletes' NIL rights. Eventually, they were doing so for entire rosters. According to Opendorse, collectives accounted for nearly 82 percent of an estimated $1.675 billion college NIL market in 2024-25 — an enormous pot that athletes will no longer receive if collectives' deals are invalidated. Revenue-sharing may replace those dollars for some athletes, but certainly not all, including few women's athletes. Most schools are allocating as much as 90 percent of their $20.5 million to football and men's basketball. 'There are only a small amount of athletes that have real market value to command real commercial dollars,' said a second collective head. 'The vast majority are hurt by (the CSC) guidance. That will not play well in the court of law or the court of public opinion. Especially once these athletes start complaining about their deals being denied even though they were 'promised' that compensation.' But those 'promises' are exactly what the CSC is attempting to stamp out. NCAA enforcement made a short-lived attempt at the dawn of NIL to weed out booster involvement in recruiting, notably targeting Tennessee for its collective's eight-figure deal to quarterback Nico Iamaleava in 2022. But in early 2024, that state's attorney general filed an antitrust suit against the NCAA and successfully secured a preliminary injunction that explicitly allowed athletes to negotiate NIL deals with boosters and collectives. The parties reached a settlement a year later, making that policy permanent. Advertisement The CSC represents the conferences, not the NCAA. And its policy does not say those parties can't negotiate with each other. They are, however, being told preemptively that the deals they're negotiating will not be approved. Which sounds to some like the next legal mess.
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Business
- New York Times
New NIL enforcement targets collectives, deals must serve ‘valid business purpose'
A new college sports enforcement arm charged with regulating name, image and likeness payments to athletes issued guidance Thursday that could make it extremely difficult for school-affiliated collectives to get their deals with athletes approved. The recently approved House settlement, which took effect on July 1, established a clearinghouse, called NIL Go, that must approve all third-party deals for more than $600. The two main requirements for those deals are that they're for a 'valid business purpose' and within a fair-market 'range of compensation.' Advertisement The goal is to prevent schools from utilizing booster-driven entities to funnel payments to recruits and transfers as a workaround to the $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap. Guidance issued Thursday by the College Sports Commission said that 'an entity with a business purpose of providing payments or benefits to student-athletes or institutions, rather than providing goods or services to the general public for profit, does not satisfy the valid business purpose requirement set forth in NCAA Rule 22.1.3.' It then cited as an example a collective that 'reach(es) a deal with a student-athlete to make an appearance on behalf of the collective at an event, even if that event is open to the general public, and the collective charges an admission fee (e.g., a golf tournament).' And, 'The same collective's deal with a student-athlete to promote the collective's sale of merchandise to the public would not satisfy the valid business purpose requirement for the same reason.' A message Thursday seeking comment from The Collective Association was not immediately returned. In the four years since NIL took effect in 2021, collectives affiliated with specific schools have made hundreds of millions in deals with athletes just like those described in the examples. They pool funds from donors and boosters and use them to license the NIL rights of specific athletes in exchange for appearances and social media posts. College sports leaders have long lamented that those deals are de facto pay-for-play inducements, not legitimate endorsement deals. 'For somebody to just slide you a few dollars because they want you to come or stay at a certain school and call it NIL, that's make-believe, that's not a real thing,' Purdue athletic director Mike Bobinski recently told NBC Sports. Critics, though, believe any attempt to restrict how much athletes can make and by whom will eventually be declared another antitrust violation, much like several recent decisions that went against the NCAA. One distinction is that CSC and NIL Go were created by the Power 5 conferences, not the NCAA. Advertisement Ohio State made headlines last year when it disclosed that its football roster was earning a combined $20 million, most of it coming from one of two Buckeye collectives. Roster payrolls at the top programs have since escalated well beyond $20 million. Knowing the House settlement was coming, many collectives 'frontloaded' payments for this coming school year so they would not be subject to clearinghouse approval. In a series of posts on X on Thursday, Dalton K. Forsythe, director of Utah State's Blue A Collective, criticized NIL Go for technical issues, then said, 'We're hearing from peers across the country: nearly 100 percent of collective-backed NIL deals are being denied, regardless of size or structure.' He continued, 'The College Sports Commission has taken the position that collectives cannot serve a 'valid business purpose' — a standard that was never clearly communicated before implementation.'
Washington Post
24-06-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
A former NBA player-turned-basketball GM for a … high school?
With more money flowing through the system and policies consistently changing, major college athletic departments have tried to stay modern by hiring general managers. The job description includes identifying talent to recruit to the program; facilitating name, image and likeness (NIL) deals; and maintaining relationships with boosters. Now the trend is starting to trickle down to high school sports.
CNET
01-06-2025
- Business
- CNET
Will I Have to Pay for a COVID Vaccine and How Much Will It Cost?
Under the direction of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., government policies surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine have changed dramatically, casting new doubts on its availability and cost in the coming months. This past week, Kennedy announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was pulling its recommendation for routine COVID booster shots for "healthy" pregnant women and children. This came not long after the agency also pulled the recommendation for any adults younger than 65 without at least one condition that puts them at high-risk for a more severe infection. How the government defines "healthy" in this context is still unclear. Notably, pregnancy is considered a high-risk condition in and of itself. Other conditions currently include asthma, cancer and diabetes. The CDC later contradicted Kennedy's announcement, stating that healthy children, ages 6 months to 17 years old, can get COVID shots after receiving "the clinical judgment of a health-care provider." Set against the broader concern about Kennedy's history of anti-vaccine beliefs, these moves have caused renewed concern about the ability of Americans who want them to get COVID boosters, especially ahead of fall and winter when infection rates are known to increase. According to data from the CDC itself, about 70% of Americans were considered fully vaccinated against COVID as of May 2023. These boosters are still desirable for many Americans, however, particularly for those who might be considered healthy themselves but live with high-risk friends or family. Putting barriers in the way of COVID vaccination could also increase the risks of variant strains developing and spreading among more individuals. If you're concerned or intrigued about what these moves against vaccine recommendations might mean for you, keep reading. For more, find out what Novavax might mean for the cost of COVID-19 vaccines. What does ending COVID vaccine recommendations mean? Hearing that the government has ended certain vaccine "recommendations" might seem a little vague but there are a few important ramifications to keep in mind. For starters, ending the recommendation for a vaccine would remove it from the required immunization schedule for children, although the CDC's contradiction of Kennedy's initial announcement has muddied things on this count. For the time being, it seems that the ability of kids to get updated COVID shots is nominally safe. More pressingly for most healthy adults who might want to get regular booster shots, government recommendations are typically used by health insurance companies to decide which shots they will cover and for whom. So in effect, you might still be able to seek out a booster shot for yourself or your child, but now it could cost you. How much will a COVID-19 booster shot cost? It's hard to say for certain how every individual insurance company will react to these decisions from the CDC but should your provider choose to end coverage for booster shots, you'll have to pay to get one. As for how much that will cost you, that's another thing we can't know for sure right now, but you should expect it to be in the ballpark of a couple hundred dollars. According to CVS's webpage, the pharmacy chain charges at least $199 for a COVID vaccine shot that is not covered by insurance. For the time being, the company says they are free of charge with insurance. For more info about staying safe, find out how to check if your at-home COVID tests are expired.
