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The bill would allow athletes at California schools to hire agents and be paid for the use of their name, image or likeness. It would stop universities and the NCAA from banning athletes that take the money.

How can California stop the NCAA from banning atheletes?  It this report correct?

How would CA penalize the NCAA if they simply banned all CA programs from their association?

• Relent and allow athletes to hire agents and profit off of their names/likenesses.
• Expel California schools from NCAA competition.

Quote from Cincy on the other thread:


Are any other states considering this legislation?  The NCAA could just go hardball if it's only CA and NY.

"Our rules will not change, and team that violates them will be penalized."

At least I understand the new law better now, it makes punishing the kid illegal by the university, which was not illegal before.

How many CFB players each year would "benefit" from this do you think?  Of the current players, how many could make money from their likeness (ignore recruiting shiftiness)?

Are we talking ten?

Agreed, but I'd expand the last comment (if your examples were intended to imply only blue blood markets would be interested). Depending on local support, I could see 2-5 players from each school being contacted immediately upon a rule/law change.

‘Looking into the NCAA’s model, I saw it was egregious’: Athlete compensation has become a bipartisan matter

U.S. Congressman Mark Walker didn’t realize the power the NCAA holds until this spring. An incumbent from North Carolina, Walker traveled a unique path to Capitol Hill, working as a Baptist minister for 16 years before entering Congress in 2015 as a Republican elected on a campaign promise of “people over politics.” That promise brought NCAA leaders to his office earlier this year.
Walker represents North Carolina’s 6th District, a middle-class community located in the outskirts of the cities that college basketball’s blue-blood schools, Duke and the University of North Carolina, call home. Walker arrived in the state in 1991 during an era of Duke men’s basketball dominance punctuated by its rivalry with the University of Michigan. Over time, this rivalry and the characters playing a part in it served as a catalyst for him to consider as a legislator how to protect the publicity rights of NCAA athletes.
“Watching the Duke-Michigan rivalry in the heart of college basketball and becoming a Duke fan, I remember how the Fab Five changed basketball as it was then known,” Walker recounted. “There was a sense of marketing behind their black socks and longer shorts. While Chris Webber, Juwan Howard and Jalen Rose went on to professional basketball careers, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson didn’t profit from any of it. Over the years, I found myself thinking about this a time or two.”
As a minister, Walker has spent a fair amount of time working with underprivileged communities in the inner city. A sports fan, he has hosted sport camps for children who otherwise may not have access to such opportunities. These experiences drove him to investigate how NCAA athletes are compensated.
“I pay attention to college sports more than anything else,” Walker said. “The more I began looking into the NCAA’s model, I saw it was egregious. It is only the NCAA athlete who has to sign a moratorium to profit off of their name, image and likeness. We don’t ask other scholarship students, who unlike most NCAA athletes have time to pick up part-time work, play in bands or complete internships, to do this. I asked how it got this way and why there is such a resistance to even take a look at this.”
These findings led Walker to introduce to Congress the Student-Athlete Equity Act. The legislation would change the NCAA’s amateurism model by defining “a qualified amateur sports organization in the tax code to remove the restriction on student-athletes using or being compensated for use of their name, image and likeness.” The proposal is a bipartisan bill, co-sponsored by Louisiana Democratic Congressman Cedric Richmond.
It is this proposal that led top NCAA officials to Walker’s Washington office and to Walker recognizing the power of the $1 billion annual revenue-generating enterprise he had taken on.
“I found out how powerful the NCAA is, and even their influence in Washington D.C., when four of their top brass showed up in my office in the spring of 2019,” he said. “They weren’t ugly about it, but I was surprised by one of their questions. He said, ‘What do you think you’re trying to accomplish here?’ The other three were cordial, but tried to convince me this would open the door to corruption. I didn’t laugh out loud, but this was after LSU head men’s basketball coach, Will Wade, had been recorded with a middleman trying to make payments to obtain a recruit.” (While Wade was evasive when asked to explain what was meant by a “strong-ass offer,” LSU reinstated him following a meeting with the school and NCAA officials to explain and clarify the wiretap and said he denied wrongdoing related to college basketball recruiting.)
Walker’s federal proposal is one of a growing number of pieces of legislation recently proposed or passed aimed at changing how NCAA athletes can be compensated.
Last month, California legislators unanimously passed the Fair Pay to Play Act, which was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday during an episode of LeBron James’ “The Shop.” The law, which goes into effect Jan. 1, 2023, prohibits the NCAA from preventing NCAA athletes from profiting off of their names, images and likenesses. The NCAA has indicated it will challenge the law in court on constitutional grounds.
California’s law is expected to lead to the enactment of similar state laws nationally. New York state Sen. Kevin Parker recently proposed a similar bill. South Carolina legislators Marlon Kimpson and Justin Bamberg, and two bipartisan legislators from Colorado have indicated they will propose bills when their respective legislatures convene in January 2020. Florida Democratic Rep. Kionne McGhee introduced FL HB 251, the Students Participating in Intercollegiate Athletics bill. While McGhee’s bill resembles California’s Fair Pay to Play Act, the New York proposal and South Carolina’s planned proposal include require NCAA member institutions to make additional revenue-based payments to NCAA athletes.
For South Carolina Rep. Bamberg, a momentum shift has allowed the possibility of changing how NCAA athletes are compensated.
“A few years ago, Sen. Kimpson and myself filed a bill that would have required schools, contingent on the revenue produced by respective sports, to compensate student-athletes in said sports, but were met with a lot of resistance,” he said. “The resistance wasn’t even so much from the schools disagreeing with the basic concept. It was the schools’ fear of the intimidation that was coming their way from the NCAA.”
Bamberg asserts he and Kimpson were inspired to revisit the issue after the passage of California’s Fair Pay to Play Act, recognizing the possibility of compensating athletes from an intellectual property and publicity rights model.
“There are players who can’t afford gas, pay their rent or take their girlfriend on a date,” he said. “If they get financial help from anybody, they lose their eligibility. I’ve had friends play college football who I watched struggle financially growing up. After college, it is as if they never left the poor area they grew up in. They are celebrated and everyone wants to buy their jerseys, but they still can’t afford to put gas in their car. It’s a new-age version of extortion.”
As other states follow California’s lead, legislators believe a legislative wave challenging the NCAA’s compensation model is rising.
“We have been talking to other legislators and I have fielded a number of calls from around the country from people, including community-based organizations, seeking to learn how they can help,” Kimpson said. “We will be meeting with legislators in the Democratic Caucus and Congressional Black Caucus on the matter.”
Both Republican and Democrat legislators see the issue as bipartisan.
“This is a non-partisan issue,” Kimpson said. “I’ve been reached out to by several Republican legislators in support of the proposal.”
U.S. Congressman Walker agreed.
“This is a bipartisan issue,” Walker said. “I am a small, limited government guy and my goal is not to tell the NCAA how to run their nonprofit. But I have a responsibility as a member of Congress to speak out about injustice if there is an infringement on the rights of these young adults. When you have an organization making hundreds of millions of dollars on the backs of unpaid labor, you have to ask how we got to this point. People like Rep. Cedric Richmond, who is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, partnered on this bill to make sure nobody would put it in a partisan camp. We think it will pass on the House floor and we would like that to happen by the Spring of 2020.”
While partisan politics may not present a barrier to the passage of the proposed legislation, each of the legislators fears that NCAA public relations may present a serious hurdle.
“The NCAA is branding this as ‘pay to play,’ which is not what it is,” Walker said of his bill. “The biggest concern we have to address is figuring out a way to unwind the stereotype or false message that this bill is ‘pay to play.’ Where the dam breaks in our favor is when people begin realizing we are not trying to take from their alma maters or the NCAA. We just want these young men and women to have the same earning potential as every other American. When people think about college athletes, they think most will turn professional and make millions of dollars. That is not the case. Ninety-nine percent of NCAA athletes never receive a dollar from a professional sports contract. When they have a chance during their early adulthood to market themselves, they should have access to do it. Maybe they can’t wear their university logo while doing it, but there’s a way through this. We don’t want to take anything from the universities or NCAA. I am a capitalist. Rock and roll with what you’re doing, but just don’t restrict other people from having access to do the same.”
Kimpson echoed Walker’s sentiments.
“The pushback we’ve heard time and time again is that this is violative of the NCAA’s rules and that in order to stay in good standing with the NCAA, we can’t do this,” Kimpson said. “People say it will ruin college football and basketball as we know it, but the evidence is quite to the contrary. There is already a competitive advantage the big colleges have against the smaller NCAA Division I schools and even among individual programs. Look at Clemson’s football program’s $55 million football facility, which has a barber shop and putt putt course. The Clemson soccer team doesn’t get to use that. Competitive balance is a fiction that needs to be exposed, and we are building a coalition of lawmakers across the country to expose that fiction.”
As the coalition assembles, time may be ticking for the NCAA to address this issue with its own legislation.
“The NCAA has been promising for years that they would look at this,” Walker said. “When I first talked to Jay Bilas about this two years ago, the NCAA promised they would resolve this. At their annual meetings over the last two years, nothing has been done.”
For Bamberg, addressing how NCAA athletes are compensated is an issue of fundamental fairness.
“College athletics has changed,” he said. “That is evident in the money the NCAA generates and the money people tied to it are paid. The only thing that hasn’t changed is how the athletes get treated. They are the last piece of the puzzle. We have to plug something in place to make sure they are taken care of. It is not cool to see a young man or woman, who by all accounts couldn’t even afford to buy a new pair of socks or underwear, struggling, knowing they are generating billions of dollars in revenue and if they were to borrow the money from someone, they would get kicked out of college sports.”
Walker, the minister-turned-politician who came to age in the shadows of blue-blood college basketball, is surprised as anyone that he is the federal legislator carrying the torch to reinvent how NCAA athletes are paid.
“I was in ministry for 16 years and do not have a law degree, but am surprised that in the last 40 years with the rising values of college television contracts, stadium size increases and exploding revenue generation that nobody took this up,” he said. “The fact that the NCAA refuses to engage on this at all really blows me away, because we are talking about a free market concept. It is the government’s job to make sure the rights of these students are protected.”
In response to a request for comment, the NCAA replied with a copy of the letter the NCAA Board of Governors sent Newsom in response to the Fair Pay to Play Act. In a statement following Newsom’s signing of the Fair Pay to Play Act, the NCAA focused on the confusion the law could create as other states have yet to enact similar bills. The Pac-12 Conference, which is headquartered in California, indicated it was “disappointed” by the passage of the Fair Pay to Play Act and asserted the law would have a negative impact on NCAA athletes in the state.