I've been thinking about this. I deliberately split this apart from the California law thread because I think it's a wider topic.
Let's assume that the NCAA is forced to relent and allow athletes to profit from their likenesses. For the sake of argument, this will be limited to ONLY third-party payments. The schools themselves will still be barred to provide nothing to the athletes beyond the scholarship, stipend, etc that are all agreed upon currently.
What does this mean for recruiting? Who benefits the most?
- My initial thought would be that the helmets / blue bloods would benefit the most. After all, they have the largest fan bases and the most money. A Zion Williamson jersey with "Duke" on the front of it will garner him greater value from his likeness rights than a Zion Williamson jersey with "Wichita State" on the front of it.
- However, the counterpoint is that while this means bigger value for the highest of high-end stars, it also means that if you're at one of those bigger schools but you're not a top-end star, you'd have little value. At a smaller school, you might be *the* star. I.e. Rondale Moore is an absolutely beloved star at Purdue, and sells jerseys. If he were at Texas, or Ohio State, or Alabama, he'd be just another receiver.
So it seems like this will allow the top-end stars at the absolute helmet/blue-blood schools to earn tons of money. But I wonder if it actually *helps* the downstream tiers because players know that sometimes it's better to be a big fish in a smaller pond than to be a small fish in the ocean.
I realize this is purely hypothetical, so I don't know if we'll agree on an answer here. But I wanted to open it up for discussion.
I think this is all true for what I'll call the LEGITIMATE uses of this legislation-- that is, the cases where a player's merit or his popularity gain him a reasonable, like-sized, proportionate promotional value. And "reasonable" and "like-sized" and "proportionate" are all certainly subjective and mutable, but at the very least we can agree that it's coming from on-field performance or general popularity.
But I also see a class of what I'll call ILLEGITIMATE uses of the legislation, and it would be most effective in recruiting. For example, what's to stop Joe Texas Big-Hat Billionaire Booster from telling all recruits, "I'm offering you a non-exclusive contract for your likeness set at $25,000 per year, that will be available to you on signing." For a wealthy fanbase, it would be quite easy for one booster, or multiple boosters, to pay out that kind of money to every single signee. Beyond that, if a player actually gains popularity and his likeness becomes worth MORE than that basis, then the contract could allow that player to earn for himself anything above the already-agreed upon value.
I'm specifically calling that an "illegitimate" use case, because it wouldn't be illegal or against the rules, but could be a realistic consequence. And in that case, the very richest schools would have the largest competitive advantage, simply because they could afford to pay more. In many cases the richest schools coincide with the blue bloods, but not in all cases. Stanford comes to mind as a school with an extremely wealthy fanbase that could take advantage of this. I'm not sure they're football-crazy enough to do it, but it would really only take one...
In effect this creates a completely legal and permissible recruiting bidding war. And long term, I'm not sure how that works out for the sport.