OPINION:
Last week, a judge in Texas reinstated Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby after he was banned for life by the NCAA for gambling on college sports, including games he played in.
As a former college football player and current administrator, I find this appalling. There is nothing more harmful to the integrity of sports than a player crossing this line. But in the broken world of collegiate athletics, it seems that anything goes. However, I was happy to see that Mr. Sorsby recently decided to move on from Texas Tech and is now following his dream of entering the supplemental NFL draft.
The villain in this fight is Texas Tech University, but the face of it is the school’s biggest booster, Cody Campbell. While the university was under no obligation to reinstate Mr. Sorsby, you’d be right to wonder what the fallout of their non-compliance would have been, especially when you factor in the $5 million NIL (name, image, and likeness) deal Campbell made to bring Mr. Sorsby to campus in the first place. He clearly wanted a return on his investment, and I am sure there are other Campbells out there also looking for a return on their NIL investments.
As someone who works for a prestigious university in our nation’s capital and is at the forefront of NIL for college athletics, I believe college athletes are entitled to compensation. They put their bodies and livelihoods on the line every day, generating significant revenue for their universities in the process. But when boosters like Campbell treat NIL like private equity investments, it taints the original intent for which NIL was created in the first place.
That’s why I am not surprised to see Texas Tech and its billionaire boosters support the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA), which was introduced by Sens. Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell this month. While the bill attempts to address some of what needs fixing in college sports, like NIL, transfer portal madness, and athlete compensation, it is not the solution we need.
For starters, this bill allows for a myriad of new avenues for trial lawyers to sue athletic departments. It also puts the FCC in charge of college football media deals and defers to the federal government for scheduling over 800 college football games a year.
Who wants to wait for a bureaucrat’s approval before their favorite teams can square off?
I am equally concerned that there is an antitrust exemption carve-out that will increase the value of private equity investments in college sports. There are also athlete compensation caps that directly conflict with NIL while there’s no cap being placed on out-of-control agent commissions.
The entire Title II section of the PCSA makes zero sense with its applicability for college athletics as it creates a new entity to collectively negotiate media rights with anti-trust protection. This is precisely what Rep. Jim Jordan and others in the House are fighting the NFL on.
The professional league’s anti-trust exemption for media has been exploited so aggressively that now NFL fans are begging for some sanity around the never-ending streaming subscriptions they require just to watch games on Sundays. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, stated, “Professional sports leagues use their TV broadcasting exemptions to charge consumers inflated prices that would otherwise be illegal.”
This legislation is problematic to the core, so who benefits in the end? It’s not the student athletes, coaches, fans, or the universities that they represent.
Instead, it’s the private equity firms that are buying and may ultimately trade players. It’s the politicians who favor the expansion of the federal government. It’s the corporate entities that benefit from creating an NFL-style market where they eventually price out tickets and television.
Whereas I once believed the spirit of the effort to repair college sports was diminished due to the debate surrounding it, I now question whose interests were being prioritized from the start. How are the greatest beneficiaries in this debate the entities who claim they care the most about improving college sports? Maybe it’s time for the rest of the country to benefit from policymaking on this issue, rather than big government, trial lawyers, and private equity.
Mike Andrews is Executive Director of the 1867 Flight Club Collective, Howard University’s NIL entity.
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