NILs Thread: What PSU and Other Schools are Doing with NIL

If this isn't "pay for play" it is an exceedingly close cousin: www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/31771563/dan-lambert-plans-500-month-endorsement-deal-every-miami-hurricanes-football-player-scholarship

After you've read the article, answer this question: If Lauren Cook (John Cook's daughter) had the backing of a billionaire who was enamored of Nebraska women's volleyball, would there be anything stopping her from offering $100,000 per year to every Nebraska women's volleyball scholarship athlete (or, in the alternative, every player -- schlolarship or not -- on the Nebraska women's volleyball team) to endorse her not-yet-formed (because I just made it up) Lauren Cook Sports News Network"?  If you think she couldn't do it, why not?

Extra credit: do you think it would give Nebraska a competitive advantage?

The obvious solution is for the NCAA to adopt a salary cap so that the less well supported "schools" can continue to compete and thus save jobs for our athletes.

Setting aside whether any particular endorsement arrangement is/should be permissible, I wonder whether some endorsement choices will be off-putting to fans, and if so, will that affect fan support of teams?  My quick answer is probably not.  Not many fans will care whether player "X" has an endorsement deal with one brand versus another brand (though I do wonder what happens if an athlete wants a deal with a company that is a direct competitor of a company that a university has a deal with?)  But there certainly are scenarios I can imagine in which the endorsement choices of an athlete could be controversial -- I'm not going to go into any hypotheticals, because to do so would unnecessarily inject controversy into this forum.  But without specifying the precise circumstances, we can acknowledge the possibility.  And if the situation arises,  what happens then? 

If an endorsement is otherwise permissible, schools can't get involved (and I imagine won't want to get involved).  But there certainly could be fallout if an endorsement choice of an athlete somehow alienated a significant portion of the fan base ("I really hate that athlete X endorses Product Y.  It's just a horrible company and a horrible product").  Or, setting that concern aside, what if boosters see the amount of money flowing in directly to the athletes from NILs and say "Why am I giving my money to this program when the athletes are getting paid more than my kids earn four years out of college?" (to invent one hypothetical).  

No answer to any of these questions, and perhaps none of these will ever become problems.  We certainly are entering interesting times.  

Well certainly one can revile Mr.  Emmert as the public face of the organization.  But I believe he is basically mostly a mouthpiece for a group which has struggled unsuccessfully to integrate apparently irreconcilable goals - to provide for a fair competition for college students organized by schools many of whom will stop at nothing to try to win, and to allow the schools that will stop at nothing to make as much money as they can. 

The Penn State sanctions were indeed a debacle, as tacitly acknowledged when the sanctions were "modified."  But Emmert's comments here are in my view simply a statement that he is giving up.   The goals and needs of the member schools, and the student athletes, are too diverse to serve with one (or even 3+) sets of rules.    I perceive from his statement that he wants the schools to decide what they want to do. 


Of course he may have been asking for a jelly doughnut, but if that was his intent, it was expressed too subtly for me to discern.