What role should college athletes play regarding regulating NIL?

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Visit us at capitalfinancialusa.com. This is the Adam Gold Show. Yesterday, we talked with Tom McMillan, former University of Maryland All-American basketball player, is a teammate of Len Elmore and John Lucas back in the day, three-term U.S. representative to Congress, and he runs an organization called, essentially, Lead One. And they are concerned about the NIL era. Not that they are against NIL, but they're worried that it's being used as a recruiting inducement. And I don't think there's any question that it is being utilized as a recruiting inducement. I'm just not sure it's that big a deal, to be perfectly honest, since we've had recruiting inducements, since we've had recruiting. David Ritpath from Ohio University, our friend who joins us whenever we talk about athlete advocacy in college, he joins us on the Adam Gold Show. How long have recruiting inducements been going on, sir?

Boy, Adam, first, thanks for having me on. And they've been going on, you know, you want to say since the beginning of time, but really, you go back to when college athletics first started in the mid-1800s. You know, going back to the 19th century, there's always been recruiting inducements. And as I always tell people, Adam, that it's never been permissible to offer anything more than tuition and room board, books and fees, at least since 1951. And then certainly the stipend off and on, you know, several years, what that used to be called laundry money. Now we have the largest stipends, but you've never been able to offer anything more than that. But however, we've been giving inducements, whether under the table or over the table.

Candidly, an inducement is, you know, you'll have this nice locker like University of Oregon has, or you're going to have this academic center and all these other things, right? So one second, please. I'm sorry.

I had an issue there with my phone. I apologize. Oh, no, it's quite all right. Yeah, inducements have been going on forever. David Ritpath is joining us here. You and I have talked about the collegiate model before and invariably we get to the part of the conversation where we say if they were starting from scratch, it would not look like this.

What should the system look like? Well, I think, you know, I'm a fan of college sports and I know you are and I think we all we all have to look in the mirror that what it's become because it's become essentially there's nothing minor league about it. It's major league. You know, you have that University up the north north from me that puts in a hundred and ten thousand people in a in a football stadium and has a 250 million dollar athletic budget. That's major league and we need to accept that if we were going to start it over again and truly have it be about education. There's ways to do that, right?

And, you know, and we even eat when I say we eat groups that I work with, particularly the Drake group. We've proposed lots of things where it would be, you know, no off campus recruiting. You would basically be like high school. You'd have your your team with the with the people you have on campus and only be on campus recruiting.

No non-traditional seasons. You'd have time for academic remediation to get people, you know, up to snuff academically. That would be the focus that those are just a few things that that could happen. And honestly, I think people would still watch even in that scenario. But we also watch even in the scenarios that we're going through right now. I do not buy, as you know, Adam, that this is the end of college sports. People, people watch college sports if we are giving wheelbarrows of cash as football players walk out of the locker room.

And as Jimbo Fisher said, and I also been going on since the beginning of time. We're just now seeing it. So we just can't go around and just feel better because we think it's being hidden. Right. Yes. We think it's actually being taken care of.

It's above board now. These athletes have value and they should be able to realize that. It's actually I think television ratings would go up if we were giving out wheelbarrows full of cash at the end of games. We might have just come up with a million dollar idea. I think that like if the team that was small, especially if there's a like a game winning touchdown, we just like instead of confetti, we just drop cash from the.

Yeah, honestly, that's probably what they should do. But all that cash would fall on the heads of coaches. We wouldn't be here, though. David Riddpath, we wouldn't be here in this position with NIL as a big deal. If the NCAA and the people who run it and I'm not even talking about Mark Emmert at this point.

I'm talking about the university presidents. If they had recognized that the the deal that has been struck with players for the last 60 years hasn't changed in spite of the fact that the money has gone way through the roof. If they had been more proactive.

I bet we're not here today where we are. No, I agree. And again, I think somewhat successfully, you know, for the past 60 years, it had been sold as this enterprise that was predicated on the athletes allegedly being amateurs and not getting paid other than an educational coin, a scholarship.

And that's what the appeal was. And I think certainly last year showed that that's not the case. We don't care if the athletes are getting paid or getting or getting NIL money. Maybe a few people might care. But I think the high percentage do not. And they're still watching. And then I often say to people who do care, well, you watched when this was going on, but it was just under the table and you knew that it was going on.

Why is that OK, as opposed to above board payments to the athletes, whether it's through NIL or or even direct pay? And most don't have a good answer for me. But I agree with you, Adam, that, you know, things evolve. I think I heard Mike Krzyzewski the other day say something like, you know, the system doesn't work anymore. I'm not so sure it ever worked, but he's right.

It doesn't work anymore. And why don't we evolve? Because at the end of the day, I always say this, Adam, we're going to watch NC State, North Carolina, Duke, play basketball, play football, whatever, no matter what. The athletes are making 10 million dollars a year.

We're going to watch. And so why not just evolve with the times and accept the fact that college athletics in America were the only country that does this is major league is a major league sports property. And you can even go down to Division 2 and Division 3 where it's not really, you know, college athletics as we'd like to believe the mythological construct. Right. Right.

You just need to accept college athletics what it is and not what we hope it should be. Adam Gold here from my man, Coach Pete DeRuta with the Capital Financial Advisory Group. We are talking retirement.

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Or you can text Adam to 21000 for coach Pete DeRuta. Do we need federal legislation on NIL? I'm going to hedge my bets on this and say no. But I do think there is a place for some federal regulation in college athletics that's beyond limiting what the players can earn. Why the NCAA and a lot of people out there, you hear a lot of conference commissioners, Jim Phillips and others, why they are pushing for national standards. They want to limit the earning power of the college athlete. So I think actually we should be capping expenses, which would also require some congressional intervention. We do not need to be paying offensive coordinators to $3 million a year. We do not need to be building what we're building in college athletics. That's where the money is being wasted. We need to make sure the money gets in the hands of the people who really do deserve it.

And that's the athlete. So there I think, Adam, there's a place for some potential federal regulation. But honestly, with regards to NILs, we're at a point right now that I don't think federal regulation is going to do anything in the sense that you can say the horse is out of the barn, so to speak. You've got some inducements and collectives and lots of other things. You've got a hodgepodge of state laws. What needs to happen now, Adam, to actually, when I say regulate this, this is not to regulate it so that players can't earn what they want to earn and all those other things. The best way to regulate this now is not federal legislation, in my view, and I doubt that that would happen, to be honest with you, what's going on in the world. There's a lot of things going on. So far down the list of priorities.

Exactly. And again, I do think there's some things that should be discussed at the federal level. In the Drake group, we have called for a presidential commission, much like the Amethyst Sports Act of the 70s, to look at college athletics from top to bottom. But right now at this point, if people want regulation, if you want to use the term guardrails, you have to sit down and negotiate directly with the athletes as a non-employee union. And that is the only way, Adam, right now, and let me give you some examples. So if we wanted to say that, you know, if the athletes agree that there cannot be any NIL inducements as part of recruiting and they're part of that negotiation and they agree with that, there's a much better way to regulate it than what we're doing now.

Not that there wouldn't be things going on. Or say, for instance, hey, we really don't want NCAA college athletes to make money being on an OnlyFans pornography site. Now again, a college student could make money doing that, and I'm not judging, but if we wanted to regulate that, we're not going to be able to tell college athletes what they can or can't do because they're college students, they're not employees.

And that's the best way right now, Adam. To me, it's a no-brainer. It is time for the NCAA and the conferences to sit down with the athletes directly and negotiate with them at the table. David Rintpat, before I let you go, and I appreciate your time, there are probably college students on OnlyFans right now. They're just probably not athletes. You had mentioned something about capping assistant coaches' salaries, and I wonder if all of this, and you also mentioned locker rooms at Oregon, and there's opulence all over college sports. In fact, most high-level college football programs have better locker rooms than NFL teams.

Almost all of the top college programs have better-looking locker rooms than NFL teams. How much of this stems from the fact that the athletic departments essentially have to show something close to a zero balance? Why not just tax them? Why not just make them for-profit enterprises and tax them? Exactly, and that's something that I've said for many years, that certainly college athletic programs, at least at the Division I level, should be taxed.

They should not get the 80% deduction. That's why they're so willing to donate so much money to college athletic departments because it's considered an educational donation. For me, Adam, I'm a proponent of you deal with the right athletes, and you take care of the athletes first when people complain that there's not enough money or going to drop women's sports and all these other things. People have to understand that spending on football and men's basketball since 1990, when that was about the time title not really started to be enforced, even though it had been on the books for 20 years, spending on those two sports has increased over 500%.

We've made choices, bad choices. That's what's hurting non-revenue male sports. That's what's hurting female sports. Caps like this would actually help college athletic departments meet federal law. Honestly, we should be adding teams instead of dropping teams. We should be adding teams because that helps the bottom line of enrollment and other things that institutions want. We do things backwards in many ways, but that's because we want to put everything into football, men's basketball, and I think that those days are numbered.

David Ridpath, I appreciate your time, sir. Good luck to your Blue Jackets in the off-season, and then next year, we've got to get you here for a Blue Jackets, Hurricanes game, and then maybe you and I can sit next to each other and root against each other. Well, I would love to do that, and I tell you, I still think you guys have the best team there, the best coach.

I'm surprised that you're not in it right now. I thought the Cup was going to be raised by the East no matter what this year, but I got to admit, the Avalanche are scary. It'll be an interesting Stanley Cup Finals, whoever gets there.

Good question. I don't know if Colorado's goaltending is good enough, but the Avalanche as a team in front of their goaltender, they are frightening, and they are fast. It is going to be a blast.

It's almost like you don't need a great goaltender when you have that, right? It is possible. I thank you very much for your time, sir. We'll talk soon. Adam, thank you. Bye-bye.

You got it. David Ridpath, Dr. David Ridpath, if you will, at DRRidpath on Twitter. Really good follow if you are interested in the relationship between college sports and how it treats its athletes.

Really good follow for that. Off of the crossbar! And the Hurricanes have won the Stanley Cup! It's June 19th, 2006, but it all started May 6th, 1997, with the announcement that the Hartford Whalers were coming to North Carolina.

It's a story of transition, of heartbreak, of figuring it out on the fly. The Canes Corner look at the 25th anniversary of the move. Presented by the Aluminum Company of North Carolina. Listen now. Find Canes' 25th anniversary wherever you get your podcasts. We have a poll up. Dennis put this out, oh, about what, 11 o'clock, 11.30?

Roughly that. And here are your four options, and write-ins are always accepted. Aaron Donald, contract, minicamps. Doesn't say contract there, but that's why we would be talking about Aaron Donald.

I have thoughts on that. Aaron Donald, minicamps. Deebo Samuel says he's going to participate in minicamp for San Francisco, so that means to me, anyway, that he is planning on signing a contract because otherwise, why go?

You're giving away your leverage if you go. Panthers Cheerleader, this is in last place. We'll get back to that in a second. And it's not just Panthers Cheerleader, there's more to that story, and we'll explain. NHL playoffs, still in the running. And baseball, colon, colon. North Carolina or New York?

One is college, one is pro. And right now, that is the leader in the clubhouse, if you will. So you still have time to vote. And we'll also take phone calls, 919-860-5326, coming up at the top of the hour.

Whatever it is you want us to get to, we can do that then. Alright, now back to the Panthers Cheerleader story. It's now on the front page of ESPN.com. Carolina Panthers have a transgender cheerleader. By all accounts, Justine Lindsey is the first trans woman to be an NFL cheerleader. I guess it's possible that we have had one without knowing. I don't know. But by all accounts, this is the first of her kind in the NFL.

Here's what's interesting to me about this. Lindsey made the Top Cats in March. She didn't just get appointed to the squad yesterday.

She made the Top Cats in March. She tweeted about it. There was a news item in March. She made it public then. So, is it possible that this wasn't that big a deal in March?

I don't even understand. It should have been a big deal. I think it deserves attention. It deserves to be talked about. I only found out about this. I kid you not. Yesterday, in the evening, I only found out about it when a listener brought it to my attention on Twitter.

I was like, have you heard about this? This is appalling. This person expressed outrage that a trans woman was going to be a cheerleader for an NFL team. For the life of me, I can't figure out why it matters. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why an NFL cheerleader who is transgender, why it matters. At best, NFL cheerleaders are dancers.

At best. At worst, they're simply a waiver of pom-poms. NFL cheerleaders don't do anything. They stand there. They look good.

They line the field. They're good for TV cutaways. They will occasionally make appearances on behalf of their teams. They're representatives in the public.

Sometimes they do calendars during which the owners take advantage of them. Looking at you, commandos. This is not a competitive situation. NFL cheerleading is not a competitive situation. Like Lea Thomas.

She's the trans woman who was a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania who won the NCAA title in the 500-meter freestyle. And in this case, while I have no problem at all with her participation in the sport, competing with women, I do understand why some push back against it. It is a competitive situation. I have no problem with it, but I understand the position of the people who do. That makes more sense to me than having a problem with somebody waving a pom-pom who happens to be transgender.

I don't understand the issue. Cheerleaders are supposed to be women. Well, Justine Lindsey is a woman. What's the point? And there are male cheerleaders out there too.

Yes! I mean, look, I don't want to generalize this because I don't want to cheapen the issue. But are you threatened? Is something inside of you threatened by a trans woman cheerleader of an NFL team? Or are you the person who goes into the club thinking that she's really into you when we know she's not? This to me is 100% about insecurity.

100% about insecurity. Shouts to Justine Lindsey. Have a great year. This is the Adam Gold Show.

Over the crossbar! And the Hurricanes have won the Stanley Cup! June 19th, 2006. But it all started May 6th, 1997 with the announcement that the Hartford Whalers were coming to North Carolina. It's a story of transition, of heartbreak, of figuring it out on the fly. The Canes Corner look at the 25th anniversary of the move presented by the Aluminum Company of North Carolina. Listen now. Find Canes 25th Anniversary wherever you get your podcasts.