NCAA says that their rules are more important than state laws?

For those people who have been following my thoughts on the future of college sports, not from a conference alignment standpoint, understand that it's been the better part of two decades that I have been wondering why players couldn't get money from the system. My thoughts started with, why don't we just allow agents to loan players money? And I was told that that was crazy. And I'm like, I understand it sounds crazy, but the games create so much money. And now that name, image, and likeness has become the law of the land, and I'm not saying just in a legal sense, this is the way it is, the NCAA refuses to adjust.

They refuse, they're still hell-bent on making the old way work, and it simply will not. David Ridpath, my friend from Ohio University, joins us. Professor of Business, he joins us on the Adam Gold Show. First of all, congratulations on your blue jackets on Adam Fantilli. I don't want to play you guys now starting this year. We don't open with you this year, so we don't have to see you on opening night.

Well, we're very excited here. I mean, I think like any team, we wanted Connor Bedard, and I'll save my fix the lottery cynicism for later, but getting Adam Fantilli was a major coup for the blue jackets. And of course, I think the wild card here is can Mike Babcock coming out of semi retirement and with the success he's had, but also the issues that he's had as a head coach, and he come to Columbus and take a pretty young group and some pretty exciting players and put us back in the playoff hunt. He wins. Mike Babcock just wins.

All right, let's get to the issue that the whole reason I talk, although you know what, you and I could talk, we could talk Metropolitan Division hockey, you know, either now or another time. So Charlie Baker was brought on to be the head of the NCAA because, you know, with all those political ties, it would be just a piece of cake to get, you know, get congressional assistance in reining in NIL. Why hasn't somebody told the NCAA that this was I'm not even gonna call it a monster because that makes it sound bad. This was something that was never going to be reined in.

And they simply need to learn how to live with it. Yeah, I think you're right, Adam, and what you said before on your lead in about the NCAA refusing to adjust. It's only adjusted with the transfer freedom, the stipend, and certainly now NILs because it was forced to do that.

None of these things would have happened because of progressive leadership. And my hope was with Charlie Baker that somebody from the outside could be a real disruptor and come in and say, let's look at this realistically and understand that maybe the North Carolina's Dukes and NC states of the world, those athletes do need to be paid. They need to have employee status. And we need to negotiate with them directly as a bargaining union unit and come up with agreements on these things. Then we're immune from antitrust protection instead of this hail Mary to Congress, which I can tell you I've spent a lot of time on the Hill with the Drake group. And the appetite is not Tommy Tuberville's appetite, OK? There is not an appetite there to try to go back to something that I think, as you alluded to, Adam, we're not going to return to. College athletics has changed, I think, for the better. And I do think we're going to an inevitable conclusion here that at least some of the athletes and maybe the Ohio University athletes won't fit in that category.

And that's OK. But some of the athletes will be designated to be employees. They will be in a union. They will collectively bargain. And then you can actually talk about reasonable restrictions to the transfer portal. I truly believe that athletes as a collective body might actually agree to a one time transfer exception, but it can't be dictated anymore.

Go ahead, Adam. What's funny is that the NCAA just presented this student athlete representative with being against employee status when in reading it, it seemed like it was written by the NCAA. As it turns out, that person wasn't even an active student athlete. It was somebody like he has to be a student athlete. There's so much there's so much deception going on.

David Ritpath, professor of sports business at Ohio University, past president of the Drake group. The other thing is that the NCAA sent out a memo to all its member institutions. I found when I read this, I was on vacation and all like I couldn't I couldn't laugh on the radio because I wasn't on the radio and I would have laughed for 20 minutes. So they sent out a memo to all their member schools saying that ignore state laws and just pay attention to our rules. Did they really think that that would scare schools to comply?

Yeah, I'm laughing, too, because and believe me, when I saw it, I was laughing because the incredibly had zero luck at doing this over the years in virtually every case. And no school is going to certainly North Carolina, for instance, using your state. No school is going to be say, well, hey, we've got to follow NCAA rules when another state is going to be like, we're going to follow our state law.

Right. And the trump card that the NCAA thinks they have, they'll never use because they had the chance with California. When the NIL bill first passed the California Assembly, the NCAA said you're going to do it our way or we're going to kick you out. And the California school said, bring it on.

Right. I would love I would love the NCAA to say, oh, by the way, ACC, we're kicking out Duke, North Carolina, Wake Forest, North Carolina State, because those schools are not following North Carolina are not following our our bylaws. Then, honestly, in some ways, I want that to happen, Adam, because then it would lead to a breakup, because believe me, Virginia and everybody else, they're not going that way. They're going to they're going to be like, we're going to stay with those schools. And then the NCAAs, we know it would cease to exist.

So they really don't have any legal authority to do this. And we're only looking at more litigation. But candidly, we're not seeing that progressive leadership we need to actually involve college athletics, because at the end of the day, you know this, Adam, it doesn't matter what happens. We're still watching Duke play North Carolina in basketball. And that's the way we need to look at it. Dr. David Roodpath is joining us here on the Adam Gold show.

All right. So because there is no progressive leadership at the NCAA level and they continue to look back as opposed to looking forward, it really is the people, the presidents, the athletic directors that are still pushing the old way and some hybrid look at how it used to be. Is there a movement? Do you sense any movement that this is not working and it's never going to work from the grassroots part of college sports? Or are we still just being ruled and governed by people who think the old way is the best way?

Well, I don't think it will work. But yes, there are a lot of people that think that and truly believe a lot of the kind of those public talking points, which which were successful for many, many years. But now and I'm not saying that athletes are smarter today, so to speak, than they were before. But now they have more access to information and they have access to each other and they can talk to each other.

Somebody in California can talk to somebody in North Carolina, not like when we were younger, Adam, not to date date ourselves. But when athletes were recruited, they may not have even known each other. Now they can easily band together.

There's organizations out there that are supporting them to help them collectively organize. They also realize the power. We saw it. We saw it at Grambling. We saw it at Missouri that, you know, they could just up and say, you know what, we're not going to play.

Yeah. And so the old way of doing things is not going to work anymore. And my wish is that the NCAA and others would listen to outside people like the Drake group, like Ramogie Huma and the National College Players Association. And I think you can come up maybe not even with with a model, a new model, but new models.

I think that you are going to have some athletes that are getting paid and you might have the Ohio Universities of the world more of a participatory club sports model there's many ways to go, but we are never ever going to go back. And anybody who's longing for that, it's a fool's errand. All right. Final thing for Dr. David Ridpath. And I appreciate your time as always, sir. I'm very thankful that you're willing to do this, even from your car, by the way. So thank you very much for doing this.

Hope you're not like at a traffic light, just waiting to turn right. EA Sports, really the beginning of all of this, when Ed O'Bannon realized that he was not getting compensated for being in a historical video game, EA Sports has a college football game ready to go. And they, with some circumventing, basically are offering players $500 one-time fee, no royalties, to have their NIL, their name, image and likeness depicted in this video game. Do we know what, on average, not the special players, not the quarterback of Ohio State or Alabama or something like that, do we know what the average college football player's worth is to this game? No, I don't think we know until we test the market. And that's why I don't think that the $500 is a fair amount. It could be for some, but I do think for others, you have to make the market, let the market dictate that. And I do think that athletes should boycott at first to be able to get their real value.

Basically, it would be pretty simple, a flat rate and then a percentage of the sales of the game, no? I think that that's definitely a way to do it. Absolutely. David Ridpath, the number one Columbus Blue Jacket fan in my Rolodex. I appreciate your time, sir, at DRRidpath on Twitter. And soon, you got to get on Threads now. Yeah, I got to check that out. I just heard about this this morning. I just got back from Europe, so I'm out of touch, but I think I want to try Threads, absolutely.

Oh, I don't even know what it's called. Can we DM each other on Threads? Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Sure will. All right. Bye bye. You got it. Dr. David Ridpath here on The Adam Gold Show.