Greg Sankey made a bold statement yesterday about NIL and who’s responsibility it is

ACC football media day and we will have just had the ACC's commissioners forum.

Jim Phillips, the commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference will give his state of the league address. We'll talk college football, the landscape and all of the issues that kind of plague it because there apparently is a plague for a lot of people. I don't see it that way but I guess if you say it long enough it's true and the Southeastern Conference which runs college football, not even lion, they keep winning national championships, their commissioner Greg Sankey had his state of the league address yesterday and he had this to say about name, image and likeness. The reality is our student athletes deserve something better than a patchwork of state laws that support their name, image and likeness activity if support is the right word. Our student athletes deserve something better than a race to the bottom at the state legislature level. Only congress can fully address the challenges facing college athletics. The NCA cannot fix all of these issues. The courts cannot resolve all of these issues. The states cannot resolve all of these issues, nor can the conferences.

Whether congressional action is achievable is a matter of debate, much debate. Okay, I can poke a lot of holes in that but let me bring in, and I've already done that, let me bring in Tarun Sharma from the University of Minnesota who created the NIL Law Clinic, also from Conduct Detrimental, the podcast. He joins us on the Adam Gold Show and I appreciate your time, sir.

Thank you very much and I know you spent some time at Duke University with the, you know, as a like a manager or grad assistant with the Duke Baseball Program, so hey you left us, you left us a heck of a baseball program here. Tala, I'll let you start first with what your thoughts were with what Greg Sankey had to say with needing congressional legislation, a federal law, to deal with NIL. Well yeah, thanks so much for having me, Adam, and it's like you said, really, like media days have given us another wild week in the world of NIL.

Every time you think you know something, it's like everything changes, but here's something that hasn't changed. It's that the conferences, the NCAA, they don't necessarily need to do everything, and that was what I took away from Greg Sankey's point, is that he's saying that no one can fix everything. Well fine, I mean, I don't think that really that needs to be the goal. I think that fixing a few things, bringing in interested parties, being able to speak directly to the student-athletes, I think that's what's important. We get an opportunity to speak with some student-athletes, people that work on their behalf in the multiple roles that I have, and they don't necessarily always feel like they're being listened to, and I think that's a really good place where anyone, whether it's Sankey or Charlie Baker, could start.

Let's be honest, I don't always listen to what my 14-year-old has to say either. Teren Sharma is joining us here on The Adam Gold Show, an NIL expert from Conduct Detrimental, the podcast. Here's what I come back to. When he says the NCAA can't fix it, I don't think that's true. I think the NCAA can fix it. Their bigger problem at the very beginning of the NIL era in college sports was that they didn't want any of these inducements to be used as recruiting tools, so get rid of that violation. Get rid of that as a violation, except that it's always been the lay of the land anyway. It's just now a legal way of operating, players getting money for who they are.

So if we eliminate the violation aspect of it, then what's the problem? Yeah, I think that's a fair point, but whether it be helping connect you to important donors that are able to give NIL deals or if I'm spending a bunch of money on a new cooling tub at the football facility, there are a lot of different ways to use money that the programs are earning in terms of a recruiting inducement. So for a long time, that money was funneled directly into facilities. That's no longer the key now in terms of attracting potential student athletes to enroll at your school. So I think that, yeah, we have seen that difference.

Tarun Shamrath from Conduct Detrimental, the podcast, University of Minnesota Law School, where he created the NIL clinic. There was a time where we needed the law, right? Whether it's Florida or California, I think Florida wrote their law and passed their law first, but California's law went into effect before the others. At that point, we needed the laws to shake the NCAA out of the 17th century. Do we even need any laws now? I mean, I realize that they're all a little bit different, which can be confusing, but do we even need any of these laws now?

Well, so I think it's the opposite. California passed the Fair Play Act and then Florida moved the timetable up. And so I think that the state laws are really valuable in that sense that they push the envelope in a way that the NCAA is not going to, right? The NCAA is very stagnant. If they're not forced to make a move, they're never going to make a move. And you can see this with just a couple of years ago, the differences between the men's and women's basketball tournaments.

They weren't going to do anything until Sedona Prince really like put them on blast on social media. And so I think when the NCAA gets pushed to move, they move. So state laws are really important in that way. And I think that what we're seeing now, especially at the state law level, where you're passing these laws that say that the NCAA cannot jump in here, cannot run these investigations of how the programs are operating. And you're seeing this in Texas and Missouri and some other states. I think that that is effective in that it's going to push the NCAA to act or we're going to end up with a court battle where the NCAA is going to try to come down on these programs in these states because they've already put out that that letter that says that if state law conflicts with NCAA law is a private association, you don't have to be here. I don't know if drawing the line in the sand there is the best thing to do. And so we might very well end up with a court battle over that enforcement.

You bring that up from conduct detriment of the podcast and joining us. It just makes me laugh because they're basically telling these schools that you are beholden to us, not to the state law. What are they going to do about it? Are they really willing to tell, let's just say, the University of North Carolina, I'm sorry, you're not playing in the NCAA tournament because you obeyed the state law? What is the NCAA's record in court?

Not very good, especially recently. I mean, even the the case that they relied upon for about 40 years, Board of Regents, is a case that they lost. The Supreme Court saved them from themselves and then they relied on one small piece of dicta to preserve the amateur model and now they're not going to be able to do that. I think that everyone points to the Kavanaugh concurrence as kind of showing that that's how the court feels, but it's not just the court. It's the NLRB. It could be the Third Circuit with this Johnson case. I think that the law does not agree with what the NCAA is stating and so if they want to continue losing, and they don't, and that's why they haven't enforced anything recently, they're going to lose. We'll close on this with Tarun Sharma from Conduct Detrimental, the podcast.

You follow him on Twitter at TK Sharma Law on, I guess that's Twitter. We don't need any more than that, at TK Sharma Law. Do you think that the Charlie Baker administration of the NCAA, just call it that, it is a political arm really, and guys like Greg Sankey, and my guess is Jim Phillips will say the same thing because he said it before, do you think they continue to beat the drum for federal legislation because they know it's nothing more than a delay tactic? Yeah, I mean, at best, and that's giving them a lot of credit because when Charlie Baker says stuff like that in an ideal world, I would like to see a federal law by the end of the year, that's never going to happen. That's wishful thinking. I don't think that the motivation exists at the federal level.

I don't think that there are enough people that want to expend the political capital necessary in an election year to make something like that happen, and so I think it's almost like putting your head in the sand. You're going to say, yeah, we're going to get a federal bill, we're going to get a federal bill. It's almost like not listening to your constituency because I hate giving Carolina credit for anything, but Bubba Cunningham is saying we need a plan B, C, and D, and Joe Castiglione at Oklahoma is saying the same thing. Those are people that are closer to the ground with student athletes that understand where this is going, and so to say, yeah, the federal bill is the only way that we're going to be able to solve everything is not only missing the forest for the trees, but it is failing to understand the moment, and so I think that they'll continue to do this as long as it's an option. They've stalled every other time, so we'll see what happens. I think they're going to have to be forced to move.

That's the only way that they've moved in the past, and it might be the case here again. Tarun Sharma from the University of Minnesota where he founded the NIL Clinic and Conduct Detrimental, the podcast. We've had Dan Lust, John Nucci, Daniel Wallach, and now Tarun for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I have no idea what that is, but it's a great sports law podcast.

You should go check it out if you're interested. Tarun, thank you so much, man. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me, Adam. You got it.