What happened on Capitol Hill, regarding NIL, yesterday?

Matt Brown writes Extra Points, which is about the off-field forces that shape college sports.

You can follow him on Twitter at Matt Brown EP. So let's get to the what happened on Capitol Hill yesterday, which I've been laughing at this idea for such a long time because nobody knows less about what college sports needs than senators and representatives, even those that played. Maybe Cory Booker knows what they need, but man, it's so far removed. So with the Senate hearing yesterday, what was accomplished other than exposing the people who don't know?

I mean, in a very practical sense, nothing. And part of this, not to be immediately too cynical about the political process, but the, the NC double is almost certainly missed their window. Even if lawmakers were really interested in their specific policies, just because it's mid October, uh, the law-making process is going to slow down in weeks to prep for the presidential election. And I don't know if you guys have noticed this, there's no speaker of the house and the individuals that might end up becoming speaker of the house have a less than zero relationship with democratic leadership. So even if the Senate actually passes a bill, something they haven't come close to doing right now, reconciling that with the house looks way less likely than it, than it did three months ago. So, you know, looking at the hearing as the prerequisite for creating policy, I think you kind of have to throw that out. It was useful to me in so far as this is the first time we had a collective operator actually testify. You got Charlie Baker to make some tiny modicum of a, of a concession. But to me, the far more interesting stuff happened after the hearing rather than anything there because we've had nine of these, nine of these things already. There's there, we know the arguments. I'm going to get to what happened after the hearing in a second. You did say that the law-making is going to slow down. I'm not entirely sure that that is physically possible considering what has gone on.

Matt Brown, at Matt Brown EP on Twitter, extra points. And so I just want to drill down on something Charlie Baker said, because we see these or hear these things all the time. When Charlie Baker said, if, if the courts deem the athletes employees, that division two and division three will get out of sports. And to me, that is trying to scare people and maybe it works for people who don't know better, but that's, that's never going to happen. This is like when Jim Delaney threatened that, well, maybe if, if the students get NIL rights, maybe the big 10 will just go to D3. Like, please, do they think we're all dumb?

They might. And, and, and I will say this, I think what Charlie, what Charlie said there is substantially less outlandish than the Delaney Ohio state is going to start scheduling Oberlin and Kenyan baloney. He even, he even admitted that later, right? Right.

Here's the rationale for, for, for the argument. We don't know. And I, I say this like honestly, like you and I and Charlie and Cunningham and everybody else, they don't exactly know right now who will be considered employees. If the courts deem athletes employees, is that going to be limited to just, uh, you know, quote unquote revenue sports? Is it going to extend to all of division one? You know, the Johnson V NCAA case, you know, those plaintiffs are FCS football players, right? You know, so that would, that would indicate maybe there's a more expansive definition or maybe it includes everybody not to bore everyone here, but the legal definition of an employee is not tied to revenue.

It is tied more to control. So yeah, and I've had ADs and commissioners from low major D one, your high points and Elons of the world, all the way down to D three, tell me we do not have the money to pay, you know, uh, an above minimum wage stipend and do everything else here that we're doing. But what, but if you're a division three school that has, you know, in North Carolina or South Carolina sponsors athletics, you're not doing this to make money.

You're not making money. You're doing it probably to boost to enrollment to get tuition dollars. And then, yeah, what it means is you won't have the same kind of division three football. It may more closely resemble club sports. You're not going to practice as often, but they're still going to do it because, because people still want to play football and a lot of these schools need those men on campus playing football to keep the doors open. Like I'm not expecting hundreds of athletic departments to actually close.

They're just going to look very different. Yeah. What people don't understand is that D D two has like partial scholarships. D three doesn't offer scholarships. So all of those athletes are paying to go to school if they're not getting need-based aid.

And I'm sure a lot of them are getting need-based aid because a lot of students, I got some need-based aid when I went to college a billion years ago. All right. Let me, let me get to the part that I thought that, and I agreed with you that the most interesting thing, even though he sort of contradicted his own opinion in front of the Senate was Jack Swarbrick, Notre Dame's athletic director, who is outgoing, who said the solution is collective bargaining. And what may happen out of that is something you alluded to. So you're going to bargain for whatever the, the relationship is, whether it's financial or otherwise. I mean, maybe it's just work, you know, workplace, uh, sick rights and, and, uh, and healthcare, who knows what it's going to be.

Uh, but it doesn't have to be, you know, a hundred thousand dollars an athlete. With so take two for moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, you could show off your skin again. And you know what that means beach day as a tick to inhibitor. So tick two is the only one staley pill of its kind for adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis. Ask your dermatologist about so tick two today and learn more at so clearly you.com.

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Call one eight eight eight S O T Y K T U to learn more. No, it doesn't. And this is something that, you know, I began to hear coming out of COVID from ADs that were afraid to put their names to it in public saying like, it would be much easier if we could just sit down with athletes and negotiate a shared commitments to like, this is the, you know, the, the health and safety protocols that we're going to do, right. Just like professional sports do, and then come to an agreement rather than having to dictate it and then worry about lawsuits or worry about people sitting out or fighting about it.

Right. The challenge to this is that right now you can't collectively bargain with people that aren't employees. And so what Notre Dame's outgoing AD is saying here, and I'm going to write about this more for tomorrow's extra points is to ask Congress to create some kind of new designation or a legislative carve out, which has happened before for, uh, for a couple of other things. Um, and is what, whether that then is, is bringing the collectives and bringing NIL revenue sharing in house and having, you know, Jim Phillips cut a check from part of the ACC television deal to athletes in those sports directly, whether that's, you know, setting up some kind of protocols to protect scholarships or, or, or to purchase that of health insurance. Uh, who knows?

Like that depends on who does the negotiating, but right now there's not a pathway to do it without an employment status, which university leaders are adamant. They don't, they don't want. And candidly, I actually believe ADs and believe Charlie when he says that the athletes that they talked to don't want it either. I don't think it's a universal thing, but overwhelmingly we're like, if you and I were to just call up every college athlete we know on our phones and ask them, the overwhelming response is going to be, I have no idea. I'm not thinking about that right now.

I'm thinking about what I'm doing on Thursday night. Um, but there are athletes who are concerned about this. This could be a pathway around it. The challenge is you just spent the last two years telling Congress, what we really need is you would abandon them for being employees.

And now you're kind of coming around and undermining the argument you just made a second ago and asking, maybe what we really need is this completely different thing. Um, that's got to be very frustrating. I think if you work in Indianapolis to read that, uh, yeah, I, I think the direction of the wind probably has a lot to do with Indianapolis, Matt Brown. This is why people need to subscribe to the newsletter, uh, at extra points. So go check that out.

Let me something that you wrote about today. And I know our friend Andrew Carter from the news and observer did a deep, deep dive on this, but while I have you, since I know you've written about it before, um, NC state seemed to be the school we would know they are the school that flipped from no to yes, which allowed Stanford and Cal and SMU to be members of the Atlantic coast conference starting next year. It, for me, it can't be, there's not that much money that is involved, uh, you know, additional monies for state.

There just can't be that much for them because I would have to imagine a lot of the money coming in is going to be distributed to the Florida States Clemsons of the world to try to buy their silence for a while until they can figure out something else down the road. Who knows? Uh, but this has to be more about the future. Uh, what can you tell us about this?

It's, it's a great question. And I thought the news and observer did a really good job filing, uh, you know, some pretty extended open records requests to get all of these text messages between, you know, NC state regions and NC state's president and some of these other folks that, you know, that have their ear. And what that story tells us is up until I think two weeks before the, the depress relief, you know, NC state's president was saying that he had a lot of reservations about this, particularly about, about travel. So something changed in those two weeks.

I filed similar requests for a shorter time period. And, and, uh, I think whatever happened there happened over the phone and what you're alluding to here, I think makes the most sense rather than some kind of like, I don't want to say the word bribe, but rather than some kind of we'll help you with the AAU we'll help you with some, with some state vote down the line. We'll help you with something that has nothing to do with athletics. Like I think that's less likely, although we don't have a record disputing it. I think it's more likely that some of these arguments, including from the, uh, from Ben, the, one of the way, the Wake Forest alums that were in marketing. Yeah.

Ben Sutton. Yeah. Thank you for saying you got to do this for the future because now this is a way of hedging and giving the ACC strength in case NC state or Florida state and Clemson leave, whether that's putting you in a position to maybe post some schools in the big 12, whether that's putting you in a position to maintain ESPN's current relationship with you in the event that you lose a couple of schools, you have to, you have to look at this as something that gives you more options in 2030, 2032, which maybe not every state fan wants to hear.

Cause maybe you'd like to think that you're in the same group of desirability, like a Florida state or a UNC might be. I'm here to tell you that's, that's not true. Right. Um, but that I think is the most likely argument. I wish president Woodson and others from the university community would be a little bit more direct. My understanding is the only thing that they've said so far is the deal that was presented to me in those last two weeks was different from the deal that we were originally presented. And so that's why I changed our mind, which is fair, totally fine. I think it would be beneficial to fans in your market and industry observers elsewhere to learn specifically what changed.

Yeah. I think, um, I have no idea what, what changed, but we're talking about even the university presidents are in many ways, politicians and unquestionable and they act, uh, they act accordingly. I have noticed, maybe you have to, the Clemson whisperers have gone a little quiet last, uh, last couple of weeks, but October is not over yet. And we were told before the month began that by the end of October, uh, there would be some sort of announcement. Do you anticipate any announcement as we say goodbye?

I don't think so. I read those same things and I texted the people I know at those schools and texted the people I know that work in, in the big law firms and big media consulting companies. And, and, you know, as best as I can tell, nothing with the situation has changed in October versus September or August. If those schools want to leave, they're going to have to come up with an amount of money that is impossible for anybody to do without institutional investment. At Florida State figured out a way to get, you know, a word joke about this, the Saudi money or whether that's BlackRock or somebody else to come up with the $300 million check.

Great. What I had heard was that will be something that's more likely to happen next year than this year. Plus it'll be a little bit cheaper next year. So that's what I've heard. But you know, listen, message board rumors are undefeated, man. I'm sure, I'm sure somebody in Spartanburg knows something here that I don't.

There is a, yes, message board, message boards are undefeated. I actually think the target is probably closer to a half billion dollars. That's the number, I mean, if you just look at the number, depending on where you go, that's what it would be worth. But my gosh, and I've joked about it, by the way, when the ACC signed the deal with the CW, which also produces live golf, they air live golf, why not live ACC football? That's it.

And then everybody would stay because the money would be too crazy for anybody to leave. Matt Brown, extra points? Maybe, no, I'm not going to say the Saudis should get invested in extra points, but it would be good financially for you, man. I appreciate your time. We'll talk again. Okay, yeah, thank you. Hopefully, I'll take the big cookout money.

I think we're going to go stay away from oil state money right now. Very good. Big cookout money, chocolate Reese's Shake, and everybody's happy. There you go. I'll write for Cheerwine, my friend. Thanks for having me on. I'm down for that. I love some Cheerwine. I'll write for Cheerwine. Very good.