Would be surprised if Trump issued the EO because of this.
Given there is a 20.5 fund available now, I'm hoping the under the table crap is much less.
Yeah there are basically four competing things right now:
1. The House settlement, which established a clearinghouse, and where the clearinghouse at first tried to say "booster collectives are banned" and then walked that back to "collectives are fine as long as the money passes the sniff test and is tied to actual endorsement activities." This is what was colloquially referred to this week as a "soft cap".
2. The SCORE Act, which had bipartisan support on the onset but only had Republican votes to get it out of committee, which has an unknown future in whether it actually becomes law. People have been optimistic this month, but some are now a little pessimistic. The very quick summary on the SCORE Act is that it:
--Wants to establish a framework for college athletics to standardize some of the craziness around transfers, NIL, etc. that have happened over the past few years. I do not have an opinion on whether their method of standardization is good or fair, but it basically wants to make it so that all states / schools that are operating on a certain tier of college sports have to do things the same way.
--It seeks to establish in law that athletes are NOT employees of the schools but ARE allowed to earn compensation within the framework
--It makes it so that all schools with a major football or basketball program (or any sport where a coach makes $250k+ but I think that would really only be those two) are REQUIRED to fund 16 varsity sports. Basically, they don't want schools cutting their athletic departments in order to only fund football.
3. As the SCORE Act made its way out of committee this month, two Democratic Senators introduced a bill to classify athlete as employees and explicitly allow for collective bargaining.
4. Immediately after, or roundabouts the same time, that the Democratic Senators introduced that bill Trump issued the EO linked above.
We obviously keep politics stuff off of the front page, but in this case it's the intersection of politics and college sports and has a profound impact on Notre Dame football. My
opinion is that the worst system for everyone is the collective bargaining one as it is mostly likely to lead to disruption of college sports as we know it, and I have bias + strong feelings about the importance of "non-revenue" sports in all forms of secondary and non-secondary education. I don't want to see any system that is professionalized or profit driven and turns into a mini-NFL with all of the soccer, baseball, lacrosse, track, wrestling, etc. teams getting cut or defunded. I don't see any winners in that except for agents and a small handful of football/basketball players. Others will disagree with me, and I know that there are actually some schools that want collective bargaining because it's the "easiest" way to regulate things.
My other opinion is that the best system for Notre Dame is some version of:
--Direct revenue sharing where ND can pay on par with any other major school
--A system where collectives can still compensate players for NIL, because ND will have major issues competing with cheaters OR schools that can funnel large sums of money through car dealerships / local businesses. Any system with a strict NIL clearinghouse is going to be rough for Notre Dame because some schools (SEC, Miami, Oregon, USC, etc.) are not going to follow it while ND does.
--A transfer system that discourages first / second year transfers but encourages graduate / late career transfers. None of the coaches like having to "re-recruit" their freshman class every year. At the same time, proven players at the FCS level need to be allowed to move up. Proven players at small time schools need to be able to get fair market compensation. So you have to balance the absurd roster turnover that the sport currently has with what's fair. For Notre Dame, they aren't really going fishing for freshman transfers but they are often getting impact players who upperclassmen, so the above works best for us relative to our competitors.
And a whole bunch of other stuff that is secondary.
www.whitehouse.gov
