Hartford Business Journal

HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | JULY 8, 2024 13 collective stuff is a little bit more in doubt" because of the pending settlement agreement. "Anyone who tells you they know the answer to that is lying to you," he said of the question about what the future holds for NIL. "The schools, the athletic directors themselves, they don't know yet exactly what will happen to NIL." 'A competitive edge' Of course, that doesn't mean there are no educated guesses. Murphy said the settlement agree- ment is "aimed at reigning in NIL collectives and bringing that more in-house by letting schools pay the athletes directly for their NIL rights." While the agreement caps those direct payments at about $20 million a year, some schools "have a budget big enough to pay more than that for athletes," he said. "Where there's an opportunity to pay $1 more to get the better recruit, somebody in college sports … is going to find a way to do that to gain a competitive edge." UConn Athletic Director David Benedict views that issue another way. He expects the NCAA to move toward a revenue-sharing model, which he said would "create some- what of a level playing field," but he does not believe it will be required of every school. "There will be some campuses that don't have any money to share," he said. "So from that standpoint, the enterprise is going to evolve, because that's new." The NCAA may say "this is the money that you can share and you get to decide how and who you share it with," Benedict said, but collectives raising money from donors "and then providing that to the student athletes is going to probably die down or be eliminated once you get to a place where there's revenue sharing." Getting organized Once the NCAA adopts the reve- nue-sharing model, it raises other issues, including that athletes may try to unionize. Eric Brown, a labor and employ- ment attorney in Watertown who coun- sels college athletes, said he believes "that's inevitable." "I think it's ultimately going to happen, because it always happens when there's big money around," he said. The ability of student athletes to unionize depends on whether they can be considered employees, since they would now be paid. If they are, Brown said, there are many issues to negotiate, including whether athletes are paid for their performance or just for participating. "Can a scholarship be considered a form of payment?" he asked. "And if it is, is that going to be taxable as income? What kind of benefits are going to be available? And can you cut players if they're not performing?" Murphy said another issue concerns the 22% rate for revenue sharing. "The question is, are athletes going to be happy with that rate forever?" he said. Still, organizing college athletes won't be easy, Murphy said, because they "are a very transient population who have a lot of other stuff going on and are only 18 to 22 years old, for the most part. Can they organize themselves and create the kind of union that would have enough resolve to have some negotiating power?" The athletes also face another huge hurdle: The NCAA and its members "are very much against" student athletes being considered employees, Murphy said, because it raises issues such as eligibility for workers' compensation, and compli- cates the coach/athlete relationship. The NCAA is already lobbying Congress to pass a law to prevent it, he added. Big unknowns Brown said there are other issues related to the settlement agreement that must be ironed out, including how the shared revenue will be distributed. "Are all the sports going to be treated equally, or are there going to be prorated payments based on a revenue-production basis?" he asked. That's an especially acute question when Title IX is considered. The federal law requires male and female student athletes to be treated equally. Will that apply to revenue sharing, Brown asked, since "we certainly know that revenue from women- based sports is lower than revenue from men-based sports." For Murphy, the ESPN writer, the biggest unknown is whether revenue sharing will ultimately cause the most successful and profitable schools, particularly in football, to split off from the NCAA. "I don't think that's a foregone conclusion yet," he said, "but … I do think it increases the likelihood that the biggest schools eventually decide they need to form their own league." Of course, college athletics has gone through many changes over the decades, and schools have adjusted. Murphy says there will come a time soon when schools will have to decide what their alums and fans will support. "Do you want to be a school that is in what might be a full-blown future entertainment industry-level, profes- sional sports league?" he asked. "Or, is it important to you to feel more like the Ivy League, the way that's more what you may have thought of college sports in the past? "I think schools have been able to straddle those two worlds for the last quarter-century," he said. "And I think that time is coming to an end. You're going to have to pick a lane and stick with it." Ex-UConn center Donovan Clingan was drafted by Portland in the NBA. PHOTO | UCONN ATHLETICS Eric Brown

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