On Thursday, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey joined the Dan Patrick Show to share about the hopes of college football being played this year, how not having March Madness being played this year affected the SEC, and about what allowing NCAA athletes to compensate off their likeness will mean.
(The video link above will take you to the exact mark that Sankey’s interview begins)
When asked how athletes can capitalize on likeness, this is what Sankey had to say:
“Let’s just take a step back for a second. Remember a year ago California is in this debate about its state legislation, the NCAA sends the letter, says they better be careful about championships participation and a year later we are talking about operationalizing student athlete name, image, and likeness. So there are some easy elements if you read the 31 page report which I haven’t had the chance to read yet…. one element is businesses like, student athletes running a business. And Dan, we’ve had people do that and do it really well. We had a football player… run a landscaping business his whole college career believe it or not, and did quite well and you never knew it. We had another student athlete who played in the NFL, wrote a book, worked with the compliance offie, did it in a great way. Now, can you just say, we’re going to run businesses and the boosters don’t take over and make it a recruiting issue. That’s the above board piece. And that’s where there are a lot of questions still to be answered in my opinion.
Dan Patrick then goes on to give Sankey a scenario where a car dealer reaches out to the quarterback to come once a week during the offseason to sign autographs and I’ll pay you $100,000. Is that legal? Sankey responded with this:
“Well, that remains to be seen. I’ll back you up and say that we have a football leadership council where I have taken them through that exercise. I didn’t put the $100,000 on it because I am not sure that’s necessarily real world right now. Could that happen? So I am going to put that hypothetical aside. But I just talked through a room of starters from each of our 14 teams the process of people reaching out, asking about appearances, asking about showing up at a car dealership, at a restaurant. High value time would be football season and our student athletes have said to us, ” I don’t have enough time in my life right now.” They’re very good about identifying where they should have this space, but when you actually walk through the exercise of scheduling appearances, having contracts, what’s the rate going to be, where am I going to find time? We literally ended with questions. 1. How can the university help me in this process? And that hasn’t been answered for us yet. And then the next observation was, ” I don’t know if I want this.” And we’re talking about high level competitors saying, you know what, I am preparing for football…and I think you have this tension between the focused competitor and the tractions, and we’re going to have to find that balance quite frankly.”
Sankey went on to share how in the end, what does this mean? “It means the individual gets to go act in their own interest and decided do I, or do I not want to be involved in economic activity? The responsibility of the university is to provide the support basis via the scholarship, the academic support, and mental health, but the individual student athlete gets to go function somewhat like a student who wanted to go sell autographs.”
@GregSankey, SEC Commissioner joined us this morning. He talked a bit about what allowing NCAA athletes to compensate off their likeness will mean.
For Greg's full appearance: https://t.co/bsec7FZ9ty pic.twitter.com/sQ2sMUEGhU
— Dan Patrick Show (@dpshow) May 1, 2020
This is an interesting conversation that will continued to be had until a decision is made.
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