NCAA president Mark Emmert: We need help from Congress on athlete name, image, likeness

Dan Wolken | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption How will the NCAA's new rule impact college recruiting? USA TODAY Sports' Dan Wolken explains the impact of the NCAA's new rule.

NEW YORK — Throughout the 113-year history of the NCAA, the notion of federal government intervention in the management of college sports has generally been viewed with both skepticism and outright disdain. But NCAA president Mark Emmert has carried a new message into the halls of Congress lately on the nationwide push for college athletes to be able to profit off their name, image and likeness: We need help.

Emmert acknowledged Wednesday at a sports business conference in Manhattan that he has met with members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate recently to discuss how federal legislation might help the NCAA deal with an onslaught of issues presented as more states pass bills similar to California’s “Fair Pay to Play Act.”

And in a separate telephone interview, Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said he is receptive to helping craft a bill of some type that would address the complicated question of how to compensate athletes without them becoming employees of the schools.

While the NCAA’s Board of Governors voted in October to begin the process of liberalizing rules governing name, image and likeness rights, Emmert said the NCAA would rather have a federal law to fit those rules within rather than try to navigate various state laws. Currently, nine states other than California have introduced bills, with at least eight more likely to see measures introduced during 2020 legislative sessions.

SUDDEN CHANGE: How the NCAA is must deal with name, image, likeness

OPENING DOOR: NCAA Board of Governors pushes for more athletes benefits

“I have certainly never heard anybody, including in Congress, that wants sports run out of Washington, D.C.,” Emmert said. “There’s an interest in providing support because some of these issues can’t be really resolved without congressional action. You can’t have 26 or 30 different state laws so you need something at a federal level that becomes an umbrella that organizes all of that. But nobody is talking about the federal government running college sports.”

For Emmert, who said he anticipates spending 75 percent of his time on the name, image and likeness issue over the next year, there’s an uncommon urgency to these discussions. Though California’s law wouldn’t go into effect in 2023, other states including Florida have proposed timelines as early as 2020 or 2021.

The NCAA has a name, image and likeness working group led by Ohio State athletics director Gene Smith and Big East commissioner Val Ackerman that is expected to roll out its recommendations in the second half of 2020 with new rules scheduled to be implemented in January 2021.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan Senate working group led by Murphy and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) was announced last week to discuss how college athletes can be more fairly compensated. Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C,) already has introduced a bill that would allow college athletes to make money off their names, images and likenesses. In addition, a legal challenge to the NCAA’s athlete-compensation rules has been set for oral argument before a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in March.

“This whole thing is a house of cards that’s going to come down one way or the other,” Murphy said during a telephone interview Wednesday. “College athletics is trying to be a multi-billion-dollar industry without compensating the people who are making the product. That’s not going to stand in the long run from a moral perspective or a legal perspective.

“The college athletics industry created this problem by professionalizing itself over the course of years and one way or another, this is not sustainable because of public pressure — fans aren’t going to allow for the coaches and the schools and the companies to make billions of dollars while the students make almost nothing — or because the courts are going to step in.”

Whether the NCAA can meet its own deadline, whether Congress can pass legislation quickly enough to track with those rule changes and whether the NCAA might have to fight certain state laws in the meantime while all of this gets sorted out are among the issues Emmert is trying to balance as the NCAA deals with pressure from all sides to modernize its rule book.

“It’s a very difficult moment in American politics with an election year coming forward and all the other dynamics of Congress so they understand it’s hard, it’s complicated but they also know there’s a sense of urgency,” Emmert said. “They’re keenly interested in trying to have college sports be successful. There’s a keen interest in trying to help us modernize the rules and create a framework within which this all continues to work in that direction. I think there’s a lot of good intention and goodwill there."

It’s still unclear whether there’s a common set of principles the NCAA and Congress can agree on to move legislation forward. Whereas many of these state bills would greatly expand the opportunity for college athletes to make money on things like endorsement deals or autograph signings, college administrators would like to have some guardrails to prevent image and likeness rights from overwhelming the recruiting environment.

“The NCAA understands it can’t compensate athletes without turning them into full-fledged employees,” Murphy said, “and the question is whether there’s some middle ground by which Congress could allow for schools to compensate student-athletes without making them full-fledged employees. I don’t have a position on that, but I think Congress could create a national standard on students making money off of their name, image and likeness — or there’s a broader conversation about how to properly compensate student-athletes.”

But there’s clearly a preference, at this point, for the NCAA to work with Congress to find a solution rather than a years-long fight in the court system.

“Realistically and practically, you can’t have 25 or 50 different state pieces of legislation on this particular issue,” ACC commissioner John Swofford said. “I’ve been doing this for about four decades now and I was never in the place where I felt like we needed federal intervention, but I think we’re maybe at that point.”

Contributing: Steve Berkowitz in McLean, Virginia.