Is in the state of Virginia. They passed a
law that will go into effect July 1st that allows
schools to pay athletes uh for nil. Now,
the language makes it clear that the students are not
employees but they will be paid for promoting the program
or the school JP LC up here is the,
is this the next step towards students becoming employees?
The the employment thing? I I waffle back and
forth on, I think with employment comes control which
the conferences in the schools would like to have back
considering the state of the portal and some of the
inputs that are going on here. Um Also when
you're an employee, you can be fired. And
I don't think any of these young people wanna be
fired at this point in their life here. So
is it probably a step closer? Yes, I
think if, if they can figure out a structure
to where it makes sense that um they can operate
off of an independent contractor status with the university uh
paying athletes, I think a lot of people would
see a benefit in doing that there. But this
is intriguing because I think a lot of people were
asking the question of, when would it get to
the point where you could just bring name, image
and likeness in house. And one of the big
benefits for me and we've been talking about collectives here
. I do not think collectives are good for the
sport because they are not paying athletes based off of
what their actual market ability is. They are paying
them as commodities to get them on campus is pay
for play. And a lot of these collectors will
say if you don't live within a radius, which
you're not supposed to, if you're not enrolled for
this amount of time, which you're not supposed to
, you're not gonna get your money. I do
not like that. That is buying athletes. We
need to get rid of that. So if you
bring nil in house, you can cut out the
collectives and ultimately have, um, a more level
playing field that way. And I also think,
you know, you were listening to coaches and,
um, I the I forgot, I'm drawing a
blank here. Ole Miss coach, uh Kiffin.
Yeah, he's been very outspoken about it and there's
just some frustrations because when it comes recruiting, you
got the collectives in there, they're becoming that middle
man, promising recruits this and it just gives the
schools a little and coaches a little bit more control
and I see you're making that face there, but
it gives them a little bit better idea when it
comes to recruiting and who they're actually recruiting, making
promises to these, some of these collectives go rogue
and they start talking to players that might not be
so high on the list and they start offering things
that coaches are like, don't know if we should
be offering that player that amount or if we even
want this play to have a committal offer on the
table. So, yes, there's a lack of
control from the institutional side because of collectors. I
think this Virginia nil legislation has been what nil should
have been from the jump because you know, let's
say you get the Ohio State football pro uh poster
from the 20 tens. Joshua Perry is on it
. How much was Joshua Perry paid for that appearance
back in that year?$0. So you look
at a Purdue basketball billboard from 2008 or nine.
How much did I make off that?$0?
This is, you're not an employee, but you
could be paid as let's say an independent contractor because
your name image or likeness is being used. It's
, it's like the argument that was made about jerseys
, you would say, oh, this Purdue basketball
jersey that says 33. Yeah, that's Eoi Moore's
number, but this is just a coincidence. We
didn't really make it to be Eto Moore's jersey.