the BigAmateurism monologues

By executive order dated June 24th, 2021, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear issued temporary name, image, and likeness regulations that provide athletes in Kentucky NIL rights. With a NIL law pending in the Kentucky legislature, Beshear acted preemptively to ensure that Kentucky schools are not left at a competitive disadvantage in the ever-important talent acquisition market. Beshear’s executive ord...

The NCAA’s infractions and enforcement action against NC State arising from the basketball-related criminal cases in the Southern District of New York makes a mockery of basic principles of due process. From its inception, the NCAA Committee on Infractions (COI) relied upon newly created investigative and adjudicatory principles adopted in August 2018 by the NCAA’s Commission on College Basketball...

From the beginning of the early 20th century, one central question has plagued the voluntary regulation of college sports: who is in charge? If you were to pose that question to twenty in-system stakeholders/decision-makers, you might y get twenty different answers. The NCAA regulatory and decision-making process is notoriously opaque. Its defining feature is a lack of clear accountability. After...

An element of the NCAA’s and Power 5’s quest for preemption is the claimed need for a national enforcement entity. In 2019 and through 2020, the NCAA argued that it—and it alone— should serve that role if Congress federalizes the NIL market. Now, with the NCAA’s diminishing relevance as a national regulator, NCAA and Power 5 lawyers, lobbyists, and advocates like Linda Livingstone call for a “trul...

On New Year’s Day, ESPN analysts Kirk Herbstreit and Desmond Howard went old school to criticize NFL-caliber football players who opted out of increasingly less consequential bowl games to avoid career-altering (or ending) injuries. Herbstreit questioned these players’ love for the game, and Howard described them as entitled. Facing immediate blowback online (and presumably after consulting with E...

Nick Saban’s comments on the state of college sports regulation will no doubt be remembered more for the reaction they drew from Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher than for what they say about the future of college sports. This was textbook Saban. Grab headlines with provocative claims, then weave in the actual message. Saban’s claims that Texas A&M and Jackson State were “buying” players—and Fisher’s e...

On July 20th, 2023, Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Jerry Moran (R-KS) released a discussion draft of a bill titled “College Athletes Protection and Compensation Act of 2023.” The bill is largely a cut-and-paste job from Moran’s 2021 bill, the “Amateur College Athletes Protection and Compensation Act of 2021” and Booker/Blumenthal’s 2020 bill, the “College Athletes Bill of...

For the last six weeks, the Power 5, the NCAA, and their lobbyists, lawyers, and corporate allies have engaged in an unprecedented, no holds barred campaign to bend the federal government to the will of the big-time college sports industrial complex. Between May 19th and June 16th, four Power 5/NCAA-friendly bills were proposed or circulated for discussion. On May 23rd, the IRS issued an Advice Me...

On March 29th, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Innovation, Data, and Commerce held a hearing titled “Taking the Buzzer Beater to the Bank: Protecting College Athletes’ NIL Dealmaking Rights.” During and after the hearing, many in the college sports commentariat seemed confused and surprised by the dissonance between the stated purpose of the hearing—protecting college ath...

As I predicted in my last episode, today’s hearing in the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Innovation, Data, and Commerce was a dog and pony show for P5/NCAA interests staged by the most powerful lobbying interests in American history. Titled “Taking the Buzzer Beater to the Bank: Protecting College Athletes’ NIL Dealmaking Rights,” the hearing had little to do with NIL and everything to...

On Thursday, March 23, Notre Dame President Fr. John Jenkins and athletics director Jack Swarbrick published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “College Sports Are a Treasure. Don’t Turn Them into Minor Leagues.” Jenkins and Swarbrick invoked education, integrity, gender equity, the “thrill” of March Madness, and God Almighty to set against a “crisis” in college sports borne of (1) “the growing...

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument in Johnson v NCAA yesterday. In Johnson, Division I athletes seek employee status and benefits under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The FLSA governs hourly workers, minimum wage, and overtime issues. The NCAA contends that athletes cannot, as a matter of law, be employees under the FLSA because they are amateur “student-athletes.” This e...

The Transformation Committee’s final report and rollout centered on the “New Holistic Model for Student-Athletes.” That newly coined marketing phrase is a smoke screen for athlete “benefits” that are neither new nor materially beneficial. The athlete “benefits” outlined in the report are predicated on the benefit structure of Power 5 Autonomy legislation in 2014. In this episode, I compare the Tra...

On January 3rd, the NCAA Division I Board of Directors Transformation Committee (TC) released its final report. Far from providing “transformative” change, the final report is a case study of bureaucratic misdirection and Power 5 indifference to the needs of athletes. The TC’s high-power spin doctors navigated the Committee’s public misdirection campaign from the very start. Soon after, the NCAA’s...

Wow. It feels like 20 years ago that college sports stakeholders were talking about a unanimous US Supreme Court decision that required the NCAA and Power 5 conferences to play by the same free competition laws as the rest of America. News cycles move so quickly that even “big” stories come and go in a matter of days. Synthesizing and ranking a year’s worth of consequential events is a daunting ta...

On December 15th, two important news stories broke. First, a National Labor Relations Board regional director in Los Angeles decided that a case for athlete employee status could move forward to an administrative hearing. The case involves USC football and men’s/women’s basketball players. Notably, one of the issues in that dispute is whether the Pac-12 and the NCAA are “joint employers” with USC....

You’ve probably never heard of Huck Devenzio. He’d like it that way. Huck was Dick Devenzio’s older brother. Dick was an athletes’ rights pioneer of some renown in the 1980s and 1990s. His mighty megaphone was silenced in 2001 when he died from cancer. Huck passed away early Tuesday morning after a years-long battle with Parkinson’s disease. In many ways, Huck was as important to early athletes’ r...

The Democrats have secured at least symbolic control of the Senate with a possibility of actual control if Raphael Warnock defeats Herschel Walker in the Georgia special election next month. This episode discusses the importance of that race in the college sports legislative environment. I also discuss a revealing interview that Lead1 President Tom McMillan gave last week to ESPN/SEC pundit Paul F...

In September, the NCAA declared Virginia Tech football player Alan Tisdale ineligible for most of the football season. Tisdale’s crime? He placed a series of bets on NBA games through FanDuel’s popular sports betting app. The bets totaled $400; most were only a dollar or two. Tisdale is over 21 and placed the bets in Virginia, which legalized sports gambling. While watching a preseason PowerPoint...

Voters have reduced the mid-term red wave to a purple trickle. Gone is any claim of a Republican mandate and a potential power play to end the athletes’ rights movement through a bill like Roger Wicker’s (R-MS) “Collegiate Athlete Compensation Rights Act.” In this episode, I think out loud about what the short-term lay of the land may be for congressional intervention on athletes’ rights issues. I...

This episode takes a quick look at several issues that have popped up over the last couple of weeks. These issues are relevant to the P5’s/NCAA’s relentless quest for a historic congressional power grab. First, I look at what’s happening in the Johnson suit in the 3rd Circuit. In Johnson, athletes claim they are employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The 3rd Circuit will decide that single...

The Power 5 are now in overdrive in their congressional campaign to eliminate the athletes’ rights movement. I will be publishing episodes over the next few weeks that synthesize recent evidence of a massive push by the Power 5 for the same federal protections and immunities (preemption of state laws, federal and state antitrust immunity, and a declaration that athletes can’t be employees) they so...

On Friday, September 9th, 2022, NCAA President Mark Emmert sat for an interview with sports business analyst Kristi Dosh. Emmert’s free-wheeling comments covered an array of issues, including NIL regulation, athlete employee status, and the future of college sports. Emmert proposed that athletes be treated as “brand ambassadors” for their institution. Emmert explained that athletes—particularly re...

On Sunday, September 11th, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “The Transfer Frenzy That Is Turning College Football Rosters Upside Down.” As the title suggests, the Journal pitched the new transfer market as out of control. This episode analyzes the Journal article and the ease with which influential media outlets embrace and reinforce false NCAA/P5 narratives. Contrary to the Jou...

On Friday afternoon, September 2, news broke that the CFP Board of Managers voted to expand the CFP from four to twelve teams. This decision is historic and fundamentally changes the post-season football market. It follows years of anguished debate and conflict among and between the Power Five conferences on the appropriate CFP format. The CFP expansion saga was a reliable storyline for the sports...