I'm somewhere between "a little" and "very" confused on the entire NIL thing. The way I thought I understood it, Name/Image/Likeness meant the players could profit from businesses using their Name/Image/Likeness. I've seen ads locally that some Ohio players have done with convenience stores, Applebees, promoting some clothing collections, etc... That all made sense, in my head. I feel like it has become more "Bag-O-Cash" than "Name/Image/Likeness," at least at some programs. If that's what is really going down, let's just call it was it is: paying players to play. I even heard a talking head earlier this week suggest a salary cap for NIL. At this point, I feel like "NIL" is just deceptive wordsmithing.

Am I way off?

Bingo.

Players were ALWAYS compensated for their talents through scholarships worth 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars (room, board, books, food etc.) Not to mention all the freebies they got access to (trainers, dieticians, weight rooms, snack bars, chefs, private tutors and study managers etc).

NIL was just supposed to allow them to profit when another business entity (see: video games) used their name and face in their product. This only makes sense.

With absolutely no boundaries set and combined with NIL, it has led to a total wild west of cash for play.

What needs to happen (but won't bc it makes too much sense) is that players who sign a scholarship, also sign a contract with the University. It won't stop then from transferring via the portal (the courts have correctly ruled you can't limit their freedom of choice), but what it could do is put a clause that if you transfer you must pay back the school for all scholarship funds and services provided to date. Have fun paying that $200k bill. But you physically can. Nobody can stop you. This is no different than clauses in current employment contracts for coaches or other jobs involving compensation.

And before someone says "But what about the Engineer on an academic scholarship who transfers?!" Yep. Same for them. You leave before completion of your degree, you pay it back. Maybe not 100%. Maybe it gets prorated and decreases the percent owed for every semester you stay (of course the principal value provided to you goes up every semester as well).

But doesn't that mean they're admitting that athletes are employees? No. I said put the clause in for scholarship funds only. Didn't say anything about NIL funds, because that truly is payment of cash, and implies some form of employer-employee relationship where money is exchanged for some level of services.

Next, you put salary caps on teams, tied to NIL and scholarships. That way you don't have Kansas handing $1M bags of cash per year to dudes while Buffalo says "Hey if you figure out a way to get an advertisement with KMart then more power to you!"

What the courts have said you can't do is limit an individuals earning potential arbitrarily. I agree with that. So if Johnny donor and Hot Shot staff all want to pay a guy, then make it formal, with a contract and on the up and up so it can be tracked. Then, sorry coach but that guy just ate 50% of your alloted salary cap for this year. Certainly would need to be a soft cap with some wiggle room per year but you get the idea.

Instead we have free access to the portal with promises of bags of cash at the end of every rainbow. It's glorified AAU ball.

Yeah I'm sure the goals and opinions of Alabama are vastly different from those at Quinnipiac. But isn't that the whole POINT of the NCAA? To be the governing and regulatory body that brings these diverse schools and opinions together under a common operating procedure?

If they can't do that, then....what would you say you do here?

I'm also on board with letting the P5 break away from NCAA, and just become the professional minor leagues they seem to want to be - and let the NCAA implement the things I talked about above for all the remainder of the conferences and universities.

I think it would be an interesting case study to see how those two opposing models would fare in popularity. Americans love winners, and so tuning into the minor leagues makes sense. They also have established fan-bases at those big schools. So my guess is the P5 would be fine by themselves.

But would folks like you and me, who would actually prefer the realistic amateur version of the NCAA, pay enough $, buy enough apparel, watch enough games to garner enough advertisers and media - to make it work? I'd like to think yes, but maybe I'm naive.