Publication Title
Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law
Volume
16
Page
283
Year
2025
Abstract
Since its inception, the NCAA has championed the principle of amateurism in college sports-the idea that collegiate athletes may not receive monetary compensation for their athletic performance. In its 2021 decision in National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston, however, the Supreme Court found the NCAA had violated antitrust law with its restrictions on certain benefits provided to athletes. With the possibility of much greater liability to follow, the NCAA soon thereafter enacted a radical departure from past practice, enabling athletes to profit from their names, images, and likenesses ("NIL") while maintaining their amateur status. There were important limitations on this funding: the money could not come from schools, and it could not be tied to athletic performance. Almost immediately, school-specific groups known as NIL collectives stepped in to fill the vacuum by funneling money to athletes for their NIL rights. These collectives-independent entities apart from their schools-received their funding through boosters and supporters as well as commercial entities looking for marketing opportunities.
Created to meet tremendous pent-up demand for the payment of college athletes, NIL collectives opened the floodgates to athletic compensation, and with that came a flood of questions about collectives' operations, connections to their schools' athletic administration, and the extent of their control over the fortunes of their athletes. Due to limited oversight and transparency, the answers to those questions have proven elusive. In this Article, we explore the roots of collegiate athletic compensation through NIL collectives and focus on the nature of these organizations—their internal governance, tax structures, compensation structures, exclusivity requirements, and transparency. We contrast the conflicting principles within the current compensation scheme and propose a set of principles to guide the hand of NCAA rule-makers: avoiding hypocrisy on pay-for-play, protecting athletes from fraud and opportunism, and managing collectives for the common good.
Recommended Citation
Matthew T. Bodie and Estras D. Camcho, Collegiate NIL Collectives: Context, Structure, and Future, 16 Harv. J. Sports & Ent. L. 283 (2025), available at https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/faculty_articles/1177.
Rights
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
