Inside athletic departments and among the most avid fans, high-profile NIL agreements have turned into eye-catching headlines that seem to indicate a dramatic shift in how college sports operate. Outside that insulated bubble on college campuses, however, the rule change has been more so met with indifference, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.
About half of Americans (48 percent) have heard “a lot” or “some” about the NCAA’s decision last year to allow college athletes to be paid when their name or image is used commercially, such as in video games or to sell merchandise. Among those who have heard about these NIL agreements, the majority (60 percent) say it “hasn’t made a difference” in their enjoyment of college sports. For those who say the rule change has made a difference, more than twice as many say it had a “positive impact” (28 percent) rather than a “negative impact” (11 percent).
Full story: https://wapo.st/3udj2aW
Excerpts:
- Athletic directors still worry, mostly because of the high-value deals that can appear to be recruiting inducements or pay-for-play agreements — a scene administrators would describe as chaotic and in need of uniform standards. States have uneven laws related to NIL deals for college athletes, including whether schools can be involved in the arrangements. The NCAA has a policy intended to guide athletes and schools, but the governing body has yet to firmly enforce those rules.
- When the NCAA abandoned its long-standing belief that athletes should not profit off NIL deals, the organization announced a policy that sought to avoid a pay-for-play model and recruiting inducements. All deals needed to be a quid pro quo — the athlete provides a service for an entity and in return receives payment.
- The poll was conducted online May 4-17, 2022, among a random national sample of 1,503 adults by The Washington Post and the University of Maryland’s Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism and Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement. The sample was drawn through SSRS’s Opinion Panel, an ongoing survey panel recruited through random sampling of U.S. households. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The Washington Post’s reporting comes from Emily Giambalvo, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin
