The NCAA in the age of NIL can be best compared to the Wild West. There are laws, but they aren’t enforced except in select circumstances with miniscule punishments, meaning that, for all intents and purposes, everyone can essentially do whatever they want.
The main rule surrounding NIL is that the schools themselves can’t facilitate deals for recruits. Does that happen throughout the country, especially indirectly through backroom deals? Of course it does. However, at least in theory, a school can’t openly use NIL opportunities to directly recruit a player.
However, a new law in New York State aims to change that. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill that makes it illegal for the NCAA to bar a New York school from facilitating NIL deals for its players, following Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma-states that have similar laws.
Syracuse was at the forefront of pushing for this bill to be passed, and now that it has, we still don’t know if SU and other schools can facilitate their own NIL deals. The NCAA claims that these laws are misguided because schools are voluntary members and are free to leave if they don’t like the rules they are under.
Should Syracuse try to take advantage of the new law, the NCAA could, and probably would, penalize the school and then a court battle would ensue over whether or not the state government actually has the power to enforce the law it just passed.
What it certainly does is provide some form of cover for Syracuse. In theory, coaches can talk to boosters about what recruits they are targeting and can discuss how much money they need to field competitive teams. That obviously helps, and the fact that there would be a legal battle involved in punishing New York schools may dissuade the NCAA from handing down sanctions, or at least make the organization more careful.
The fact remains, though, NIL is still a free-for-all. Coaches talking to boosters being legal in New York in theory changes the landscape, but are we really going to pretend that doesn’t happen anyway? Especially at bigger schools that have a lot more boosters and a lot more resources than Syracuse.
Ultimately, the NCAA created the situation it finds itself in. It wants to regulate NIL, but it can’t because of the loose rules it put in place when this whole thing began a couple of years ago. The NCAA is trying to play catch up, and it’s not getting any closer.
