While athletes agree that NIL has bettered their lives immensely, those on the athletic administration side of things see a different perspective of NIL.
For one thing, the NCAA’s NIL guidelines are disturbingly unclear.
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It’s hard to navigate within the rules or guidelines when one, they’re changing, or two they’re not very clear,” Tennessee Associate Athletic Director Tyler Johnson said in an interview. “And when I ask for clarification, sometimes the response is, well, get with your compliance folks, it’s up to some interpretation.”
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Johnson gave an example of a phenomenon that occurs on a daily basis in the Tennessee compliance office. Essentially, the University of Tennessee interprets a rule one way, but then sees another school operating with a broader interpretation of that rule. Tennessee will call that school’s compliance office to ask questions, and then will ultimately call the NCAA’s compliance office to help clarify the interpretation.
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“It’s very confusing,” said Mallory Feigl, a compliance officer in Tennessee Athletics. “With bylaws changing all the time, college athletics changing all the time, it can get overwhelming in some sense for student-athletes and for staff.”
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In terms of NIL rule interpretation, this becomes even more complicated, as different states have different NIL laws that they require their schools to follow, which presents even more clarity issues at the NCAA level.
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NCAA NIL rules are also changing too rapidly for institutions to keep up. To make matters worse, sometimes the NCAA will retroactively apply new rules to old situations, like they did in their most recent investigation into the University of Tennessee.
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“It’s hard to read them sometimes,” Johnson said about the enforcement staff at the NCAA on the recent investigation into UT athletics. “How can you go and change the rules or apply rules at a particular time if it’s not relevant to when the allegations happened?”
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The NCAA’s response to the lack of clarity and widespread confusion is also another problem.
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“They’re trying to change the framework of the rules to get to the end result that the NCAA wants,” Johnson summarized, of the recent NCAA investigation.
NIL causes even more problems when it intertwines with the transfer portal.
Tennessee associate athletic director Tyler Johnson said. “I think there are lot of positives for some students,” with regard to NIL. “The negatives are when you tie NIL with the transfer portal, that’s when things start to get sticky.”
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The transfer portal used to be a tool where athletes could switch schools on the basis of disagreements with coaches, academics, or simply comfortability with the school.
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Today, transferring centers around where an athlete is going to make the most NIL money.
Tyler Johnson explains that this is a problem because college athletics are moving towards being completely focused on money as opposed to athletic development.
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“Instead of, for some coaches and some sports, it’s like, well how am I supposed to build a program, bring in kids, and develop them?” Johnson said. “Now, with the portal, the expectations are now, “I just have to go get point-scorers.” And when you do that [from the transfer portal], you’re depleting the number of freshmen that you’re bringing in and developing.”
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On the flip side, NIL coupled with the transfer portal spells out trouble for college athletics as a whole, not just the University of Tennessee.
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“When you look at programs like Samford, or Troy, they’re basically being treated like junior colleges now,” Caleb Jarreau said. “People go for one or two years and then leave to go to a bigger school and get paid. It’s hurting the smaller programs; I think that’s just the transfer portal as a whole.”
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There’s also the question of integrity and fairness as it relates to NIL and the transfer portal.
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Tyler Johnson argues that athletes are no longer choosing to attend a school based off their connection to that program, their love for that program, or their desire to develop themselves beyond athletics. Now, athletes are solely making decisions based on NIL income, which results in some athletes “jumping ship,” year after year to make more NIL money.
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This argument has some validity. Highly ranked quarterback Jaden Rashada has bounced around the NCAA in the last two years and is now in the transfer portal.
Jaden Rashada's Recruiting Timeline:
Although not a Tennessee athlete, Jaden Rashada's experience with NIL and how it has impacted where he ended up is a prime example of why the NCAA was so committed to amateurism in the first place.
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By the end of 2024, Rashada will have been committed to four different schools. Yes, this mostly speaks to the problems with an overactive transfer portal, but there is no doubt that NIL and the prospect of making millions at different schools enhances the issue.
June 26, 2022
Rashada commits to the University of Miami.
November 10, 2022
Rashada flips commitment to the University of Florida reportedly for a $13.5 million NIL deal with Gator Collective.
February 1, 2023
Rashada, having been released from his National Letter of Intent from Florida after his $13.5 million deal falls through, commits to Arizona State University.
April 18, 2024
After playing one season at ASU, Rashada re-enters the transfer portal, allegedly has his eyes on the University of Georgia.
​While no one can prove anything, it can be reasonably inferred that NIL compensation was a huge factor in Jaden Rashada’s decision-making.
This situation is the NCAA’s worst nightmare and exactly why it fought for amateurism for so long. Without amateurism in college sports, student-athletes can essentially function as professional athletes in the NCAA.
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“The idea of the NCAA is college athletics. People like students competing against each other. Well, if you’re not amateurs anymore, you just have the NFL in the SEC. So, the NCAA doesn’t like that idea," Caleb Jarreau said.
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The NCAA might not like the idea of professionalism entering college sports, but the problem is that the NCAA has not done anything to clarify if the term student-athlete still exists or if it is just moving completely towards a professional sports mindset.
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The bottom line: the NCAA knows that the toothpaste is already out of the tube. And there's really not much they can do about it.
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“There were always rumors that student-athletes were getting inducements to go to places, money under the table. But now that’s legal,” Tyler Johnson said. “But then the NCAA keeps changing the rules as they go, or they want to try to reel it back in a little bit, and so it’s like well you can’t have a conversation with a student-athlete about NIL, you can’t even say well here’s a collective you can talk to, which is what the rule used to be.”
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Now, after the most recent preliminary injunction, the NCAA cannot enforce any NIL rules.
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Even Tennessee athletes are not blind to the problems that NIL and the transfer portal can cause. While softball's Karlyn Pickens has been at UT for two years and does not plan to transfer, she broadly recognizes the negative impacts that NIL has on the transfer portal.
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“I think the transfer portal can be very negatively impacted by NIL,” Pickens said. “With institutions that have NIL collectives that are basically funneling money into their athletes and are using that, which they’re not supposed to, as a recruiting method.”
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Another more niche problem with NIL is that it does not extend to international student-athletes. 12.8% of NCAA student athletes are international and cannot receive any benefits from NIL collectives.
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Take the University of Tennessee Swimming and Diving program, for example. The staff heavily recruits international athletes, and roughly 35% of the team is not from the U.S. Tennessee’s stars NCAA champion Jordan Crooks, and SEC champions Mona McSharry, and Brooklyn Douthwright all hail from foreign countries.
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These athletes can receive deals from their own countries, but they can’t be compensated by NIL collectives in the United States.
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“There’s some disparity there that I don’t like,” Tyler Johnson said. “I understand the whole student international visa and those things, I get it, but to me it’s still real unfair excluding that group of student-athletes.”
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Beyond these, there are a lot more problems with NIL nationally. Luckily, Tennessee has remained largely above the NIL fray throughout most of the controversy until recently.
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This is not to say that Tennessee and other schools will remain completely unscathed in the NIL chaos.