A question of semantics….

[Dugan15]

There has been a lot of discussion here and in broader media about teams (particularly around coaching changes) and their “NIL”.

Not being snarky, but is there any reason the word shouldn’t be “payroll”?

I presume, just like “student-athlete”, Universities are perfectly happy to go along with a silly term, “NIL”, to avoid using the patently obvious words that we all use in our day to day life.

Can someone make “NIL” make sense in its 2025 actual usage? Thanks in advance.0

 

[CMcCat]

Snark is wholly appropriate, in my view of this matter. My only attempt to respond to your fine question would be to suggest that “payroll” is only one part of NIL. Various sponsorships with parties external to the school augment (and sometimes dwarf) the compensation athletes receive from their educator/employer institution.

 

[Hungry Jack]

My guess is that revenue sharing will be distributed as non-employee compensation. This enabled the university to avoid payroll taxes.

 

[FeralFelidae]

There has been a lot of discussion here and in broader media about teams (particularly around coaching changes) and their “NIL”.

Not being snarky, but is there any reason the word shouldn’t be “payroll”?

I presume, just like “student-athlete”, Universities are perfectly happy to go along with a silly term, “NIL”, to avoid using the patently obvious words that we all use in our day to day life.

Can someone make “NIL” make sense in its 2025 actual usage? Thanks in advance.0

Because NIL is not paid by the university, the supposed employer. It is paid by car dealership owners and the like. Are you suggesting that the players are on the car dealership payroll?

 

[rwhitney014]

Name, image, and likeness is a concept within the law of right of publicity. It’s a quasi-intellectual property right that we all have.

The argument goes that NCAA institutions were acting in concert (i.e., conspiring) to prevent students who are athletes from making monetary use of their own rights of publicity, since the standard grant in aid that provides athletic scholarships required those students and only those students not to be able to monetize their rights of publicity. Those contracts were not negotiable on an individual basis: you want your scholarship, you only get it on our terms. And the “our” was all the schools, the conferences, and the NCAA acting as one when they should be competing to provide better terms to get better athletes.

As such, those contracts - “contracts of adhesion”! - violated the antitrust laws. Other professional athletes can legally bargain away those individual rights of publicity through a collective bargaining agreement as permitted by the labor laws, but the NCAA wasn’t allowing that either. So now we’re violating that area too.

Untangle all of it - the lack of a CBA, the should-be-unenforceable contracts of adhesion, the antitrust violations, and the schools’ interest in not labeling these students as employees - and the way you can compensate athletes without creating unintentional issues with all of that is simply to allow them to earn compensation via an individual right that is untethered to their labor. That would be for those individuals whose name, image and likeness have commercial value - their rights of publicity.

Everybody wins! (So the argument goes.)

 

[hdhntr1]

Name, image, and likeness is a concept within the law of right of publicity. It’s a quasi-intellectual property right that we all have.

The argument goes that NCAA institutions were acting in concert (i.e., conspiring) to prevent students who are athletes from making monetary use of their own rights of publicity, since the standard grant in aid that provides athletic scholarships required those students and only those students not to be able to monetize their rights of publicity. Those contracts were not negotiable on an individual basis: you want your scholarship, you only get it on our terms. And the “our” was all the schools, the conferences, and the NCAA acting as one when they should be competing to provide better terms to get better athletes.

As such, those contracts - “contracts of adhesion”! - violated the antitrust laws. Other professional athletes can legally bargain away those individual rights of publicity through a collective bargaining agreement as permitted by the labor laws, but the NCAA wasn’t allowing that either. So now we’re violating that area too.

Untangle all of it - the lack of a CBA, the should-be-unenforceable contracts of adhesion, the antitrust violations, and the schools’ interest in not labeling these students as employees - and the way you can compensate athletes without creating unintentional issues with all of that is simply to allow them to earn compensation via an individual right that is untethered to their labor. That would be for those individuals whose name, image and likeness have commercial value - their rights of publicity.

Everybody wins! (So the argument goes.)

Except the fans of programs outside of big 5 or 10 or whatever it is

 

[CatManTrue]

There has been a lot of discussion here and in broader media about teams (particularly around coaching changes) and their “NIL”.

Not being snarky, but is there any reason the word shouldn’t be “payroll”?

I presume, just like “student-athlete”, Universities are perfectly happy to go along with a silly term, “NIL”, to avoid using the patently obvious words that we all use in our day to day life.

Can someone make “NIL” make sense in its 2025 actual usage? Thanks in advance.0

Payroll is usually tied to performance. As in: you do your job, you get paid. If you so it really well, then you get promoted and more money.

If you don’t perform? Well, you’ll get paid until you don’t. NIL will pay you even if you don’t perform at all sometimes. 😉

NIL: there are no guarantees for most. The whole system is a mess - but, by and large, the performers (athletes) are finally getting paid something decent.

Did you not realize the Big Ten and other major college football businesses are simply Big Business?

Fitz did an average job and got paid $5M+ a year. The players got peanuts.

God still works in mysterious ways. 🙏 right @CoralSpringsCat ?

 

[AdamOnFirst]

There has been a lot of discussion here and in broader media about teams (particularly around coaching changes) and their “NIL”.

Not being snarky, but is there any reason the word shouldn’t be “payroll”?

I presume, just like “student-athlete”, Universities are perfectly happy to go along with a silly term, “NIL”, to avoid using the patently obvious words that we all use in our day to day life.

Can someone make “NIL” make sense in its 2025 actual usage? Thanks in advance.0

No, incorrect, as of today. Compensation today is explicitly not payroll, it is not coming from the school and is not a salary or hourly wage. It is third party payments, ostensibly for compensation for Name and Likeness. Now, obviously a big chunk of the stuff currently within the "NIL" compensation is really just flat third party inducement for players to be playing at a school, but that doesn't make it payroll.

By the end of the summer though when revenue sharing kicks in, it's going to be far, far similar to payroll, although one would assume at least initially not literally payroll in that it won't technically be a wage paid but rather as a revenue share, a royalty or NIL payment of some kind, the players receive as a share of the TV revenues of each school. In practice, it'll function like a payroll. I also wonder how long it is before the courts or NLRB declares that it is formally, in fact, a payroll.

 

[PURPLECAT88]

Because NIL is not paid by the university, the supposed employer. It is paid by car dealership owners and the like. Are you suggesting that the players are on the car dealership payroll?

The idea that NIL is not paid by the university is really just a creative fiction. NIL, as I understand it, is mostly paid by “collectives”, not car dealerships. Those “collectives” work similarly to an endowment. We don’t say that Coach Collins is not on the university payroll just because his salary is paid by Sullivan and Ubben.