It’s Monday morning, so it’s time for me to let you all know what’s been on my mind the past week. I’ve once again been going through some excellent reporting from Ross Dellenger for Yahoo Sports but this time on his new report this past week that the Power Conferences are working on their own outside of the NCAA. Let’s run through it.
1. What's in the new report?
First off, this generally started because Tennessee governor Bill Lee signed a bill that was made clear a couple of weeks ago that would essentially allow public Tennessee universities to break the impending House settlement without being cracked down on by an NCAA enforcement penalty.
How that works exactly, I have no idea, but without some quick answer to that bill from the schools/NCAA/conferences, every state would sign the same thing within a week and the House settlement would turn into the “spend unlimited money paying players” settlement instead of a salary cap.
So the power conferences got together to find a response. This has apparently been an ongoing plan for months, but a new draft was discovered this past week.
Dellenger’s report describes the new document officials from the conferences have been circulating as “intended to prevent universities from using their state laws to violate new enforcement rules and, in a wholly stunning concept, requires schools to waive their right to pursue legal challenges against the new enforcement entity, the College Sports Commission.”
What has been laid out is still a draft being worked on, but the idea would be for every major conference school to sign on, as well as a possibility of non-power conference schools opting into revenue sharing, to provide some stability.
There’s a lot of pieces here that get confusing for me.
How can the conferences enforce a rule that requires schools to go against the laws of the state they are in?
How can a state (Tennessee in this example) enforce a rule that says its schools can’t be punished by an entity that controls certain aspects of interstate competition and commerce?
How can the NCAA allow the conferences to take control of rule enforcement? Doesn’t that essentially nullify what little power the NCAA actually has a governing body?
It doesn’t seem like any of those questions are really answered yet, but Dellenger did talk to a couple of experts.
2. What do those experts say about it?
