Missouri Tiger Athletic Director Laird Veatch met with the media on Thursday to discuss the Tigers’ plans going forward after the passing of the House settlement.
Here’s a few of the quotes I found most telling and what I think went unsaid in them.
If you want to look back at Part 1, you can find that here.
You can find Part 2 here and you can find Part 3 here.
When asked about how NIL is different now
What Veatch said: “You have to sort of step back and kind of set aside what NIL has been and think about how the structure of the settlement allows NIL to be moving forward. So, I’ll take a step back, kind of give you my 101 speech.
“First of all, moving forward, there will be three ways for student athletes to, you know, receive some type of compensation from, through athletics, through college athletics. Obviously, you continue have scholarships, right? Now, the good thing with scholarships is the limits have gone away. So, you know, we’ve set roster limits, but us and many others are providing a lot more scholarship support. But that’s a piece of it. The second piece is this revenue share, which I think you could think of as more internal NIL. There’s a lot of terms that are being thrown around, but that’s the NIL type support that we are providing directly as an institution to student-athletes now. With that now is we have contracts with student-athletes, though that has the cap as you know, that is going through a system thats going to have oversight. So that’s a new, better-structured environment. And it’s pretty historical, if you step back and think about it, that on a national level, for the first time ever, we can provide those types of resources directly to student athletes. And then, on top of that, you’re going to have this third party NIL so that is separate from, you could think of that as more external NIL. I think of it as authentic NIL, what it was, as it was originally intended to be. And it’s going to have to meet certain standards. It’s going to go through the clearing house now so student-athletes are going to need to have approval of that and it’s going to have to meet those standards."
What went unsaid: I’m not sure anything really went unsaid there, I just find it valuable to have that explanation out there.
There are still scholarships, an increase in those will take up $2.5 million of this new cap, so Mizzou will have $18 million left over to pay directly to athletes in financial compensation. Then, on top of that, companies can still pay athletes for endorsements/marketing and appearances, that type of stuff, which will now, supposedly, have a stronger enforcement arm keeping a watch on whether those deals are legitimate.
When asked about possible multi-year agreements with athletes
What Veatch said: "I think that’s going to be a case-by-case basis, based on the school and how they want to approach it, as well as the student athletes. It’s going to be one of the many things that’s negotiated, typically through agents these days. So I do think that that’s going to be be an important element and can provide some balance and commitment, consistency on both sides. Which I think is healthy and good, but it’s going to be different depending on, you know, the school, the sport, the student-athlete.”
What went unsaid: That’s new.
I hadn’t heard much talk around the possibility of multi-year deals with athletes being a real part of this next step.
That’s very exciting and could help alleviate some of the issues with the transfer portal that are unaddressed in this current set of rule changes.
Now, if contracts remain completely private behind legal protections, it doesn’t make the transfer portal all that much clearer, but if contracts are public, we could go into each portal session knowing who can or can’t enter. It becomes more of a legitimate free agency like professional leagues have, which I think would be good for the sport.
Enforcing that would be interesting, would athletes have opt-outs? What about buy-outs from the team side? Could the player still enter the portal and just pay back the compensation received through what then becomes a broken contract?
All of that would have to be figured out, but man, I think multi-year deals would be a really, really positive outcome out of this.
When asked about the logistics of payments
What Veatch said: "Most of them are structured as monthly payments. I think you’ll see that be maybe a different thing at different places as well. We all as institutions, and how we choose to operate, that can, could be done differently. But essentially, they go out as monthly payments for the most part.”
What went unsaid: An extra part of the question asked was about what happens if a player starts getting paid then transfers out in December, which was unanswered. I assume by the way Veatch answered this one that payments would just stop when a player enters the transfer portal. Especially for a football player, you’re responsibilities to the team, and assumedly to the contract, have completed at the end of the season, so you keep what you’ve been paid, but the payments just stop after that.
I don’t know though, that feels like it could lead to some breach-of-contract lawsuits. A player would have a pretty reasonable argument to say “My contract said I’d get X amount of money across the full year and I played in every football game, went to practice, participated throughout the spring, summer, fall. I fulfilled my end of the contract, but the team didn’t when they stopped paying it in December instead of June.”
I guess that’s going to be just up to the wording and what teams and agents agree on. I’m not a lawyer and the schools are going to, assumedly, have some pretty good ones working on these contracts, so I think they’ll get past that part pretty quick.
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