Pretty sure most of you have heard especially you college athletes out there as this is out on every major new source already. The NCAA is planning on rewriting their constitution, at this point in time it looks like this is going to happen in January. I’m not going to bore all of you with all the logistics of this you can check out the full article on the New York Times if you wish.
The basic rundown of this is that there have been a lot of long standing rules that they are planning on changing being the NIL deals with a couple modifications. We all remember when we got excited with the whole NIL rules getting passed and athletes getting money off of their name. Especially in a sport like wrestling where it is not really profitable and scholarships are not in abundance it was bigger than ever for us.
The essential rundown of what this will do on the bigger scale is it “supports college athletes’ right to profit financially from their name, image and likeness, marking a reversal from the NCAA’s long-standing denial of those rights” (Washington Post)
Now what they don’t stand for is players making money from their school. I guess people would get mad when they hear this but it is perfectly reasonable. Richer schools will be able to pay players more and get the better talent and build a better program due to that making college sports (Especially Football) a pay to win sport at the college level and essentially ruining college sports as a whole and turning it into a full blown business.
Now this is a big bright side for the rules is that the will delegate “considerable power” to all three of its division schools and allow them to govern themselves. This also includes the “Authority and Autonomy” to develop themselves in a way that they feel is best and will give them the most success.
Obviously this won’t affect wrestling as a college sport as much as a it will affect football where some of the schools have so much viewership so advertising is worth millions to them such as QB Bryce Young of Alabama is the second most paid NCAA athlete behind none other than Olympic Champion Gable Steveson.
Teams with high viewership and money will start to pull better recruits and maybe make up for that small percentage that they did not have before. If schools start dumping more money into coaching salaries, better facilities, scholarship offerings, athlete “perks”, and more that happens guys will be more likely to commit vs a school that may be slightly better for them but does not offer the same things.
There seem to be many loopholes to this either way the NCAA goes about this but NCAA athletes are going to be getting paid the only main thing they did go against is a ‘Pay for Play” model as stated before which would be essentially like a salary.
Why aren’t the athletes who generate billions in annual revenue classified as employees? Why aren’t they entitled to the rights and privileges of employees, such as a fair wage and collective bargaining? These are some of the bigger questions being asked. They really have not been answered and just seem to be the unfair things the NCAA does.
The new proposed constitution says that the college athletes can not be paid for their performance. Even with this just seems to cut out some of the whole advantages of NIL but the supreme court can still rule against that.
With all that is being said there are many doubts about how long this new NCAA Constitution will last and many think it won’t the way that it is going, but things can still change.
