The new agency in charge of regulating the name, the image, the similarity agreements in university sports sent a letter to schools on Thursday saying that he had rejected agreements between players and groups backed by donors formed in recent years to channel money to athletes or their schools.
These agreements do not have “valid commercial purpose,” said the memorandum, and do not adhere to the rules that require external agreements to be between players and companies that provide goods or services to the general public for profit.
The letter to the athletics directors of Division I could be the next step to close the current version of the collective, groups that are closely affiliated with schools and that, in the early days of null after July 2021, proved to be the most efficient way for schools to indirectly reduce the agreements with the players.
Since then, the landscape has changed once again with the agreement of the House of Representatives of $ 2.8 billion that allows schools to pay players directly from July 1.
Already, Colorado, Alabama, Notre Dame, Georgia and others have announced that they are closing. Georgia, the state of Ohio and Illinois are among those who have announced plans with Learfield, a media and technology company with decades of licenses and other experience in university athletics, to help organize null agreements.
External agreements are still allowed between the athlete and the sponsor, but any value of $ 600 or more must be examined by a place of signs called Nil Go that was established by the new College Sports Commission.
In his letter to the ads, the CSC said that more than 1,500 agreements have been clarified since Nil Go was launched on June 11, “which extends from three figures to seven figures.” More than 12,000 athletes and 1,100 institutional users have registered to use the system.
But most of the letter explained that many agreements could not be cleared because they did not adjust to an NCAA rule that establishes a standard of “valid commercial purpose” so that the offers are approved.
The letter explained that if a collective reaches an agreement with an athlete that appears on behalf of the collective, which charges an admission rate, the standard is not met because the purpose of the event is to raise money to pay athletes, not provide goods or services available for the general public to obtain profits.
The same would apply to an agreement that an athlete does to sell goods to raise money to pay that player because the purpose of “selling goods is to raise money to pay that athlete student and potentially to other students athletes in a school or schools in particular, which is not a valid commercial purpose” according to the NCAA rule.
However, an agreement could be approved if, for example, companies that paid the players had a broader purpose than simply acting as a collective. The letter uses a golf course or a clothing company as examples.
“In other words, null groups can act as marketing agencies that coincide with athletes students with companies that have a valid commercial purpose and seek to use the student's null to promote their businesses,” said the letter.
