Kirby Smart, Georgia Bulldogs Land in New World Where College Football Players Can Be Paid

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ATHENS - Kirby Smart’s Georgia Bulldogs have entered a new era of players being allowed to profit off their image and name. 

The question remains how much of this will or will not change college sports as we know it. Frankly, there are a lot of moving parts right now. Many questions remain unanswered about NIL in Georgia and around the country. The NCAA, in its usual miss-the-boat fashion, was late to the party. It has its pants down again. 

In Congress, the usual back and forth inaction has lead to no real guidance on what has become a real issue now that the states and Supreme Court have opened the door to players being paid for things like sponsorships, autographs and pretty well anything under the sun. 

While all of this is getting sorted out it seems like those of us in the media don’t quite know how to react to the unknown. The truth is we simply don’t know what we don’t know (RIP Donald Rumsfeld) about the future of college sports now that NIL is real. 

What is Nike going to do when UGA student-athletes to have sponsorship deals with the likes of Adidas? What about a deal with Ralph Lauren? Nike, an official athletic partner of UGA, might have new language in its upcoming contract extension with UGA in the near future. Does that mean Nike will try to stop any agreements with UGA players and any sort of clothing? 

I’m not sure. 

What will happen when a player inks a deal with a vaping company? What about a company that is selling legal marijuana? What about Silver Dollar or another bar in Athens having JT Daniels’ or Stetson Bennett night every Thursday night downtown?

Will players only talk to media outlets that pay them? That seems hard to imagine, but whatever you can imagine seems possible these days. 

It looks like players can have their own football camps now, but it is hard to imagine those would take place on campus. With that said, what is Georgia’s athletic department going to do or how will it react to players who are of age making posts endorsing alcohol? Will a team rule prevent players from starting a OnlyFans site? Can there be team rules about these things? It seems like that’s not possible. 

What happens when a player is kicked off a team, or not resigned to their third year of a scholarship after two years of playing for a school? Could that player sue and allege their ability to earn was hampered by the decision of the coaching staff or school?

Will players be allowed to use their uniforms? Will they be permitted to use trademarks like the Georgia “G”? Both seem pretty hard to believe. And the value of a player, more often than not, is that the player is of value “because” they play for a particularly school. Rarely do players transition to superstardom before playing a college game (Zion Williamson). 

All of this is overdue, but it’s been rushed, too. Any day the NCAA or congress could try to make sweeping changes to the parameters of things. For the players something is better than nothing. The Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this summer was a big smackdown to the NCAA and schools. 

It allowed players to earn a living without sacrificing their scholarship - something we didn’t have the benefit of before Thursday. 

This is anecdotal, but I very clearly remember the difficulty one college teammate of mine had with the setup of the NCAA prior to NIL. He had a child when he was a junior in college. Because of NCAA bylaws at the time, he was not permitted to work and receive money and keep his scholarship. He had to pick. 

So he went into business for himself by buying and selling used textbooks on campus. I’m sure he was breaking NCAA rules, but he wasn’t an employee, and he wasn’t a contractor. He was just hustling. It was quite a sight to see him, a starter on the basketball team, rolling around a cart with books on it just to get some money to pay the bills for his wife and baby, who had moved from Florida to our college to all be together. 

It was a mess, but it was what it was. None of us ever reported money we earned in the summer for various things. Everything was undercover. Now everything is wide open, and where we will go next is hard to know for sure. 

That said, I’m not sold the new world of NIL is going to pave the way to players getting paid so much that endorsements outweigh what they have to do on the field or court to win. This is just another step in the long way to modernizing what has for so long been the con that is college athletics. 

Administrators and elected officials might feel good about themselves today, but they’ve delayed this so long, and fumbled it so much that the path forward is unclear and questions abound.

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