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NCAA Commissioners Meet with D.C. Lawmakers about NIL Policies

Two Power 5 commissioners met with United States senators in Washington D.C. this week to ask for legislative help surrounding the NCAA’s Name, Image, and Likeness policies.

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff met with Sen. Maria Cantwell (R-WA), Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and others on both sides of the aisle, according to various reports.

nfl“I have been invited to meetings with several senators tomorrow to discuss the issues we’re seeing with name, image, and likeness, and with the existential threat of our student-athletes being deemed to be employees,” Kliavkoff told ESPN earlier in the week.

NCAA president Mark Emmert and other higher-ups in the organization have been calling on lawmakers in D.C. to make some regulatory rules in regards to the NIL policy.

A recent article from ESPN.com outlined the reasoning for the Power 5 commissioners going to Washington D.C. for help with the NIL rule.

Below is an excerpt from the ESPN article.

“The goal is to discuss a few of the issues facing college athletics with influential senators,” Kliavkoff said. “I think it’s more likely that we eventually get federal legislation on name, image, and likeness, but we’re also interested in discussing all of the harm that will come to student-athletes if they are deemed to be employees.”

The meetings come on the heels of Pac-12 spring meetings during which athletic directors and coaches sought solutions to better control the NIL landscape.

Kliavkoff told ESPN it’s imperative to enforce rules prohibiting the use of NIL as a recruiting inducement or pay-for-play.

“Either the NCAA is going to get its act together in enforcing this,” he said, “or I’m going to be pushing for a smaller group to figure out how to create and enforce the NIL rules that we all agree on related to inducement and pay-for-play. The amount of a NIL payment should be commensurate with the work done as a backstop to make sure we’re not using it related to inducement and pay-for-play.”

To read the full article from ESPN, click here