Ohio State Football: NCAA too little, too late with NIL rules

NIL is not going away anytime soon. That Pandora’s box has been opened. The Ohio State football program has managed NIL a lot better recently. We’ve seen the fruits of those efforts in regard to recruiting. They finally figured out how to manage something that doesn’t have any rules.

Now, the NCAA is trying to institute a national rule that conflicts with some laws that have gone into effect for certain states. Because of that, the NCAA has now said that schools can be punished for violating the NCAA rules even if they don’t violate the state rules.

This is too little, too late from the NCAA on this issue. They saw this problem coming well before now and decided to do nothing about it. Not only that but their ability to hand down significant punishments has been neutered over the years, culminating in them getting yelled at by Congress.

There is zero chance that the NCAA actually has any power to do anything to these schools that violate the rules. I’m sure this will get challenged in court and the NCAA will get struck down. It’s happened before and it will keep happening because they refuse to get ahead of issues.

As far as the Ohio State football program is concerned, they should keep doing what they are doing. Clearly, it’s working now. The letter that the NCAA sent should have no bearing on what they want to do with the NIL collectives that they currently work with.

The NCAA waited far too long to try to get everyone to follow the same rules. The coaches called them out on it too. Now, it’s up to the states themselves to decide how NIL is going to be governed across the landscape.

Is it chaos? Absolutely. But it’s a chaos of the NCAA’s own making.