UCLA Faculty Association: (Re)Dividing the Athletic Revenue Pie

Blog readers will recall the major brouhaha that resulted from the decision of UCLA to move to the Big Ten. Ultimately, after a fuss by the governor at a closed Regents meeting and several later discussions by the Regents, the move was allowed, subject to certain payments to compensate UC-Berkeley.

However, the gradual move of supposedly amateur student athletes toward a professional compensation system suggests that more changes are to come. Already, student athletes can cash in on their name, image, and likeness or NIL, thanks to a US Supreme Court decision. A recently-submitted bill in the California state legislature would entitle certain athletes to payments of up to $25,000 per year plus more upon graduation. From Sportico:

California’s legislature is raring to upset the college sports apple cart once more. While federal authorities contemplate how and whether to address the unruliness of NIL—three years after the the Golden State passed the nation’s first name, image and likeness bill—a powerful California legislator wants to move the athlete-rights goal posts with a new law that would create a pathway for direct compensation from schools to players. The proposed legislation by Assemblymember Chris Holden revives an effort he previously pursued and follows two other California pay-for-play bills that failed to make it to the floor for a vote. The most recent of those bills, which was introduced last February by state Senator Steven Bradford, passed both the state Senate education and judiciary committees before getting snagged in appropriations amid aggressive lobbying from schools such as USC and UCLA...

Holden’s new bill (Assembly Bill 252), christened the College Athlete Protection Act, requires that each Division I institution in the state establish a “degree completion fund” as a means of paying their head-count scholarship athletes their “fair market value,” which the bill defines as an equal share of half their team’s annual revenue, minus the cost of the athlete’s grant-in-aid...

In a statement, Holden couched the rationale for AB 252 in educational terms. “My goal is for athletes to play hard and study harder without fear of losing access to what they’ve trained and worked for,” he said. The law would serve to provide cover for schools to contravene the NCAA’s prohibition on players getting compensated beyond their scholarship, a $4,000 cost-of-attendance stipend and the $5,980 in education-related benefits established by the Supreme Court’s NCAA versus Alston ruling. The amount would be determined by a revenue-sharing formula based on figures schools report annually to the Department of Education...

The bill could pave the way for a number of football and men’s basketball players to receive six-figure payments each year from their institutions. It would also create a state government agency called the College Athlete Protection Program, which would be tasked with making sure schools don’t fudge their revenue numbers and, if they do, issuing punishment. As with its predecessor legislation, AB 252 is being backed by the National College Players Association, the athlete advocacy group that spearheaded the state-based NIL reform effort. This law-making bid represents the latest salvo in the NCPA’s ongoing war against college sports amateurism, which includes its pending effort to have the National Labor Relations Board classify USC football and basketball players as joint employees of their school, the Pac-12 Conference and the NCAA. Holden’s bill, however, attempts to sidestep the labor question entirely, stipulating that its provisions do not, one way or the other, “serve as evidence of an employment relationship.” ...

Full story at https://www.sportico.com/leagues/college-sports/2023/california-ncaa-pay-for-play-bill-chris-holden-1234706713/.

The actual bill is at https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB252/2023.

Assemblymember Holden held a news conference to promote the bill, available on YouTube: