Cutting to the Chase on NIL

From time to time, we take note of the ongoing controversies surrounding compensation for student athletes. One of UCLA's athletes made it into the LA Times on that very issue:

Faced with an unfamiliar situation, Chase Griffin relied on natural instincts. He surveyed the scene, felt the pressure and stepped up to face it. Qualities that served him as UCLA’s quarterback came in handy testifying before Congress earlier this year. Only no audible was needed given all the time he had put into preparing his remarks about how these politicians were wrong in their misguided attempt to protect college athletes.

“It is disheartening,” Griffin told a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on innovation, data and commerce, “to see a federal bill that ignores our hard work and the value we create by putting obstacles in our pathway to the American dream.” Griffin was speaking out against the FAIR College Sports Act, a proposed bill that would increase regulation of name, image and likeness deals in the name of fairness and transparency. In reality, Griffin felt the bill did nothing more than provide another roadblock to athletes receiving the compensation to which they are entitled.

He felt so strongly about the issue that he paid his own way to take a red-eye flight to Washington, powering his way through just a few hours of sleep to defend athletes’ rights to maximize their NIL dollars. “Frankly,” Griffin recently told The Times, “the bill that we were discussing there, the FAIR Act, wasn’t a good bill and I thought that I had to offer truthfully and experientially my knowledge on what has been and what it can continue to be with unfettered access for college athletes to exercise their NIL rights.” ...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/sports/ucla/story/2024-05-24/chase-griffin-ucla-college-athletes-paid-nil.