Tony Bennett defined Cavalier men’s basketball for the past decade, and his recent retirement has struck chords deep in the University community. In explaining why he chose to leave, one of the things Bennett cited was recent changes in player compensation structures. In part, Bennett was referring to new permissions for players to benefit monetarily through name, image and likeness deals. The change allows market forces to infiltrate college sports, something Bennett did not feel he was best suited to adapt to.
It is important to note that economic incentives to recruit players have existed since college sports began, but recent legalization allowing athlete compensation has changed the way that the market for talent will move going forward. Student athletes are now paid according to how much monetary value they bring to a school, and in this way, NIL succeeds in bringing fairer compensation into college sports. However, NIL is still a woefully underdeveloped system, something which has raised concerns about equitable compensation. In short, while NIL has provided students with increased autonomy and compensation, there are also current patterns of extreme inequity in the NIL system which undermines the very ideals NIL rights are supposed to promote.
The NIL system does well in providing a framework for students to finally achieve some sort of compensation for the immense value they add to any university. Prior to NIL, there was no system for legal compensation for student athletes. Extremely talented players had to wait until after college to be paid for their work, all while colleges profited off their performance. NIL enables students to not have to wait years to see their talent pay off in professional leagues while effectively acting as an employee, bringing monetary value without pay. In this way, NIL accomplishes the goal of creating a fairer, more flexible collegiate athletics system.
However, inequity does persist, and is, in many ways, exacerbated by new and unregulated structures within the NIL realm. A large driver of this inequality comes in the form of collectives, the structures many schools use to organize their NIL payments. These collectives operate as a closed-door investor — giving money to students depending on how much value the student brings to a university. The University uses the not-for-profit Cavalier Futures Collective to distribute NIL payments to athletes. Cav Futures chooses between social and economic factors for its own, arbitrary and often problematic definition of value.
Cav Futures, like other collectives, is an independent organization without formal ties to the University, meaning that it is not governed by basic equity regulations. For example, student athletes engaged in sports that have little professional presence have much smaller chances of receiving compensation for their college performance. Similarly, female athletes receive notably less money than their male counterparts in part because collectives are able to operate outside the bounds of Title IX and its regulations. Title IX was designed to prevent universities from funding sports based on profitability specifically because men’s sports tend to be higher-valued and receive more collective funding than women's athletics.
It is true that title IX has not completely solved gender inequality in collegiate athletics — female sports have long been systematically ignored by universities. However, this inequality is worsened by the profitability factor brought by NIL compensation. Distributing money only according to profit perpetuates the idea that women’s sports are less-than men’s and discourages any opportunity for growth that women’s sports might have had with more funding. Only 18 percent of NIL funding went to female athletes. While all athletes deserve reward for their achievements, NIL promotes the idea that some achievements are more valuable than others, hurting athletes in sports that aren’t traditional breadwinners for universities.
In addition to this unregulated inequity, NIL relies upon closed-doors distribution, something which raises important concerns about transparency. For example, when responding to a data request by the Washington Post, the University provided only aggregate data, meaning that individual payments were not disclosed. Because of this, we cannot be certain Cav Futures’ values align with ours as a student body. Who is to say that Cav Futures cares about dedicating money to students who need it, who have to work jobs or who simply dedicate more time to their craft? What algorithm decides which sport is more deserving of attention from the student body than others? A lack of transparency leads to uncertainty in a new system and its procedures which in turn will continually undermine NIL’s lofty goals of increased collegiate athlete fairness.
With the NIL changes we see a flaw in creating an unregulated free market economy — it pits the interests of money against those of equity and fairness which need to be preserved in an academic setting. As money is able to flow between donors and corporations to students, incentives change and the University is put between a rock and a hard place — distribute funding more evenly and risk defunding extremely popular programs like men’s basketball, or distribute according to value and risk dampening some students’ academic experiences.
In many ways, the idea of an independent collective is antithetical to the educational mission of the University. Independent collectives are able to evade many of the high standards to which public universities are held, standards including transparency and gender equity. Moreover, the goals of and incentives for collectives deviate from those of an educational institution. Therefore, in an ideal world the athletics department would establish their own distributive framework for NIL funds, one which would be held to the same public scrutiny and laws as other aspects of academic funding.
However, this requires intense restructuring and is unlikely to happen in the near future. Thus, in the interim, the University should push Cav Futures to provide more transparency with their funding, allowing students, athletes and others to drive improvement to the system. If we truly care about preserving the notions of equity in collegiate life — something NIL rhetorically aspires to — the University and its students must lead the way by emphasizing transparency.
The Cavalier Daily Editorial Board is composed of the Executive Editor, the Editor-in-Chief, the two Opinion Editors, the two Senior Associates and an Opinion Columnist. The board can be reached at eb@cavalierdaily.com.
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